Ventricle Health – a national virtual cardiology care network – recently announced $8 million in seed funding led by RA Capital Management alongside Waterline Ventures and other investors. This funding round will finance the expansion of Ventricle Health’s heart failure management therapeutic model in collaboration with value-based care provider groups and payers.
The company’s care model is based on well-established guideline-directed medical therapy (GDMT) pathways. And they provide patients access to cardiology care appointments from their homes in as little as three days. Ventricle Health’s home-based and virtually enabled care model can reduce the overall average annual cost of heart failure care by at least 30-50%.
Heart failure spending in the U.S. Medicare population alone is expected to exceed $70 billion by 2030, making it the second largest category spent after renal failure. And employer health costs are similarly rising related to increasing heart failure diagnoses in their aging employee populations. Despite rising costs, only 1% of the eligible heart failure population is currently on optimal titrated dosages for guideline-directed medical therapies.
The ability to get to a cardiologist in a timely manner after hospital discharges only exacerbates the problem of heart failure-related re-admissions. The current average wait time to secure a cardiology appointment in the U.S. is 26 days – a time that could make all the difference in the outcomes and ultimate costs of caring for a heart failure patient.
Ventricle is headed by a veteran team of heart failure clinicians value-based care operators, and digital health innovators, many of whom have a personal story of family heart failure that fuels their passion. And the company is operational and delivering high-impact virtual and home-based clinical services in support of Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), primary care practices and their payer partners in the Mid-Atlantic, Texas, Ohio, and Florida, with more markets to be announced soon.
KEY QUOTES:
“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. 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. Ventricle is here to change that.”
— Ventricle Health founder Dr. Daniel Bensimhon
“It is incredibly exciting to have partners like RA Capital and Waterline make this investment in our mission. Each team brings tremendous clinical and value payment-policy depth from their existing portfolio partner collaborations. Along with our existing investor partners and an amazing team of seasoned value-based clinical operators, their investment will help us accelerate and expand access to a care model that is so urgently needed in the US beyond the markets we are currently serving.”
— Chief Executive Officer, Sean O’Donnell
“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. 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.”
— Anurag Kondapalli, Principal at RA Capital Management
