Chris Altchek, Cadence, on delivering care outside of the four walls of the hospital

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In this episode, I sat down with Chris Altchek, CEO and Founder of Cadence. Founded in 2019, Cadence is a health tech platform that combines personalized clinical care with a breakthrough technology platform. With this Cadence offers consistent care for people managing chronic conditions, such as congestive heart failure, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and COPD, from the comfort of their homes. Cadence recently raised a $100M Series B round, putting its latest valuation at $1 billion.

During our conversation, Chris and I discussed:

• Chris’s career journey and entry into healthcare
• How Cadence is scaling remote monitoring to serve large patient populations
• How the pandemic changed the healthcare system’s perception of remote care
• The future of Cadence and his advice for MBA students interested in the space

Beginning to 07:18 — On Chris’s career journey and entry into healthcare

• Prior to Cadence, Chris founded Mic, a consumer internet company which exited in 2018. Chris took time to reflect after selling his company to explore what he wanted to do next and landed in the healthcare industry after joining Thrive Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence. There, he explored the intersection of healthcare and technology and explored converting wearable device data into personalized healthcare insights.
• Within the space, Chris became especially interested in remote patient monitoring (RPM) and its potentially significant impact on delivering better healthcare. However, he quickly realized that available RPM offerings focused on small subsets of patients and were not accessible for most patients or healthcare systems. With this discovery, Chris identified an opportunity to scale RPM to support a larger subset of patients with chronic conditions who require close clinical attention. With this vision in mind, Chris founded Cadence to provide RPM at scale.
• At Cadence, he encourages his team to take on large, transformative change rather than incremental change as it mobilizes people behind a meaningful mission. It is through this perspective and approach that Cadence has been able to land contracts with two of the country’s largest healthcare systems: Life Point and Community Health systems.

“It is easier to make transformative change than incremental change”

7:18 to 21:10 — On Cadence and its positioning within the remote care market

• Cadence’s solution considers the obstacles patients, payers, and providers face within the remote monitoring space: Patients struggle with the time-consuming and resource-demanding management of several chronic conditions, providers lack the appropriate technology to deliver rapid responsive care, and payers have not historically aligned incentives with personalized care until the recent push towards value-based care. With these challenges in mind, Cadence created a solution that caters to each of the stakeholders.
• More specifically, Cadence runs end-to-end remote monitoring and virtual care programs that allow healthcare systems to manage patients outside the four walls of the hospital. They deploy devices in the home that are easy to use, provide real-time vitals, and include a communication platform that enables patients to quickly reach their care management teams. Additionally, the Cadence platform allows for each patient’s provider or specialist to respond to any incoming data alerts in real-time.
• Cadence has set itself apart from competitors within the space by taking risks alongside the providers and aligning cost-cutting incentives across the board. Moreover, they help partners operationalize remote monitoring at scale to hundreds of thousands of patients.
• Regarding the skepticism around virtual care being able to fulfill all requirements of a patient’s care journey, Chris agrees that virtual care cannot and should not necessarily replace current clinical care, but rather act as a complement to available services to ensure a more accessible, personalized, and affordable care delivery approach. He does not think that virtual care should be stand-alone or replace physical touch points with clinicians, but rather empower them to provide care on a more intentional and scalable level.
• Another interesting point that Chris brought up was regarding risk stratification, a common practice in value-based care in which high-risk patients are prioritized in terms of resource allocation. Chris disagrees with the approach and argues that Cadence is able to remove the need for risk stratification and provide all patients with chronic conditions equal access to care. Per that perspective, Cadence should be able to truly achieve the full potential of value-based care as it will be able to collect data and provide insights for entire populations as opposed to specific sub-groups.

21:10 to 26:17 — On the pandemic’s impact on virtual care and healthcare equity

• Chris agrees that the pandemic shifted the mindset of payers, providers, and patients to understanding that virtual care is an integral part of the healthcare journey. Moreover, it pushed the healthcare system to invest in the appropriate infrastructure to ingest large amounts of data to produce personalized insights that enable providers to better care for their patients and empower patients to take ownership of their conditions.
• The pandemic also uncovered the disparities in healthcare. Cadence’s platform is pushing toward making healthcare more equitable by providing patients the opportunity to receive high-quality care regardless of their zip code. Already, Cadence is live in rural communities across several states where they are offering patients daily monitoring and responsive care services.

“Zip codes should not determine life expectancy”

26:20 to 29:53 — On Cadence’s future

• Regarding Cadence’s future, Chris is determined to transform their solution into a comprehensive platform and not just a point solution. He recognizes the struggles providers have with managing a variety of vendors and software solutions and envisions Cadence’s platform as a one-stop, device-agnostic solution that primary care providers and specialists can easily utilize.
• Cadence already makes it easy to integrate existing devices within a clinical setting and is actively working with medical device producers and healthcare systems to add even more devices to their systems to make it easy to scale their platform to large patient populations.

29:54 to End — On MBAs and opportunities at Cadence

• Chris admits to being skeptical of MBAs earlier on in his career, but he has since changed his mind about the value it provides after partnering with and hiring MBAs at Cadence. Over half of Cadence’s team are MBAs, and Chris believes that they bring a well-rounded perspective on successfully operating a business.
• With that said, his advice to MBAs is to jump into the startup journey whenever they can as entrepreneurship can be a true accelerant and provide a valuable learning experience on how to run a business.
• Finally, Chris shared that Cadence is hiring and that they look for 3 things in candidates: Someone they are excited to spend time with and do not mind being stuck in an airport with; a craving for accountability and a drive to make transformative decisions that impact patient care; and an intense growth mindset, curiosity, and comfort in working with teammates who think differently.

To see all of the roles Cadence is hiring for, check out their careers site.

We are so appreciative to Chris for joining us on this episode of The Pulse Podcast! Subscribe for our new releases on Twitter, Spotify or Apple podcasts.