Digital health startup Zivian Health Inc. has raised $3 million to expand its software platform that aims to connect physicians, nurse practitioners and physician assistants for collaboration.
The seed funding round was led by Wireframe Ventures, Crosslink Capital and NextView Ventures, the Cleveland-based company said Tuesday.
Zivian Health tracks credentialing and licensing rules for nurse practitioners and physician assistants in all 50 states so they and their physician collaborators can concentrate on caring for patients, said Dr. Rafid Fadul, co-founder and CEO of the company.
Fadul partnered with Jesse Corn to start Zivian Health last year. Corn was head of AudioEngine at Findaway, the Cleveland-based digital audiobook distributor, before Findaway was acquired by Spotify for $119 million in 2022.
Most of Zivian Health's employees are based in Cleveland, Fadul said.
Fadul is a pulmonary critical-care physician who worked with both Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals in the Cleveland area prior to moving to northern Virginia a couple of years ago. He has been a digital health advocate since 2009.
As the founding chief medical officer at Wheel Health, a digital health infrastructure company, Fadul has had clients "from startups who were just entering the market all the way up to trillion-dollar enterprises [that] were getting into health care," he said.
Among Wheel Health's largest clients was Amazon.com Inc., which has piloted virtual urgent care, primary care and pharmacy services for its employees and their families since 2019, according to Fierce Healthcare.
Companies such as Amazon also want to provide employee health care through "advanced practice providers" — nurse practitioners, physician assistants and other licensed, non-physician professionals — because they are "generally equally as good as physicians, but they cost a lot less," Fadul said.
In addition, the number of U.S. physicians is falling, while the number of nurse practitioners and physician assistants is rising, according to a 2019 article in the American Journal of Managed Care. Yet education, training, licensure, certification and scope of practice vary significantly among advanced practice providers nationwide.
Zivian Health proposes to solve the problem of scaling the U.S. health workforce by tracking the credentialing and licensing regulations for nurse practitioners and physician assistants, managing their relationships with physicians, and providing an audit trail of their collaborations for regulators.
"[It's] an organized, clean interface where everything lives," Fadul said. "It gives me a lot of peace of mind knowing that I'm working with people who are equally as committed to quality and motivated by the same things."
