Our Raise, Our Reach, Our Mission: Serving Healthcare's Invisible Stakeholder

Today we at Zivian are excited to announce two milestones: First, we have officially launched our compliant collaboration platform for medical practioners in all 50 states. It’s an exciting moment, but we know that is when the real work begins. To take on this challenge we raised a seed round of $3M from investors equally driven to improve healthcare across the country. 

Our mission at Zivian Health is simple - we help advanced practice providers like nurse practitioners and physician assistants, and enterprises who leverage those workforces. We master compliance so the practitioners and enterprises can focus on their core competencies. We build technology to make the requirements easier, the quality better, and the effort more transparent.  It is straightforward that our stakeholders are the APPs, the physicians supporting them, and the enterprises employing them. 

Patients, however, are the stakeholders we had in mind when launching Zivian Health because patients suffer most from inequities in our healthcare system and benefit most when that system works as it should.

Before starting Zivian, I trained as an internist, pulmonologist and intensive care physician seeing patients in the ambulatory setting to the intensive care unit. At every institution I worked shoulder-to-shoulder with APPs and saw their capabilities first hand. A few years back, I began collaborating with Melanie, a nurse practitioner working in rural West Texas. Melanie moved back to her hometown after becoming an NP, wanting to open a clinic to serve her community. As is all too common in healthcare, she spent several unsuccessful months trying to find a stable collaborating physician to support her practice. We ultimately met through a mutual colleague, I agreed to be her supervising physician, and we started to meet regularly in accordance with the regulations of Texas.

Early in our collaboration, Melanie shared a powerful story with me about a mother who came to see her to care for her child’s asthma. Her child had moderate asthma, but had not been seen by a medical practitioner in many months and had long since been out of inhalers. When Melanie asked why, the mother told her she had to take a day off of work to see the closest family physician taking patients, who was three hours away. But if she took a day off of work, she would likely lose her job, along with the insurance to pay for the very medical care her child needed. This mother was put in the impossible dilemma of choosing between her livelihood and insurance, or the immediate care of her child. Melanie got the child on a stable medication regimen and for the first time in months, kept him out of the ER. 

Enabling and supporting Melanie’s practice changed the way an entire rural community received care. Melanie created a ripple effect in the community, touching the lives of her patients and all of those around them. The role I played was incredibly small compared to hers, but it was equally as gratifying nonetheless. 

Our “Why?” and our most important stakeholders are the patients, families, and other community members Melanie serves. It’s hard to fathom, but nearly 80% of our country is deemed a ‘healthcare desert’, leaving patients without appropriate access to care. And the trends are equally as sobering: over 300,000 healthcare providers dropped out of the workforce in 2021, and the US is projected to have a shortage of 124,000 physicians by 2034. 

As the number of physicians has declined, we experienced a rapid rise in the adoption of digital health services and a swell in the numbers of advanced practice providers. These trends increase the urgency  of maintaining compliance for APPs and quality for patients. We - as a country and as physicians - need to support the growth, training and supervision of advanced practice providers to fill the gap and serve communities in desperate need of quality healthcare through local and digital channels.

At Zivian, we exist to create ripple effects in as many communities as we can to change and improve the way that patients, everywhere, receive care. As of today, we’ve earned the trust of hundreds of nurse practitioners and physicians, and more than twenty health organizations. We house their collaborative relationships, track meetings and chart reviews, submit licensing - managing all the elements of compliance and quality so they can focus on patient care and scale their workforce quickly. Their input has helped guide the development of our compliance platform used by physicians, APPs and enterprises. What started out as a home and audit trail for the collaborative relationship has quickly evolved into a tool enabling providers to expand their licensure and reach, and for enterprises to manage workforces.  

In addition to announcing the public launch of our collaboration platform across the entire country, we’re excited to share that we’ve raised $3M in seed financing from venture investors aligned with our mission. Wireframe Ventures, Crosslink Capital, and NextView Ventures see the importance of supporting the APPs and overarching goal of improving patient outcomes. And we’re thrilled to have them onboard supporting our mission and our growth as a company.

Our work has just begun.  And we relish the challenge and its purpose.

Rafid Fadul, MD

CEO, Zivian Health