An Arlington heart health startup has raised $8 million to bring its virtual home care to more value-based care provider groups and payers.
The investment round was led by Boston's RA Capital Management alongside Waterline Ventures of Cambridge, Massachusetts and other investors.
Ventricle Health provides its members with access to a network of 2,000 cardiologists — members can book appointments to be seen virtually in as little as three days. The digital health startup ships an assortment of at-home tools to monitor patients' health — such as a body scale that measures fluid, an electrocardiogram (ECG or EKG) and a blood pressure cuff — and offers remote patient monitoring and patient education and advocacy.
The startup was founded in 2020 by Dr. Daniel Bensimhon, medical director of advanced heart failure and mechanical circulatory support at Cone Health, a network of hospitals in North Carolina, who saw a gap in both preventative and long-term care for heart failure patients.
“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 said in a statement.
The goal of the platform is to "wrap around the patient, monitor their symptoms, see a physician frequently and then have a pharmacist help you get your medicines and it's all virtual,” Bensimhon said. “We see a patient over four months, we get the patient in, we optimize and we try to get them back to their primary care doctor.”
Ventricle Health CEO Sean O’Donnell, who joined the company in December, just signed a lease for a small office space in Ballston. He said he wants to build out Ventricle Health in the DMV because of the access to digital health talent.
The investment round allows Ventricle Health to expand its therapeutic model to new markets beyond the Mid-Atlantic, Texas, Ohio and Florida where it already serves patients in collaboration with primary care practices and their payor partners. For RA Capital, it was the patient-centric approach of Ventricle Health that attracted them to the investment.
“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,” Anurag Kondapalli, Principal at RA Capital Management, said in a statement. “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.”
For Bensimhon, it's about getting care to rural Americans that can’t make it to the doctor or afford those life-saving cardiologist visits.
“It's democratizing great heart failure care,” Dr. Bensimhon said. “They're paying for the wrong thing. They're paying for the hospital, they're paying for people to be sick. We want them to change their mindset. Focus on paying for people to be healthy. Pay upfront. Let’s solve it together.”
