Lisa Suennen
Lisa Suennen is a co-founder and Managing Member of Psilos Group, a healthcare-focused venture capital firm with over $577 million under management. Ms Suennen has headed Psilos' West Coast office since the firm's founding in 1998 and focuses on the medical device, healthcare information technology and healthcare services sectors. She serves as a Director on the Board of several Psilos portfolio companies, including AngioScore, Inc. (chairman), PatientSafe Solutions, OmniGuide and VeraLight, Inc. (chairman).
Lisa is also an active blogger. You can read her posts at www.venturevalkyrie.com.
Prior to Psilos, Ms. Suennen was at Merit Behavioral Care (formerly American Biodyne, Inc), where she held various senior executive roles including Senior Vice President/General Manager of the Public Sector Division (a $300 million business unit), Senior Vice President of Pacific Region Operations and Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Ms. Suennen joined Merit in 1988 while still in its early start-up period and, during her nine-year tenure, played a key role in its growth to an $800 million/year company. While at Merit, she also participated in the acquisition and integration of regional managed care companies, the company's IPO in 1991, and the company's sale to Magellan Health for $800 million in 1998.
Previously, Ms. Suennen served as Worldwide Product Manager for INGRES/Relational Technology, Inc., a relational database company, where she had responsibility for development, marketing and distribution of the company's UNIX PC software product. Prior to INGRES, Ms. Suennen served as Director of U.S. Market Development and as Manager, U.S. Government and Industry Relations for X/Open, an international computer industry standards setting and lobbying consortium. Earlier, Ms. Suennen spent several years at Regis McKenna, Inc., an international high technology marketing and public relations firm, responsible for government relations and public relations strategy for client companies in the software and healthcare areas.
Ms. Suennen holds an M.A. in political science, a B.A. in political science and a B.A. in mass communications, all from the University of California, Berkeley. Ms. Suennen is also Vice Chair of the National Advisory Council of the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a visiting lecturer at the U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.
Recent posts
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[Editor's note: To tap the wisdom of our distinguished group of Xconomists, we asked a few of them to answer this question heading into 2013: What makes you optimistic?]
As... Read more »
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Patient monitoring outside the hospital has been a hot topic (and also a not so hot topic) for the past 15 years. Starting back in the late 1990s with companies like... Read more »
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The organization called Medtech Women just held its second annual Medtech Vision Conference last week and it was another sold-out event. (You can see my story on the first year of... Read more »
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I recently took a vacation in Italy, and in my quest to eat everything not nailed down in the Lake Como region, I had the good fortune to participate in an... Read more »
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You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
—The Beatles
I had the pleasure of attending a “salon” type dinner... Read more »
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The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” –Paul Cezanne
A couple of years ago my sister told me a story about how... Read more »
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Attention to health is life’s greatest hindrance—Plato
Let’s just say you own a car. You have undoubtedly purchased insurance for the car and if you are diligent and worried about value... Read more »
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Last week Steve Case wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post called “Give Entrepreneurs Room and They Will Grow the Economy.” For those not familiar with him, Case was... Read more »
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The Who once sang, “I hope I die before I get old.” Despite their best efforts to exit the planet early, most of them didn’t. They and their fellow Baby... Read more »
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I set off for five straight days at the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference last Monday, but on the way drove the carpool to my daughter’s high school that morning in... Read more »
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Last year about this time of year I wrote a parody of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas about the coming of healthcare IT and meaningful use. I decided to make these... Read more »
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“Yeah, I love being famous. It’s almost like being white, y’know?”-Chris Rock
On Monday, November 21, the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones VentureSource released the results of the 2011... Read more »
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If you are simply reading the paper or engaging in any random cocktail party conversation these days, it doesn’t take long before you are reading or talking about healthcare. Health and... Read more »
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I spent the early part of this week attending the Cleveland Clinic Medical Innovation Summit and, despite the fact that the Cleveland Clinic stubbornly insists on holding its conference in Cleveland... Read more »
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We are limited, not by our abilities, but by our vision. —Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a world thick with healthcare conferences, MedtechVision, held September 15-16 at the Rosewood Hotel in... Read more »
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Once upon a time there was “ehealth.” That time was the late 1990′s and there was a temporary ripple in The Force when anything that combined healthcare and the Internet had... Read more »
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Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending an event put together by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, a branch of the US Department Of Health and... Read more »
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Talking about health insurance is a good way to clear a room. It is a rare person who is excited to interact with their insurance company or who can understand the... Read more »
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“The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a greater danger to the privacy of the individual.” 1963 quote from Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.
I moderated a... Read more »
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I have been intrigued by numerous articles written recently on how hospital administrators are looking to other industries to learn how to adopt processes to reduce errors and improve quality of... Read more »