NEWS

February 26, 2019

New York, New York – February 26, 2019 - The Break into the Boardroom (BiB) program, sponsored by Deerfield Management and Oxeon Partners, and HLTH announced today that they have joined forces to directly connect healthcare leaders with qualified female board candidates. The Get on Board: Break into the Boardroom Match Program is an extension of the BiB program that was founded to promote greater representation of female healthcare executives on boards within the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

There is broad acknowledgement that females remain significantly underrepresented on both public and private company boards, and that diversity of opinion and perspective improves governance. There are, however, few quantifiable steps being taken to improve the situation. With this in mind, and consistent with BiB’s mission and approach, HLTH’s featured diversity initiative aims to make a difference with a purposefully concrete design. Throughout the HLTH conference, being held in Las Vegas on October 27-30, 2019, healthcare leaders seeking to fill corporate board seats will have an opportunity to schedule individual meetings with qualified female executives interested in governance roles.

“BiB’s collaboration with HLTH is designed to connect board leaders with talented, board-ready women who can be hard to find or unconsciously overlooked,” said Jonathan Weiner, Founder, Chairman and CEO of HLTH. “Together, we have the opportunity to deliver quantifiable results by tracking and reporting on the number of organizations meeting diverse candidates, the number of women exposed to board opportunities, the number of interviews conducted, and the number of boards that move forward with adding a woman they met as a result of the Get on Board: Break into the Boardroom Match Program at HLTH.”

Deerfield partner, Leslie Henshaw, notes that “too frequently directors are selected from a homogenous pool of candidates that look strikingly similar to the existing board. This happens not by design, or even with awareness… it’s just the path of least resistance. HLTH and BiB see this event as a perfect forum to drive change by making it easy for existing board members to meet a curated pool of female candidates in an organized setting.”

“We are thrilled to partner with HLTH to expand the reach of BiB, which runs an annual full-day program for approximately 40 qualified female healthcare executives interested in adding a first time governance role to their professional credentials,” said Mia Jung, an Oxeon partner. “While BiB has connected a number of its alumni with board opportunities, this event materially expands both the candidate and directorship pool from which we can promote matches.” The Get on Board: Break into the Boardroom Match Program has limited capacity and is on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, or to submit organization or applicant interest in participating in the matched interview sessions, please visit https://hlth.com/breakinto-the-boardroom/.

About Deerfield
Deerfield is an investment management firm committed to advancing healthcare through investment, information, and philanthropy.
For more information, please visit www.deerfield.com.

About Oxeon
Oxeon is a specialized professional services and investments firm that builds and accelerates the growth of impactful healthcare technology and services businesses. Our primary mission at Oxeon is to make people healthier. We achieve our mission in three core ways: recruiting world class executives into our clients and portfolio companies, investing in transformative healthcare companies, and building de novo businesses to address the problems plaguing our healthcare system. The innovative companies we build touch millions of lives. To learn more, visit www.oxeonpartners.com.

About HLTH
HLTH is the largest and most important conference for health innovation. It's an unprecedented, large-scale forum for collaboration across senior leaders from established payers, providers, employers, and pharma services, as well as from disruptive startups, prolific investors, representatives from government, academia, health associations, business groups, media, and industry analysts. The event is unique in creating a marketplace for the key stakeholders leading the dialogue and development of a new health ecosystem. HLTH's mission is to be a catalyst to drive substantial reductions in health costs and dramatic increases in health quality. HLTH takes place on October 27-30, 2019 at the MGM Grand's brand new conference facility. To learn more, visit www.hlth.com.

Contacts
Deerfield Management Company
Karen Heidelberger, 212-551-1600
karenh@deerfield.com

Oxeon Partners
Amy Lackner, 646-561-6983
BiBHLTH@oxeonpartners.com

HLTH
Carolyn Joyce, 347-871-0534
media@hlth.com

April 13, 2017

February 2, 2016

New York, New York – February 2, 2016 – Deerfield Management and Oxeon Holdings have joined forces to expand their leadership roles in supporting innovative programs and practices to foster improved diversity in the workplace. On February 2, over 30 female senior healthcare executives with interest in corporate governance will receive training and guidance designed to help them obtain their first boardroom role.

A growing body of academic literature suggests that gender-based heterogeneity in the boardroom is associated with improved ROE and ROI metrics, more effective risk mitigation strategies, enhanced decision making processes, and more diverse management teams, which are in turn associated with lower employee turnover and improved financial performance. Despite these increasingly well characterized benefits, less than 20% of Fortune 1000 board seats are held by women.

“There is a clear disparity between the number of qualified women willing and able to fill corporate board positions and the number of positions actually held by women. As such, we are excited to work with Oxeon to cultivate a new generation of female directors. Not only will the women excel at these positions, but the companies and organizations they serve will benefit from the perspectives, thought processes and problem solving approaches brought by female leaders”, stated Leslie Henshaw, Partner at Deerfield Management.

“Creating a program to educate women on the intricacies of boardroom dynamics is an important initiative we are excited to partner with Deerfield on. Oxeon’s leading position as a healthcare growth services firm creates an opportunity for us to help change the current face of American boardrooms” said Mia Jung, Senior Principal from Oxeon.

The program will consist of four educational sessions including content designed to support both finding and fulfilling board roles. The speaker line-up is made up of an impressive array of female role models, including Sally Susman, EVP of Corporate Affairs at Pfizer, Esther Dyson, Founder and Chairwoman at HICCup, Catherine Bromilow, Partner for PwC’s Center for Board Governance, and Annie Lamont, Partner at Oak HC/FT. Additionally, participants will be paired with a group of experienced mentors who have generously agreed to lend their time and perspective. Over time, Deerfield and Oxeon hope that many of the participants can become candidates for board opportunities emerging from their respective portfolio companies, allowing for practical application of lessons derived from the Women in the Boardroom series.

About Oxeon
Oxeon Holdings is a healthcare growth services firm and is the parent company of Oxeon Partners, an invested executive search firm, Oxeon Investments Funds I & II, and Cien Ventures, an internal venture studio. Oxeon seeks to connect its healthcare company partners with the fundamental drivers of business growth—great people, transformational business partnerships, strategic investments, and next generation business ideas, as well as various advisory and other growth-related services.
For more information, please visit www.oxeonpartners.com

About Deerfield
Deerfield is an investment management firm committed to advancing healthcare through investment, information and philanthropy.
For more information, please visit www.deerfield.com

Contacts
Deerfield Management Company
Karen Heidelberger, 212-551-1600
karenh@deerfield.com

Oxeon Holdings
Mia Jung
Mia@oxeonpartners.com

March 7th, 2022

NEW YORK, NY (Mar. 7, 2022) -- Deerfield Management and Oxeon Holdings joined forces in 2016 to create “Break into the Boardroom,” a program designed to promote greater representation of female healthcare executives in corporate boardrooms. To date, the program has identified and trained more than 220 women healthcare leaders and helped place 56 of its alumni and program affiliates onto corporate boards across the healthcare sector.

“We are extremely proud of the program’s impact to date and heartened by the growing awareness that boardroom diversity is not just cosmetic or politically correct, but actually just good business,” said Leslie Henshaw, a Partner at Deerfield Management. “The success we are seeing is extremely promising, but there is still much work to be done in helping boards source candidates from beyond their existing networks.”

Women make up only about 14% of corporate board seats at publicly held life sciences companies, according to Bedford Group/TRANSEARCH. The worse news is that progress has been less tangible in the private company arena, according to a whitepaper published by Deerfield on gender disparity among venture-backed healthcare companies. Of the 236 privately held companies investigated by Deerfield Institute only 10-12% of director roles are held by women. Given the growing recognition that diverse boards perform better, these numbers need to grow. The supply of talented women executives is not the problem. Connecting them to the right demand is the hard part, and that is precisely the challenge Break into the Boardroom was founded to solve.

“Knowing whether you are ready or not for a board role can be difficult to ascertain,” said June Lee M.D., a Break into the Boardroom alumni who currently sits on the boards of CinCor Pharma, Tenaya Therapeutics and GenEdit. “Break into the Boardroom gave me and my peers the knowledge, awareness, and connections to get started.”

“Having a diverse and balanced board is essential for any business. This is especially true in healthcare, where women make 80% of the care decisions for their families,” said Vincent Bradley, CEO of Advantia Health, a Deerfield supported women’s healthcare services company. “As the CEO of a healthcare company with dozens of Ob-Gyn practices, surrounding myself with women leaders is vital to me personally and to our business. I am incredibly thankful that Break into the Boardroom connected me with a channel for finding this talent. This program and our new board member, Karen Teitelbaum, have already had an enormous impact on our company and we look forward to working together for years to come.”

The program strives, by design, to be practical, concrete, and measurable. With this in mind, Break into the Boardroom’s goal is to find qualified women, enhance their knowledge of governance fundamentals and match them over time with appropriate board roles.

###

About Deerfield
Deerfield is an investment management firm committed to advancing healthcare through investment, information and philanthropy. The Firm works across the healthcare ecosystem to connect people, capital, ideas and technology in bold, collaborative and inclusive ways. For more information, please visit www.deerfield.com.

About Oxeon
Oxeon Holdings is a healthcare growth services firm and is the parent company of Oxeon Partners, an invested executive search firm, Oxeon Investments Funds I & II, and Cien Ventures, an internal venture studio. Oxeon seeks to connect its healthcare company partners with the fundamental drivers of business growth—great people, transformational business partnerships, strategic investments, and next generation business ideas, as well as various advisory and other growth-related services.

For more information visit www.oxeonpartners.com

Media Contact:
Caroline Drucker
cdrucker@deerfield.com
212-582-8296

Oct. 26, 2022

NEW YORK (Oct. 26, 2022) – Break into the Boardroom (BiB), a program developed to cultivate executive women board candidates for parity board representation on public, private, and non-profit boards across healthcare, announced today that Advancium Health Network and Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe are joining co-founders Oxeon and Deerfield Management to help support BiB’s continued growth and impact. According to a 2021 Deerfield report, less than 15% of board director roles in venture-backed healthcare companies are held by women and this is a statistic that BiB is determined to change.

Break into the Boardroom hosted its inaugural “Rising Stars” event yesterday at Cure®, a healthcare innovation campus in NYC, bringing together 50 women healthcare executives to begin building a talent pipeline for future board engagements.

These talented women were identified by leaders within New York City’s healthcare ecosystem as “rising stars” with high potential for future board opportunities. During the session they heard from BiB co-founders Mia Jung, Talent Partner at Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe and former Partner at Oxeon, and Leslie Henshaw, Partner at Deerfield Management, along with Sonia Millsom, CEO of Oxeon and a BiB alumni who now serves on several boards, partly due to her involvement with BiB.

“This dynamic group of budding female executives represents the next generation of leadership in healthcare,” said Millsom. “Bringing meaningful change to healthcare requires fresh, new perspectives, and I’m honored to not only be part of this pivotal initiative but also to be the beneficiary of its work.”

The discussion focused on how to build one’s own personal board of directors, which involves cultivating relationships with a broad and diverse group of trusted advisors with different specialties who can help guide one’s evolution. The BiB initiative has identified this as a critical lever for women to build a foundation for future board leadership. With the vast majority of board opportunities conducted through informal channels, the BiB program offers a platform for top-tier talent to connect with investor market demand. “As women progress in their careers, the ability to identify and build a personal board of directors that can be regularly consulted for feedback and advice can be transformative, and catapult them into an executive leadership role,” said Jung. “This strategic “dream team” allows them to pull from different perspectives, skill sets, and networks and can yield real results for their career trajectory.”

“Too often diversity initiatives aim for instant gratification or quick cosmetic appeal, but real change takes investing for the future,” added Henshaw. “This event was Break into the Boardroom’s first initiative aimed at building a bigger candidate pool of talented women healthcare executives who will mature over the coming decade.”

About Oxeon
Oxeon, an industry-leading builder of transformational healthcare solutions, powers change to our nation’s broken healthcare system through talent, entrepreneurship and investment. Comprised of three core businesses, the Oxeon holding company includes: Oxeon Search, which has placed more than 1,000 executives in healthcare leadership roles; Oxeon Investments, which makes selective seed investments and takes equity positions in Oxeon portfolio companies to accelerate change in healthcare; and Oxeon Venture Studio, which designs, facilitates and launches innovative healthcare businesses. Oxeon, derived from the Greek word for relationships, connects people and ideas to change healthcare and improve the lives of millions of Americans. Click here to learn more.

About Deerfield
Deerfield is an investment management firm committed to advancing healthcare through investment, information and philanthropy. The Firm works across the healthcare ecosystem to connect people, capital, ideas and technology in bold, collaborative and inclusive ways. For more information, please visit www.deerfield.com.

About Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe (WCAS)
WCAS is a leading U.S. private equity firm focused on the healthcare and technology industries. Since its founding in 1979, the firm’s strategy has been to partner with outstanding management teams and build value for its investors through a combination of operational improvements, growth initiatives, and strategic acquisitions. The firm has raised and managed funds totaling over $30 billion of committed capital. For more information, please visit www.wcas.com.

About Advancium Health Network
Advancium Health Network is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization launched by Deerfield Management dedicated to advancing healthcare and health equity through a premier volunteer and philanthropic network of health industry, financial service, and public sector experts. Visit advanciumhealth.org for more information.

Contact:
Susan Oliver
susanboliver@gmail.com
703.216.4078