Investing in Healthcare: Insights from Cleveland Clinic's Chief Investment Officer

Rosemont Roundtable: Exploring the Business of Investment Management (Formerly Global Investment Leaders)

On the latest episode of the Global Investment Leaders podcast, Chas Burkhart, Rosemont’s CEO, hosts Stefan Strein, Cleveland Clinic’s first chief investment officer, for a conversation about Cleveland Clinic's investment strategy and how it supports the organization's mission of “caring for life, researching for health and educating those who serve.” In his role as chief investment officer, Strein is responsible for the strategic direction and investment management of Cleveland Clinic’s $15 billion in investable financial assets. He also co-chairs Cleveland Clinic’s Retirement Committee, which oversees $11 billion in defined contribution assets invested for the organization’s 70,000 caregivers.

Drawing upon his 30-year investment career, which started in venture investing, Strein shares his insights on:

• Cleveland Clinic’s move in 2015 to build an investment office internally with an initial focus on creating a foundation built on managing risk and measuring performance
• The advantages of the Clinic as an investment office and how it leverages software for data warehouses, visualization tools and artificial intelligence applications used in managing clinical operations around the world to manage the investment portfolios,
• How healthcare investment portfolios are typically more conservative than the average endowment due to the need for stability and predictability in the industry
• The importance of contributing to the credit rating of a healthcare system, as the health system utilizes long term debt to fund the construction of its destination medical centers
• How the purposeful integration of investment partners and the investment team into the Clinic's mission through behind-the-scenes hospital tours, curated webinars on healthcare topics and connectivity to clinical and research thought leaders highlights the importance of collaboration and shared values in achieving success
• How Cleveland Clinic aims to be early pioneers in emerging investment strategies and newly launched firms, but not necessarily the first dollar, to mitigate risk

The podcast concludes by discussing key success metrics for the investment side of Cleveland Clinic. Strein states he measures the success of the investment office by “outperforming benchmarks, being a low-cost solution for an organization that operates in an industry with increasingly tight operating margins, and being the financial backbone of an incredibly innovative and entrepreneurial ecosystem.” By meeting these points, Strein believes it better enables Cleveland Clinic to “have the financial strength and certainty it needs to be the most innovative and resourceful healthcare system in the world.”

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