Auxira Health launched last year with a new approach to specialty care, offering much-needed clinical support to cardiologists.
The startup is now aiming to expand its white-label telehealth staffing solution nationwide, backed by a strategic investment from the American Heart Association's venture capital arm. Financial details of the investment were not disclosed.
Auxira was initially co-developed by MedStar Health and Abundant Ventures. The startup addresses the growing workload on cardiology care teams as the need for cardiac care has surged. Every day in the U.S., 10,000 people turn 65, aging into Medicare. Practices, faced with physician shortages and rising administrative burdens, are struggling to meet growing demand.
"Auxira launched to address a real-world challenge that just about every provider group faces, which is provider burnout and patient access," Inna Plumb, co-founder and CEO of Auxira Health, told Fierce Healthcare. "There's a shortage of providers out there, so wait times are getting increasingly long. On top of that, with the advent of EHRs (electronic health records), you've had a total explosion in administrative burden on providers."
As patients face long delays to get appointments with cardiologists, that also represents lost revenue opportunities for practices.
"We solve those two things, the burnout and the capacity," Plumb said.
Auxira virtually embeds full clinical support teams—advanced practice providers (APPs), medical assistants and registered nurses—into a cardiology practice's existing workflows. These clinical teams manage administrative and lower-acuity clinical tasks, allowing cardiologists to focus on complex, high-value care without the need to expand headcount or overhaul their technology infrastructure.
"We're sitting in [the practice's] EHR, we feel completely native and organic and white label to everybody, both care teams and the patients. We do the lower-acuity follow-up work. We do the visits that don't have to happen in the office, and then we have dedicated time in our day to also manage the inboxes of the providers," Plumb said. "What that does, ultimately, is it enables the providers to have a lot more time in their day for new patients who take more time and procedures, the things that doctors really want to be spending a lot of their time on."
MedStar Health also has seen benefits from the model. The health system saw an improvement in new and established patient appointment availability, including time to new patient appointments; an increase in relative value units per patient seen by the cardiologist; an improvement in top box Press Ganey patient experience scores; and a 35% reduction in after-hours EHR time.
"We've seen a 37% increase in capacity, 14% improvement in patient satisfaction, and 35% reduction in after-hours 'pajama time' for the physicians," Plumb said. "One of our pods adds thousands of visits per year to a provider practice," she added.
Auxira's model addresses physician well-being and burnout as well as patient access. The virtual clinical support platform enables practices to expand access without growing headcount, she noted.
The company staffs one APP per three cardiologists, who becomes deeply integrated into the care team and the relationship with the patient and can take on low-acuity visits for cardiologists.
Plumb joined Auxira as CEO in December. Self-described as a serial healthcare entrepreneur, she was formerly a private equity investor, a founding partner at Redesign Health, where she helped build healthcare companies at the startup incubator, as well as COO and co-founder of MedArrive.
Auxira received an investment from American Heart Association Ventures’ Studio Red, which incubates early-stage heart and brain health ideas. As a co-creator and major shareholder of the new company, Studio Red is playing an integral role in shaping Auxira’s early strategy by leveraging American Heart Association (AHA) assets and know-how, the organization said.
“Auxira Health represents the kind of high-impact innovation that Studio Red was created to support,” said Lisa Suennen, managing partner, American Heart Association Ventures, in a statement. “Clinicians are a key constituency of our organization, and Auxira’s model squarely addresses their challenges: relieving administrative strain, improving patient access and ultimately delivering better cardiovascular care."
Auxira plans to use the investment to grow its team and to invest in technology with an eye toward automation, Plumb noted.
The partnership with American Heart Association Ventures goes beyond financial support. The collaboration also brings AHA resources to the table through Studio Red.
"Their whole team is basically supporting us operationally and strategically. As we think about strategic decisions, we've dug into how we measure provider wellbeing, and they've got such deep research chops. It's fantastic to lean into that. We're actually going to be publishing a paper in partnership with them. We want to study the outcomes that we're achieving," Plumb said.
"We're also going to be participating in their conferences. And, most importantly, our providers get access to training and CME opportunities through the AHA that are unique to the AHA, to cardiology and to telemedicine. We get this unique ability to train our telemedicine providers in telemedicine cardiology by the AHA."
For APPs, Auxira is a rare opportunity to practice virtually and have deep engagement with patients. It also allows specialty-trained APPs to practice cardiology and to engage in the type of care provision they are passionate about, Plumb said in an interview in May.
The company aims to have its providers seamlessly integrate into the customer’s care teams.
"A lot of the differences come down to how providers practice, and that's part of our magic because we send our APPs on-site with the physicians, they get to learn those differences and adapt to each provider. A lot of that variability we actually want to keep, because that's a part of good patient care, that's part of serving the providers really well, that's handled and effectively absorbed by our providers," she said.
Currently, Auxira is "laser-focused" on cardiology to expand to more practices and health systems, but the company has ambitions to bring its model to other medical specialties, Plumb noted.
"The core of what we do is high-quality, complex care extension. It's not easy to do. It's not something that you could just kind of slap a telemedicine screen onto. We've really developed some great IP around that, and we are excited to bring that to other specialties as well," she said.