Culina Health Seeks to Expand Virtual Platform Offering Clinical Nutrition

Jan. 30, 2025
Startup recently received $7.9 million in funding round led by Healthworx, the investment arm of insurer CareFirst

Culina Health, which has developed a virtual platform offering clinical nutrition care, recently received $7.9 million in a Series A funding round led by Healthworx, the investment arm of CareFirst, the largest nonprofit insurer in the Mid-Atlantic region. This brings the company’s total capital raised to $20 million, with Culina the first company of its kind to be backed by a payer. Registered dietician Vanessa Risotto, co-founder and CEO, recently spoke with Healthcare Innovation about scaling up to create a nationwide network of registered dietitians to provide personalized virtual nutrition care. 

In the recent funding round, the additional investors included Rethink Impact, Collab Capital, Collide Capital, Vamos Ventures, Tensility Venture Partners, Cake Ventures, and GW Ventures. With this new capital, Hoboken, N.J.-based Culina Health said it would expand its offerings to support dietitians and patients, implement new AI platforms to improve care efficiency, and enhance its leadership with new hires.

The company has developed a team of more than 90 registered dietitians and has delivered more than 80,000 telehealth clinical nutrition sessions nationwide.

In a statement, a Healthworx executive explained their interest in Culina: “New interventions that engage members, improve health outcomes, and ultimately reduce long-term costs associated with managing chronic conditions are core to the potential of whole-person health,” said Doba Parushev, Managing Partner at Healthworx. “Through its clinically driven approach to nutrition and unparalleled level of support, compassion, and attention from its care team, Culina Health has created a viable solution that can be deployed at scale, and has the potential to improve the health of millions of people.”

HCI: Is part of the reason Healthworx was interested in Culina was because CareFirst wants to be a customer and deploy your services?

Risotto: Yes. We are the nutrition provider for their payvider, and we are tracking data alongside them to prove that the work the dietitian does is responsible in the reduction in the total cost of care.

HCI: A press release said you have served more than 10,000 patients through the Culina Health Method. Can you describe what the method is?

Risotto: We standardize care, and we are very strict about how the care is delivered. We watch recorded sessions, we review notes, we provide supervision on an individual basis and as a collective, so we capture many data points, and then we layer on all the information we learn about the patient. So there is this personalization to it. But it also is very mathematical and algorithmic. Americans recognize a certain way of eating, so when you push that out to them in a very specific way, they are able to do better, because they know what to expect, and that's the way that we work. 

HCI: Do you ever have to overcome the issue of people living in a food desert or who say they can't afford to access healthful food? And is there a way to address that those issues? 

Risotto: As a dietician, I understand you as a whole person — how much money you have at the end of the week, and then I help you leverage what you have access to in order to be well. For example, at Mount Sinai Hospital, from May to October, is a farmer's market where you can use your SNAP benefits. So if you live on the Upper East Side, and you live in one of the housing projects, and you tell me, “Well, I can't go to Whole Foods,” I say you don't have to. You can go to the farmers’ market. I tell people they can get frozen vegetables from the Dollar Store. Those are allowed to ripen to peak and are minimally processed. There are ways to help people understand how they can be well, and it doesn't mean that you have to spend $700 a week on your groceries.

HCI: It sounds like you have been able to track some pretty significant outcome improvements on things like A1C,  cholesterol and blood pressure reductions and then figure out a cost savings per patient.

Risotto: We have heard anecdotally that the payer is looking for a total cost savings of $2,500 per patient annually, if they're working with a registered dietitian. We tracked 100 pre-diabetic patients over the course of a year. We reversed all of those patients’ pre-diabetes, and that's a cost savings of $7,000 per patient annually.

We do know that working with a dietitian is about the behavior change and behavior modification. It's the same thing in thinking about the GLP-1s. A doctor is going to give you a GLP-1, but he may not manage your symptoms, and then maybe you're not going to have longevity on the drug, and you're not going to get the outcomes that you want. So how do you get the outcomes? You have to work with a dietitian, because we're going to track the food, we're going to make the changes, we're going to minimize those bad symptoms, and help you get the desired outcomes. 

HCI: These kinds of results must be compelling to insurers. Are you drawing interest from other ones?

Risotto: We are in talks with the commercial product teams of all the payers, and we will publish a white paper alongside CareFirst, and then we will go to the employers, to the payers, and say, this is what we've done. The patient is healthier, the employee is healthier, and this is what we can do for you. Many employers have a nutrition program, but it's just a checkbox, or it’s telephonic, it's once a month. Maybe it's a dietitian, but oftentimes it's a health coach, or it's a mental health professional. Those individuals have value, but nutrition is not their discipline, and there's no way that anyone's going to have success or be super high functioning if I just talk to you on the phone once a month. It doesn't work.

HCI: In addition to payers or employers, what about physician practices or ACOs. Can they be the ones who refer to your organization? 

Risotto: Yes. At the end of 2022, 7% of our referrals came from primary care practices, and by the end of 2023 it was over 70%. So that is the bulk of our business. The majority of referrals come from PCPs as well as specialty practices. We close that feedback loop for them. They refer their patient out, and we collaborate with them about the patient.

For example, I had a patient whose A1C was elevated, even though he was on Metformin. So we did some work. He lost 20 pounds, but the A1C never went down. So I just sent a note to the physician. The patient lost 20 pounds, but their blood sugar is still up, so it is likely they need an adjustment on the Metformin. So they adjusted the Metformin, and then the blood sugar came down. We could do that because we had been tracking that data together the whole time. That gives the physician confidence in the work that we do.

HCI: Anything else you are looking forward to in 2025?

Risotto: I think it's just growth and really understanding how to use technology to help dietitians spend less time doing administrative work and more time in patient care, because ultimately that's all we care about — working with the patient and making sure that they feel well and comfortable and happy.

 

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