Welcome to Heartbeat

By Jeffrey Wessler, MD MPhil, Founder, Heartbeat Health

What does it take to bring about real change in healthcare? How do you know when a good idea is worth pursuing? Why has healthcare become so focused on advanced care?

These questions have kept me up at night over the past decade of training in medicine. Some of these questions are variants on a theme of entrepreneurship, but for me, they now form the basis of a very real hypothesis. The implementation of preventive healthcare will deliver sustained and measurable improvement in outcomes.

Prevention is a solvable problem, the time is now, and we have the expertise and focus to solve it.

Prevention is a paradox: The reward is high for insurers, but it takes too long to return, so they don’t invest in it. The reward is high for providers, but insurers don’t pay, so they can’t invest in it. The reward is high for patients, but they can’t see the urgency. It is a Catch-22. The groups that are doing the most effective preventive strategies are those that have stepped out of healthcare into wellness, and stripped the labeling of prevention — like Equinox and Planet Fitness, Whole Foods and Blue Apron, Fitbit and Apple Watch — but evidence-based clinical interventions, where the cost to the system is by far the greatest, are still in need of solutions.

Here’s an illustration of what happens when prevention fails, from a recent cardiology overnight call of mine. Meet Stan, a 55 year old lawyer, who rolled into the emergency room after having been woken from sleep at 11pm with crushing chest pain. Sure enough, what Stan had previously thought was reflux was actually coming from his heart, and he was having a large heart attack. I met Stan in the emergency room about 20 minutes after his wife had called 911, and his story was all too familiar — “I’ve been told I have some high blood pressure, I’m a bit overweight, I don’t have time to exercise, I’m always stressed out, and I order Seamless 5 nights a week.” Stan’s path continues like countless others’ — cardiac catheterization, two stents, prolonged recovery, lifetime medications, and irreversible damage to his heart muscle.

We had twenty years to engage Stan — to communicate the importance of heart health, teach how elevated cardiovascular risk relates to downstream problems, to diagnose heart disease while it is still reversible, and to effectively manage it over time. Prevention fails every 40 seconds in the US — that’s how often someone here has a heart attack.

Heart disease kills more people than all cancers combined. But 80% of it is preventable.

That’s where Heartbeat Health comes from. We are doctors, designers, engineers, researchers, and educators and we’re focused on the implementation of preventive cardiology to younger and healthier people, before they get sick. We’ll do this by providing risk assessment, early diagnosis, and personalized management plans that work to keep patients at their healthiest.

Here’s what could have happened to Stan. When he turned 35, he could have taken a risk assessment to identify his elevated cardiovascular risk — prompting an initial visit with a cardiologist who would diagnose his early heart disease profile and spend time discussing its long term importance, why asymptomatic disease would become such a big deal, and what could be done about over the upcoming months and years. By maintaining lightweight communication via mobile app, with periodic check-ins and in-person screens, Stan could have changed his trajectory and possibly prevented his heart attack.

Cardiovascular disease provides an ideal opportunity for breaking the preventive paradox.

Fifty years ago, it made sense to focus our efforts on treating patients after they got sick — this was a rational priority when resources and treatment options were limited. As medicine evolved, and our treatment strategies became increasingly effective, the transition from reactive to proactive never occurred. But things are different now. Value-based care models are growing. Consumer-driven wellness and fitness platforms are winning through differentiated user experiences. And digital communities are facilitating scale and mass adoption in ways traditional healthcare has never been able to achieve.

This is the Heartbeat Health vision: to implement a preventive cardiology program for younger and healthier people via communication, personalization, early diagnosis and management of heart health and risk. By improving the heart check experience, we’re getting the right testing to the right person and the right time. In doing so we’ll create the largest network of cardiovascular patients and providers and aim to prevent or delay the onset of first cardiovascular event by 7–10 years.

So that’s Heartbeat, and we’re now open for business! We’re live in New York City with two Manhattan locations, and currently accepting new patients. In partnering with our investors, we are lucky to work with a syndicate who will provide support at critical stages of our business. Our lead investor Lerer Hippeau, along with Collaborative Fund, Silas Capital, and Max Ventures, have invested in New York’s most iconic consumer companies. Designer Fund works with founders who lead with human-centered design. Digital health leaders like Halle Tecco and Malay Gandhi bring decades of experience working at the intersection of innovation and the healthcare system. Scott Belsky of Adobe and Kelvin Beachum help us think about product and heart health in workplaces. And our original investor, Kindred Ventures, took the first bet when it was just a few doctors and an idea, and has been instrumental at every juncture along the way. I look forward on taking you along our journey over the upcoming months, and would love to have you join us as a patient, teammate, or friend. Heart disease is preventable, and heart health is achievable.

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