A Greensboro startup, founded by a Cone Health doctor, has raised $8 million in a seed funding round as it looks to reduce wait time for cardiology appointments.
Ventricle Health, a two-year-old company, is a virtual cardiology clinic focused on providing access to appointments in patients’ homes. It was founded by Dr. Dan Bensimhon, a well-known heart failure cardiologist at Cone. He is also the founder of Moonlighting Solutions, a staffing service for health care providers, which saw a significant increase in demand during the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ventricle will use the $8 million to expand its platform across the country and to collaborate with other value-based care provider groups. The startup said it currently supports accountable care organizations (ACOs) in the mid-Atlantic, Texas, Ohio and Florida, with plans to announce more markets soon.
Ventricle’s funding comes at a time when heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The seed round was led by RA Capital and Waterline Ventures, two firms out of the Boston area with expertise in the health care and biotechnology fields.
“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,” said Anurag Kondapalli, principal at RA Capital. “Rather than purely focusing on a technology-based solution, Ventricle Health stood out to our team as the unique clinical leader poised to offer [accountable care organizations] and payers a rapidly deployable, full turn-key solution that can deliver outsized value for their partners.”
The company’s goal is twofold – to reduce the wait time to see a cardiologist and reduce health care costs.
The average wait time to secure a cardiology appointment in the United States is 26 days, Ventricle said, and the company wants to reduce it to three days.
Home-based, virtual heart care will also help reduce the average annual cost of heart failure care by 30 to 50%, Ventricle said. The CDC estimated that heart disease cost the United States $239.9 billion in 2019, including heart care services, medicines and lost productivity due to death.
Ventricle’s model puts guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT) at the forefront. GDMT is designed to help heart failure patients who have a low percentage of blood being pumped from its ventricle, also known as reduced ejection fraction.
“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,” Bensimhon said. “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% of our patients are on these medications even when they come out of the hospital,” Bensimhon added. “Ventricle is here to change that.”
Ventricle said it has a veteran team of heart failure clinicians and value-based care operators. The company’s LinkedIn lists 19 employees, including Bensimhon, CEO Sean O’Donnell and Carrie Crotter, chief financial and operations officer.
