Chamber Cardio scored a $60 million series A funding round to build out its tech-enabled delivery platform that supports cardiologists in value-based care models.
The startup, which launched in 2022, provides cardiologists with a tech solution along with infrastructure for administrative and care team support and helps practices navigate value-based contracting.
Chamber partners with both payers and cardiologists to support VBC programs focused on the long-term management of cardiovascular disease, according to executives. The startup asserts that its data and intelligence platform combined with its operational infrastructure helps reduce preventable complications and hospital use, improves patient experience and provides health plans with clearer visibility into cardiovascular performance and total cost of care.
Chamber currently supports patients through multiple payer partnerships and works with a network of more than 500 cardiologists across seven states. The company plans to use the fresh funding to grow its partnerships with health plans and cardiology practices, expand into additional markets and continue building its clinical, operational and technology teams.
"When we started the company, we talked to hundreds of cardiologists and they're ready for value-based care. They want to be incentivized for value over volume. They just don't know how to do it and oftentimes can't do it on their own," George Aloth, co-founder and CEO of Chamber, told Fierce Healthcare an interview.
Frist Cressey Ventures led the series A round. Existing investors General Catalyst, AlleyCorp, American Family Ventures and Company Ventures also backed the round along with strategic participation from Optum Ventures, Healthworx Ventures and additional investment from Black Opal Ventures. The financing also includes debt from HSBC Innovation Banking.
"Our goal is to work through the providers, so enabling, empowering cardiologists," Aloth said. "We partner with cardiologists throughout the country and we build networks. We don't acquire practices, but we bring them into network through these partnerships, and then we'll wrap around them. We built a proprietary tech platform, which is essentially a pop health platform that's nuanced for cardiology. It's AI-driven, and they're directly integrated into their electronic health record. Then we have care teams that will wrap around them,"
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death and a top driver of U.S. healthcare spending, with direct medical costs and lost productivity exceeding $400 billion annually, according to the American Heart Association.
There has been a focus on VBC models in primary care as well as nephrology and oncology, but care delivery innovation in cardiology has largely been lacking as it's traditionally fee-for-service driven.
Aloth saw this firsthand on the health plan side in his executive experience at several payers. He served as a contractor to perform compliance and performance reviews of Medicare health plans for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS); he had a stint as president and CEO of a Blue Cross Blue Shield health plan and as chief operating officer at a Medicaid/Medicare payer. He also served as group president at Somatus, a value-based kidney care leader.
"Cardiology was a big expense. There really weren't a lot of solutions. It was the No.1 thing impacting our membership, especially on the Medicaid and Medicare side," Aloth told Fierce Healthcare in an interview.
He connected with Sameer Sheth, M.D., a board-certified cardiologist who served as a clinical leader at CareMore, RubiconMD and Oak Street Health, who also saw the need for more VBC solutions for cardiologists.
"We pulled our heads together, and we figured that he had the clinical side of the business and I had the payer side, and we started the company back in September 2022," Aloth said.
Currently, Chamber works with several large national Medicare Advantage payers as well as some Blue Cross Blue Shield and other regional plans. The company has its sights set on continued national expansion with a "huge pipeline" of payer partners. Aloth also sees major tailwinds in the VBC cardiology space.
"On the private payer side, there's been this huge movement. We're talking to almost all the big payers in the country. With this new administration, there's a number of CMS and CMMI programs that are coming out that are more linked to specialists, and specifically cardiologists, that we look to take advantage of," he said.
In December, the CMS unveiled the LEAD model as a successor to the ACO REACH model, which concludes at the end of 2026. The CMMI also announced the Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions (ACCESS) Model, a 10-year payment program that would offer stable, recurring payments for technology used to treat diabetes, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, obesity, depression and anxiety.
Just this month, the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health revealed the Agentic AI-Enabled Cardiovascular Care Transformation (ADVOCATE) program that aims to develop the first FDA-authorized agentic AI technology that can provide 24/7 specialty care.
"It's been just an amazing influx of attention from the public side through CMS and CMMI on cardiology and specialist-specific movements. A lot of the funding is gearing up for what we see a lot of tailwinds going into this space and obviously more specifically hiring. We need to hire a ton of people to support the business," he said.
Chamber's cardiology-focused data and intelligence platform integrates workflow-native AI to prioritize high-risk patients, identify gaps in guideline-directed therapy and reduce manual chart review.
“Cardiovascular care generates enormous amounts of data, but clinicians don’t need more data but rather a clearer signal,” Sheth, co-founder, president and chief medical officer of Chamber, said.
Cardiologists are increasingly responsible for older, higher-risk patients, yet often lack timely data and support outside of office visits. These gaps contribute to delayed interventions, missed follow-ups, avoidable hospitalizations and rising costs that traditional fee-for-service care was not designed to address.
"We use the AI to sort of predict who's on track to get sick, who's going to end up with congestive heart failure stage D and then let's get ahead of it. We stratify their population and that helps with scheduling, making sure they're seeing the right patients. There's a lot of patients that the cardiologist doesn't necessarily need to see, those things that our care team can be doing that will free up their schedule. We'll recommend actions, we'll give them data and insights, and then ultimately give them a care model that we can operationalize through the technology and we supplement with a care team including pharmacists, nurse practitioners and case managers."
Cardiology patients often have many comorbidities and see an endocrinologist or nephrologist for other health conditions. Chamber's model helps cardiologists integrate and coordinate with these other providers, Aloth said.
"We want to make sure everybody's getting the right insights, because we want to avoid those redundancies. What ends up happening today is that patients with heart disease have a very fragmented experience, and so what we would like to do is tie it all together. We'd like to say we're the heart of the cardiology care ecosystem," he noted.
Cardiologists, like most providers, face excessive workloads and administrative burdens. "Many cardiologists see 30 to 35 patients a day. Part of what our technology does is summarization, so instead of looking through 60 pages of notes, they'll get a summarization, so it saves a lot of time for the doctor to do what they need to do with the patient," Aloth said.
He added, "There's a lot of information overload, and they need just to understand what's important, what's actionable, what they need to do. They need more of a macro view."
Chamber then partners with payers to build alignment with cardiology practices.
"Once we have that density of network that's being wrapped around with the technology and with the care team, we'll go to the payers and say, 'We're working with the cardiologist in our network that are already in their network, they are already seeing your patients.' We think with our solution, with that wraparound, we can really bring down the cost for these patients, but more importantly, improve their health outcomes, with that focus on slowing down that disease progression," Aloth said.
Chamber is seeing notable results from its work with cardiologists to better manage patients. In the last year, cardiology practices it works with reported a 21% decrease in total inpatient admissions, a 39% decrease in chronic heart failure (CHF)-related inpatient admissions and 36% decrease in coronary artery disease-related inpatient admissions.
There also has been a 7.3% decrease in emergency room admissions and 6.1% reduction in total cost of care for CHF patients.
"We know it's working. We're really excited to expand what has been successful into a much larger population. by using this fundraising and we're going into a number of new partnerships," Aloth said.