A new white label telehealth staffing solution called Auxira launched out of stealth Thursday in partnership with MedStar Health.

It’s backed by the investors at Abundant Health Ventures through the new Abundant Platform, which aids health systems with commercializing ideas. Auxira is the first company to launch out of the Abundant Platform, which itself debuted May 15.

With increasing demand for care and physician shortages, MedStar Health saw an opportunity to build off its experiences with telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic and allow the technology to lead it to a new model of care.

Auxira was launched out of MedStar Health in December 2024, but the system had been working on the model for about two years.

Cardiologists’ schedules are packed with low-acuity visits like routine follow-up appointments after a cardiac event, MedStar Health said in an interview.

The model leverages advanced practice providers (APPs) that are fully remote to take on low-acuity visits and help manage administrative burdens for physicians, like handling inbox messages.

Auxira staffs one APP per three cardiologists who become deeply integrated into the care team and relationship with the patient and take on low-acuity visits for cardiologists.

Auxira differentiates itself from other telehealth staffing solutions by prioritizing the matching of APPs with cardiologists and making them a bona fide part of the care team. During training, Auxira brings its practitioners in-person to the cardiology practice to work together and build relationships.

The company onboards its providers to the existing electronic health record system and telehealth platform of the practice. This was a strategic decision that allows them to deploy quickly, Inna Plumb, CEO and co-founder, said in an interview with Fierce Healthcare. Plumb called it a “seamless care extension for specialty care.”

MedStar Health pitched the idea to Abundant Health Ventures and the investor’s consortium of 17 health systems about a year ago, where the idea received an enthusiastic response. With the Abundant Health team, MedStar Health brought Auxira to life.

It brought on Plumb as CEO in December and launched the company in stealth.

Self-described as a serial healthcare entrepreneur, Plumb was formerly a private equity investor, a founding partner at Redesign Health, where she helped build healthcare companies at the startup incubator, and CEO and co-founder of MedArrive.

Plumb also spent time in operations at Blue Apron, the meal kit subscription company, from its series B to just before its initial public offering.

As an investor and startup builder, Plumb learned that there’s often a gap between the ideas that founders have to revolutionize healthcare and the needs that exist for providers and systems.

Abundant Health Platform is helping address that gap, Plumb said. The group can bring prospective company ideas to its group of health systems to get feedback on the usefulness of services.

For APPs, Auxira is a rare opportunity to practice virtually and have deep engagement with patients. It also allows specialty-trained APPs to practice cardiology and to engage in the type of care provision they are passionate about. Plumb said remote opportunities for APPs are typically in urgent care capacities or involve high volumes of prescribing.

APPs have shown significant interest in the company since its founding in December, Plumb said. She explained the company has a high bar for hiring because the company wants the providers to seamlessly integrate into the customer’s care teams.

“It’s very small,” Plumb said, speaking of the three-to-one ratio of cardiologists to APPs in Auxira’s model. “There’s a lot of continuity of care. There’s a lot of trust.”

It’s a human-based model in an age of technology-first solutions, she noted.

“There’s no meaningful IT burden,” Plumb explained. “There’s no long-term IT integration. We jump onto their EHRs, and so we feel like a truly white-labeled extension of their care. So, over time, I think we’ll add more technology on our side, on the operational optimization side of things, but again, we want to be really careful, because the idea here, the value here, is that it’s really easy for a health system to adopt us. It’s very seamless, and it feels extraordinarily native from a patient and provider experience.”

While Auxira may add technology to its stack later in the company’s life cycle, its core competence is beefing up clinical teams with their existing technology.

“What this company really is doing is honestly commercializing the know-how of how to transform yourself with the technologies you already have,” William Sheahan, chief innovation officer at MedStar Health and the executive director of the MedStar Institute for Innovation, said in an interview. “We can do more with the same fixed investment in real estate and those cardiologists, personnel and the teams that are around them in the practice, by using remote teams and the technology that we already have to do work differently.”

Auxira also touts the time savings benefit for physicians by adding APPs to their team. Early results at MedStar Health have shown a 35% reduction in time spent in the electronic health record after-hours, a 14% improvement in patient satisfaction and a 37% reduction in third next available appointment for cardiologists, which is a measure of patient access, Plumb said.

Auxira’s APPs dedicate a portion of their day to managing the inboxes of cardiologists and performing other administrative tasks to allow the cardiologists to do higher complexity work.

For MedStar Health, forming the company both allows them to solve operational backups in their cardiology practice, and it brings in a new stream of revenue for the system.

Auxira is currently only focused on cardiology, but Sheahan said there could be a future where the company moves into other specialties.

“We set out to build a new kind of clinical infrastructure for specialty care,” Todd Johnson, CEO of Abundant Venture Partners, said in a statement to Fierce Healthcare. “Auxira is the product of deep collaboration with physicians, operators, and health systems, designed to integrate cleanly into existing workflows and scale quickly without disruption. That kind of high-trust, high-impact model is exactly what our venture platform was built to launch.”