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Julia McDowell
Experienced healthcare executive
Julia McDowell, Venture Partner at F-Prime Capital
Julia McDowell is a Venture Partner at F-Prime Capital, a venture capital firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.4 She focuses on healthcare strategy, operations, and business development.1
Background
- Julia has over 15 years of experience in the healthcare industry, working across both the private and public sectors.2
- Prior to joining F-Prime Capital, she held leadership roles at Galileo, Inc. and CVS Health, where she led complex care delivery and HealthHUBs strategy, respectively.2
- Early in her career, Julia delivered public health programs worldwide, including starting and leading the Clinton Health Access Initiative's first family planning program in sub-Saharan Africa.13
Education
- BA with honors from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island13
- MPH from Emory University as a Woodruff Fellow1
- MBA from Yale University as a Frederick Frank Fellow1
Other Roles
- Board member of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, Inc. and Social Enterprise Greenhouse13
- Former Fulbright Fellow12
Julia is passionate about improving healthcare quality, access, cost, and experience. Her unique combination of operations, strategy, new service design and launch, and commercialization experience makes her well-suited for her role at F-Prime Capital.3
Highlights
As we conclude 2023, my family and I are grateful for the overall good health we’ve experienced. But a nasty flu episode over the holidays, combined with a dose of optimism for the new year, provided some fresh inspiration for just how many opportunities there are to make our healthcare system work better for patients, their caregivers, and providers.
After steadily worsening symptoms while traveling, my husband lugged our toddler and me to a nearby urgent care. The experience we had will surprise no one: an hour waiting for the overwhelmed receptionist to register us (visual: pile up of physical insurance cards and paper intake forms), then two more hours waiting in our car (the waiting room was full…of things a sick toddler definitely shouldn’t touch), then a lengthy rehashing of our medical histories (the PA was unable to extract meaningful detail from the EHR), then a prescription sent first to a pharmacy that was closed and then to a pharmacy that was out of stock.
And while the patient experience was miserable, it wasn’t much better for the healthcare workers—slogging overtime through an endless patient queue over the holiday, or trying (unsuccessfully) to track down Tamiflu from nearby stores minutes before close. These are illustrative of broader trends in the national crisis of health worker burnout https://lnkd.in/eWDqh6Mm and rock bottom patient satisfaction with health systems https://lnkd.in/eupH2Bu5 , all exacerbated by, but not solely attributable to, the COVID pandemic.
Frustratingly, the technology to fix most of the glitches in my family’s urgent care journey is readily available, but the challenge of adoption remains. While I am incredibly excited about the potential of emerging technologies, like generative AI, to drive higher quality care and a better experience for both health workers and patients, the delivery of care is still a fundamentally human enterprise (as are the decisions to buy and implement solutions to improve that care). The most effective technology solutions will be the ones that humans at the heart of healthcare actually demand and want to use, and that offer the unequivocal, near-term ROI that decision makers at financially constrained provider organizations are seeking. It’s a tall order, and it’s a privilege at F-Prime Capital to support the brilliant entrepreneurs bringing these solutions to market in 2024 and beyond.
I'm thrilled to join F-Prime Capital as a Venture Partner! Excited to work with such an awesome team--Jon Lim, Carl Bradford Byers 🚑, Brett Cook, Erica Lee--and the stellar entrepreneurs in our health services and IT portfolio. Many thanks to Stephen Knight for the opportunity to join this incredible firm fueling real innovation in the healthcare system and meaningful improvements in health outcomes. Look forward to digging in!
