Caption Health, the AI leader that enables earlier disease detection, today unveiled Caption Care™: America’s first in-home heart wellness assessment and low-cost echo service. Through a partnership with Portamedic, Inc., one of the largest U.S. providers of in-home medical services, mobile technicians across the country will use the Caption AI platform to perform cardiac ultrasounds in the comfort of patients’ homes and other convenient settings, to help with diagnosis and detection before diseases like heart failure become difficult to treat.
“We are changing the approach to the world’s leading cause of death, especially for the underserved. Better assessing cardiovascular and heart failure risk begins with creating affordable access to basic imaging of the heart. We have partnered with Portamedic and launched Caption Care to bring the most advanced AI-enabled technology into the homes of everyday Americans, to urgently address the soaring¹ risk of heart disease,” said Steve Cashman, Caption Health’s Chief Executive Officer. “Given current heart failure guidelines and existing CMS payment models, Medicare Advantage plans will now have a scalable service to help them assess and manage the cardiovascular health for their millions of at-risk members.”
Caption Care affords health providers, payers, and value-based care organizations the opportunity for greater reach into their communities by covering the last mile of access to ultrasounds for members. There is a significant and growing need for diagnostic-quality point-of-care ultrasound, not only for those with symptoms but also to guide people at risk of developing heart disease to early interventions and improve outcomes. Caption Care addresses this with convenient, cost-effective cardiac ultrasound at scale to identify heart disease earlier, help prevent avoidable hospitalizations, and support improved outcomes.
Heart ultrasounds are the primary tool used to help identify heart failure, the most common diagnosis in the U.S. for hospitalized patients over the age of 65². It contributes to millions of deaths globally every year, but early symptoms like fatigue or shortness of breath are commonly confused for normal signs of aging. The result: a study showed 38% of new heart failure patients are diagnosed in acute care facilities, even though 46% of these patients had potential symptoms six months before diagnosis, when intervention would have had a greater impact in slowing disease progression³. Doctors call heart failure “the silent killer” because it’s so easy to ignore symptoms until it’s too late, and it has remained a leading cause of death nationwide, with cases on the rise following the COVID pandemic.
“Portamedic has been a leader in mobile in-home services for 50 years through a network of over 4,000 technicians and 100 field offices across all 50 states, giving us trusted access to hundreds of thousands of households every year. Through our participation in Caption Care, we can now play a proactive role in helping combat the largest public health threat facing this country, and we’re delighted to be stepping up to the challenge,” said Jim Fritz, President and Chief Operating Officer of Portamedic. “With healthcare increasingly moving out of the hospital and into the home, Caption Health and Portamedic are well-positioned with our market-leading capabilities to bring ultrasound to people in the most comfortable and convenient settings.”
