Diaspora Health builds and holds businesses in healthcare delivery, real estate, and software. We run them ourselves, on a long horizon, close to the people they serve.
Founded and led by Yvonne Kamau, MD, MBA. Working between Northeast Florida and East Africa.
The three businesses share owners, standards, and a back office. Health is where we started, and it still sets the bar: the same care we take with a patient is the care we take with a building or a release.
Research and innovation in primary care and hospital medicine. We study the parts of care that are easy to drop between handoffs — admissions, transitions, follow-up — and test better ways of running them, in Northeast Florida and in the communities we work with abroad.
Residential and small commercial property that we buy, improve, and keep. We favour buildings we can manage directly and hold through a cycle, rather than assets that only work on a fast exit.
We build the tools our own operations need, then make them available to others working on the same problems. Practical software for people whose day is already full — clinicians, property managers, small teams.
Yvonne Kamau, MD, MBA
Founder and Managing Director
Yvonne Kamau is a board-certified family medicine physician and practising hospitalist in Jacksonville, where she manages high-acuity inpatient panels and works with specialists, nursing staff, and case managers on complex, multi-system patients.
She trained in family medicine at Ascension St. Vincent's Riverside and completed a global health fellowship with Contra Costa Health Services and the University of California, San Francisco, with field research in health systems and implementation science.
As part of a research team at the University of Kansas Medical Center led by Sarah Finocchario-Kessler, PhD, she contributed to a body of work on maternal and infant HIV care in Kenya — how point-of-care testing at birth gets adopted on a ward, what providers need in order to use it, and how mothers experience the services built around it. The work was qualitative and implementation-focused: less about whether an intervention succeeds in principle than about what happens when it meets a real clinic. That question is the one Diaspora Health is organised around.
Her MBA sits alongside the MD, and it shows up in how the company is run: workflow and throughput treated as clinical concerns, capital allocated with the same discipline as a treatment plan. Diaspora Health grew out of that combination — a way to build durable businesses across the two places she calls home.
We work with clinicians, property owners, and teams building something small and durable. If any of that sounds like you, write to us and say what you are working on.