Exclusive: Heart care startup CardioOne circulates $8M

Clinic-facing heart care enabler CardioOne collected $8 million in seed funds, CEO Jasen Gundersen tells Axios exclusively.

Why it matters: With heart disease leading the nation in causes of death, cardiology care has emerged as the single largest driver of health care spending.

• Flexible, independent cardiology practices are prime targets for CardioOne to shift towards value-based arrangements.

Details: Houston, Texas-based CardioOne was created and funded in part by Redesign Health.

• Funds are being used to fuel new partnerships with three independent cardiology practices: Cardiac Associates of New Jersey, Twin Hearts in Florida, and Corrieius Cardiology in Pennsylvania.
• Gundersen declined to say when he expects CardioOne to raise a Series A.

How it works: CardioOne is a management services organization (MSO) that provides administrative infrastructure, scale, and tech to risk-bearing clinics so they can function successfully in their relationships with contracted payers and regulators.

What they're saying: "The independent cardiology space is a unique opportunity on the value-based care side because these practices are smaller and can move in and out of different models quickly," says Gundersen.

• Plus, he adds, "there's an entrepreneurial mindset in these folks."

The intrigue: Value-based care (VBC) has been a slow moving train, partly because many tools aren't integrated into physicians' existing fee-for-service workflows, according to Gundersen.

• "For VBC enablement to work, you have to be at the core of the practice," says Gundersen. "It can't be side work. It has to be in the middle of our Outlook workflow and what we do everyday."

State of play: An aging population, combined with an ongoing shift of care to lower-cost settings, is underwriting growth in demand for remote and home-based cardiac companies.

• Value-based heart care enabler Karoo Health in June raised $3.4 million in seed funding.
• Remote patient monitoring company Hello Heart last summer amassed $70 million in Series D funds.
• Wearable heart failure detection technology developer Cardiosense last winter raised $15 million in Series A capital.