Y Combinator-backed healthcare startup Empirical Health launches its newest tool Radar which leverages smartwatches and other wearables for holistic health metrics
By Ada Jain
Healthcare startup Empirical Health announced on Wednesday that it launched its latest tool called Radar: a science-backed score that summarizes 40 health metrics from users’ blood tests and smartwatch data, giving an overall health score.
The custom score uses real-world evidence from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), American College of Cardiology (ACC), and other validated tools to give the user a comprehensive look into their health.The solution includes six subscores on heart health, lung health, mental health, kidney/liver health, sleep health, and lifestyle factors.
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Backed by Y Combinator, Broom Ventures, Pacific 8 Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and Rebel Fund, Empirical Health completed a $500,000 pre-seed round in July 2023.
Radar considers siloed data including ACC’s risk calculation, lab tests and also, weighs any irregular rhythm notifications, resting heart rate, cardio recovery from smartwatches like Apple or Android to provide a holistic picture of heart health which a smartwatch alone fails to do.The composite score and category scores range from 0-100, with higher numbers indicating better overall health.
Currently, the Apple watch has 10 metrics to measure heart health, but it can’t predict heart attacks yet. However, a risk calculator from ACC can predict a 10-year risk using metrics like cholesterol and blood pressure, and notify the user.
Founded by Brandon Ballinger and Raquel Rodriguez Martinez in 2022 with product and engineering led by Harish Kilaru, Empirical Health features AI-generated care plans, blood pressure cuffs, benchmarks, and medical care available in 30 states in the U.S. They’ve already helped over 30,000 people with Long COVID, POTS, sleep apnea, or heart health concerns with a belief that health is 99% of the time measured outside the doctor’s office, according to the company.
Combining their expertise as an engineer and a doctor respectively, Ballinger and Martinez first met at Cardiogram—a previous startup initiative by Ballinger—where Martinez was a visiting scholar. Martinez was previously a Clinical Assistant Professor at University of California, San Francisco and a physician at Kaiser.
In the past, Ballinger also co-founded Sift, a machine learning solution for fraud detection which became a top 50 YC company, and worked on Risk Engineering at Brex, the HealthCare.gov rescue team, and was on the machine learning team at Google.
According to the founders, the initial problem was that people spend $1.1 trillion per year reacting to the complications of chronic illness and a fraction of that on prevention. While the best boutique primary care models reduce hospitalizations by 51% and overall medical spend by 15-30%, they’re labor intensive, expensive, and don’t scale. Combined with long wait times for general appointments, they launched a fully licensed, registered, insured virtual medical practice called Proactive Primary Care which is in-network with most major insurers, including Aetna, Anthem, United HealthCare, and Medicare in 30 states now, compared with only four states when they started off.
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Currently, a shortage of physicians that began during the pandemic, is still worthy of caution. Projections by AAMC indicate the physician deficit could grow to up to 86,000 by 2036.
The app, Radar, is currently free of cost, while other services are subscription based including annual preventive visits, sick virtual visits, chronic disease management, labs, prescriptions, referrals, and more.