By Dr. Shaiv Kapadia

C3 Nexus was born out of a desire to desperately solve the problem of fragmented, uncoordinated medical care in a system where costs are escalating at an alarming rate incongruent with outcomes. Ninety nine percent of a patient’s healthcare journey falls outside the traditional healthcare ecosystem, yet most of our healthcare dollars are spent in acute care medicine.

We need a system that is focused on health promotion and recovery from illness.

As a busy cardiologist practicing in RVA, I have struggled with the episodic and reactive model of chronic disease management. If we could just monitor critical physiological signs and biochemical signals in patients between office visits or following discharge from the hospital, could we impact exacerbations of disease before reaching a crisis level?

Enter C3 Nexus: a healthcare ecosystem that leverages the latest in high-tech digital monitoring paired with high-touch nursing services.

We incubated the solution for over a year before going live at a local hospital in Richmond a year ago. The field of digital health is exploding—apps, medical devices, smartphones. However as a physician, unfiltered data directly from patients would be noise and not easily actionable. C3 Nexus needed to be that filtering platform, converting patient- generated health data to actionable contextual information consumable by physicians.

All C3 Nexus patients are equipped with the FDA-cleared BodyGuardian device weighing less than one ounce, which is attached to the chest with an adhesive strip. The devices’ electrodes provide ECG, heart rate, respiration rate, and 3D accelerometry to measure posture, position, movement, and activity on the patient. Those vitals are then transmitted to C3 Nexus’ control center, where trends are monitored and abnormal activity can be spotted instantly.

Paired with remote heart monitoring, C3 Nexus Nurse Concierges create a specialized healthcare plan specific to a patient’s condition, providing guidance on nutrition, medication, and exercise and offer peace of mind to patients and caregivers. The system allows C3 Nexus to work in conjunction with physicians to monitor key biometrics outside of the clinical setting while patients go about their daily lives.

As a startup, we understood the importance of creating the right culture and values to make this solution work. We honed in on our mission very quickly, transforming the human experience in healthcare. Our team lives and breathes this daily, not only with their patients but also amongst themselves. Ensuring that your investment partner has similar values is critical. Health Diagnostic Laboratory, Inc. (HDL, Inc.) has been that partner for us, both financially and strategically. Collectively, our focus is on meeting patients where they are and moving them to where they need to be based on personalized data.

Our experience over the past year has been absolutely incredible. We have dramatically reduced hospital readmission rates in patients initially hospitalized with heart failure and heart attacks. More importantly, however, we have been able to impact our patients’ lives in so many different ways through our care delivery system—assessing risk, changing behavior, and establishing trust.

We will continue to disruptively innovate in this space, learning from our mistakes, and relishing the journey. Our success will be predicated not on how we generate revenue but rather on our ability to impact patient outcomes.