Dr. Bob Kocher

Bob Kocher, M.D., member of APCO’s International Advisory Council, is a partner at Venrock, a venture capital firm that focuses on technology, health care and energy. Mr. Kocher brings extensive health care and health policy experience, having formerly served in the Obama administration as special assistant to the president for health care and economic policy and as a member of the National Economic Council.

While at the White House, Mr. Kocher helped shape health care reform legislation, was one of the leaders of the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” childhood obesity initiative, led the formation of the Partnership for a Healthier America and served on the Federal Advisory Panel charged with developing a national obesity strategy. Prior to his tenure at the White House, he was a partner at McKinsey & Co., where he led McKinsey Global Institute’s health care economics work and worked with various constituencies in the health care ecosystem to improve health policy, productivity, clinical outcomes and patient experience.

He currently serves on the board of Castlight and the advisory boards of Harvard Medical School’s Health Care Policy Department, the University of Southern California’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, the National Institute for Health Care Management, and ChildObesity180. He is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Engelberg Center for Health Reform and co-chair of the Health Data Initiative, a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Institute of Medicine to release health care data to improve health care cost and quality through private-sector innovation.

Mr. Kocher received undergraduate degrees from the University of Washington and a medical degree from George Washington University. He completed a research fellowship with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Institutes of Health and went on to complete his internal medicine residency training at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School.