Company Profile · Digital Health · New York, USA
Carda Health
Cardiac and pulmonary rehab pulled out of the hospital basement and dropped onto the kitchen table - vitals watched live by a real clinician.
Cardiac and pulmonary rehab pulled out of the hospital basement and dropped onto the kitchen table - vitals watched live by a real clinician.
Somewhere right now, a woman three weeks out from a heart attack is doing supervised interval training in her own kitchen. A tablet props against the fruit bowl. A clinical exercise physiologist watches her heart rate climb and tells her, in real time, to ease off. This is Carda Health on an ordinary Tuesday: the largest provider of virtual cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation in the United States, treating tens of thousands of patients a year, one living room at a time.
The company mails patients a green box. Inside is a tablet and the monitoring gear that turns a kitchen into a cardiac unit. It is an unglamorous piece of logistics that happens to be doing something the American healthcare system has failed at for decades - getting people to actually finish the rehab that keeps them alive.
"Carda Health brings evidence-based, gold standard care to those who need it most."
- Carda HealthCardiac rehabilitation is one of the most studied interventions in medicine. It lowers mortality, cuts hospital readmissions, and helps people walk up stairs again. The catch is unflattering: roughly 90% of eligible patients never access it, and of those who start in-person programs, only about a third finish all 36 sessions.
The reasons are boringly human. The rehab gym is across town. You can't drive yet. The sessions are at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. You're 71 and the parking deck is a maze. So the most effective recovery tool available quietly goes unused, while the same patients cycle back into emergency rooms. The healthcare system, ever efficient, had built a cure that most people couldn't reach.
"90% of eligible patients miss out on this life-saving care, so we're bringing it straight into your home."
- Carda Health, on the gap it exists to closeCarda Health was founded in 2019 by Harry DiFrancesco and Andrew West, who shared more than a business plan - they shared family histories of heart disease and the front-row caregiver's view of how badly recovery can stall. DiFrancesco, who went on to lead the company as CEO, holds an MBA from Wharton, where he studied statistics. He has been blunt about his motivation: a US system that rewards sick care over prevention.
Their bet was contrarian for its time. Most digital health pitched apps and dashboards; Carda proposed something heavier - shipping equipment, staffing real exercise physiologists, and monitoring vital signs live, the way a hospital would. Less software demo, more standard of care. The wager was that you could move the clinic instead of moving the patient, and lose nothing clinically in the translation.
Co-Founder & CEO. Wharton MBA, statistics. Frames Carda around prevention and using AI as an "invisible engine" for clinicians.
Co-Founder. Joined the founding mission shaped by personal experience with cardiac and pulmonary rehab.
Ship equipment, staff real physiologists, monitor vitals live - keep the clinical rigor, drop the commute.
A Carda program starts with a free assessment. Then the green box arrives - tablet, connected monitoring equipment - and the patient is matched with a dedicated clinical exercise physiologist. Sessions are live and supervised: heart rate, blood pressure, and effort stream to the care team while the patient exercises, so a clinician can intervene the moment something looks off. Over the weeks, the plan adjusts, folding in nutrition guidance and stress management.
Supervised exercise, nutrition, and stress management for recovery from heart attack, surgery, and heart failure - monitored live at home.
At-home rehabilitation for COPD and other lung conditions, with a clinical exercise physiologist guiding each session.
A shipped package with a tablet and connected monitoring gear that turns the living room into a supervised rehab clinic.
Exercise physiologists backed by physicians build and adjust a personalized plan across the program.
"The waiting room is now a living room - and the heart monitor still works."
- The model, in one lineDiFrancesco and West start the company to bring gold-standard cardiac and pulmonary rehab into the home.
Backed by investors including Velvet Sea Ventures, NFX, Contour Venture Partners, and The MBA Fund. Cumulative funding reaches roughly $13M.
Reported revenue around $43.7M with a team near 180. Peer-reviewed results back outcomes on par with in-person rehab.
A first-of-its-kind national deal brings at-home cardiac (and pulmonary) rehab to Humana members at no additional cost.
Skeptics of telehealth have a fair question: does moving rehab home water it down? Carda's answer is data. Patient-reported outcomes after 12 weeks, plus a completion rate that towers over the in-person baseline of roughly 33%.
Self-reported outcomes shared by Carda Health; the 33% figure is the commonly cited completion rate for traditional in-person rehab. The gray bar is the bar everyone else clears badly.
"Same outcomes as the hospital gym - minus the drive, the parking, and the no-shows."
- The case for virtual rehab, abbreviatedNationwide partnership (2026) offering at-home cardiac rehab to members at no additional cost through the plan.
Covered by major payers including UnitedHealthcare, Aetna, and BlueCross BlueShield.
Works with systems such as Intermountain, Montefiore, and TriState Health to extend rehab beyond hospital walls.
Strip away the funding rounds and the dashboards and Carda's mission is plain: get life-saving rehab to the people who currently can't reach it. The company frames AI as an "invisible engine" - useful for lifting paperwork off clinicians, not for replacing the human who tells you to slow down when your heart rate spikes. It is a notably restrained pitch in an industry that rarely meets a buzzword it didn't like.
The business model follows the mission. Carda contracts with payers and health systems that cover the program, so the patient often pays nothing extra. That alignment - getting paid when people actually complete care that keeps them out of the hospital - is the quiet part of value-based care that most companies only put on a slide.
"Cardiac rehab cuts mortality. Most people skip it. Closing that gap is the whole company."
- The mission, without the garnishHeart and lung disease are not going to get rarer. The population is aging, rehab capacity inside hospitals is finite, and the math of who needs care versus who can physically get to it only gets worse. A model that moves the clinic instead of the patient is not a novelty in that world - it is the version that scales.
Which returns us to the woman in her kitchen, three weeks out, easing off her intervals because a clinician two states away told her to. A decade ago she'd have been a statistic in the 90% - eligible, enrolled on paper, and absent in practice. Carda Health didn't invent cardiac rehab. It just made it something an ordinary person can finish without leaving home. The cure was always there. The delivery was the hard part.
Figures and quotes are drawn from Carda Health's website and public reporting (Humana, BusinessWire, Crunchbase, PitchBook, Tracxn). Outcome percentages are company-reported; funding and revenue figures are approximate and based on public sources. Where a detail could not be confirmed, it has been left out.