Ventricle Health, which is building a national virtual cardiology care network, has received $8 million in seed funding to expand its heart failure management therapeutic model in collaboration with value-based care provider groups and payers.
The startup says its care model is anchored around well-established guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT) pathways.
Today, the average wait time to secure a cardiology appointment in the U.S. is 26 days — time that can make all the difference in the outcomes and ultimate costs of caring for a heart failure patient. Ventricle says it provide patients access to cardiology care appointments from their home in as little as three days. The company claims that its home-based and virtually enabled care model can reduce the overall average annual cost of heart failure care by 30 to 50 percent
The company is delivering virtual and home-based clinical services in support of accountable care organizations, primary care practices and their payer partners in the Mid-Atlantic, Texas, Ohio and Florida, with more markets to be announced in the near future.
“Our foundational service lines offer a rapid path for either payers or value-based provider groups to connect heart failure patients to high quality cardiology services and provides a model for cardiologists to effectively manage more patients,” said Ventricle Health founder Daniel Bensimhon, M.D., in a statement. “Study after study has shown that getting heart failure patients on appropriate guideline-directed medical therapy can dramatically improve health outcomes and lead to marked reductions in costs and improvements in quality of life in just weeks — yet typically less than 20 percent of our patients are on these medications even when they come out of the hospital. Ventricle is here to change that.”
The funding round is led by RA Capital Management, Waterline Ventures and other investors. “Not unlike what we’ve seen in the kidney disease category, heart failure today is often first diagnosed only after a patient has been hospitalized. This makes heart failure an area poised for significant value-based disruption,” said Anurag Kondapalli, principal at RA Capital Management, in a statement. “We spent considerable time looking across companies operating in the cardiovascular care space. Rather than purely focusing on a technology-based solution, Ventricle Health stood out to our team as the unique clinical leader poised to offer ACOs and payers a rapidly deployable, full turn-key solution that can deliver outsized value for their partners. This marks RA’s fifth value-based care investment in the past two years as we’ve scoured the market for what we consider to be best-model companies to unlock value in healthcare.”
Sean O'Donnell serves as CEO of Ventricle Health. Most recently, he was the senior vice president of Platform and Ecosystem Partnerships for Accolade. He was an early member of the founding team that launched Evolent Health and previously was the head of product and marketing for Provider Solutions at Aetna.
