Pulmonary rehabilitation is one of the most boringly effective interventions in modern medicine. Twelve weeks of supervised breathing exercises, light strength work, and a coach who notices when your oxygen dips. It reduces hospitalizations. It improves how far you can walk before you have to sit down.
Almost nobody gets it. The standard estimate is that fewer than 5% of eligible COPD patients in the United States ever complete a program. The reason is unglamorous: the clinic is too far away, the patient is too tired, the referral falls through the cracks. The cure exists; the logistics do not.
Kivo Health is the company built around that gap. Founded in San Francisco in 2021 by Victor Sadauskas, a physician who finished his residency at Stanford, and Vaughn Koch, a software co-founder who handles the technology side. Y Combinator wrote one of the first checks. The UCSF Rosenman Institute followed. The pitch was almost unfashionably simple: take the rehab clinic, put it in a FedEx box, and run it over a tablet.
Five years in, the box has a name. It is the Kivo Kit. Inside: a cellular-connected iPad - no Wi-Fi setup required, because asking a 75-year-old to debug their router is its own respiratory event - a Bluetooth pulse oximeter, and a set of exercise bands. The kit arrives, the patient opens it, and within a day they are on screen with a licensed respiratory therapist.
