Digital health · Preventive cardiology
Empirical Health
A virtual primary care practice built on wearable data and an extended lipid panel, pointed at one disease. It has patients, a growth curve and a machine learning paper, and no FDA clearance or trial of its own.
A vial, a watch, and two numbers
It starts with a blood draw at a strip mall lab. The patient walks into one of the 2,200 collection sites the company lists, gives a vial, and goes back to work. The panel that comes back is longer than a routine physical produces: apolipoprotein B, lipoprotein(a), high sensitivity C reactive protein, the usual cholesterol fractions, kidney and liver chemistry, a urinalysis.
Then the app does the part the lab cannot. It pairs those results with what the patient’s smartwatch has been recording all along: resting heart rate, cardio recovery, sleep stages, oxygen saturation, any irregular rhythm notification the watch has fired. Out of that come two numbers, a ten year risk of a heart attack and a lifetime risk, plus a second curve showing where the lifetime number could sit under a plan. The App Store listing states the premise: “80% of heart disease is in your control.”
The problem it picked
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and among the big killers it has an unusual property: the risk factors are cheap to measure and the drugs that move them work. In March 2026 the ACC, the American Heart Association and nine other associations issued a joint dyslipidemia guideline whose writing chair, Roger Blumenthal, said 80% or more of cardiovascular disease is preventable.
Delivery is what fails. In his 2023 launch post Ballinger laid out the arithmetic: 246,000 active primary care physicians for 332 million people, and a boutique model that cuts hospitalizations by 51% only by holding a 500 to 1 patient to doctor ratio. Harder still is showing that measuring more changes what happens to people. The US Preventive Services Task Force is the yardstick, and across much of this ground it declines to take a side: an I statement in January 2022 on screening asymptomatic adults 50 and older for atrial fibrillation, another in 2018 on adding hsCRP, the ankle brachial index or a coronary calcium score to conventional risk scoring. Where it does recommend, it recommends narrowly, with a grade B for statins in adults aged 40 to 75 at a ten year risk of 10% or greater.
A doctor and an engineer
Raquel Rodriguez Martinez is a family physician. The federal provider registry lists her under NPI 1700240603 with licences recorded in eight states. She was a clinical assistant professor and medical director at UC San Francisco, trained at Kaiser and UCLA. BGR reported in July 2023 that she is certified by the American Board of Family Medicine. Brandon Ballinger is the engineer: Sift, then Cardiogram, a machine learning tech lead at Google, the HealthCare.gov rescue team, risk engineering at Brex. He is a co-author on the 2018 JAMA Cardiology paper showing a deep neural network could passively detect atrial fibrillation from a commercial smartwatch. They met at Cardiogram, where Rodriguez Martinez was a visiting scholar.
The federal record puts the company earlier than the accelerator does. NPPES enumerated Empirical Health, Inc. on September 29, 2022, with Ballinger as authorized official and a former legal business name of Slice Health, Inc. Y Combinator gives the founding year as 2023.
Four states to thirty
The practice went live in July 2023 in California, Texas, Florida and Hawaii, at $9 per month with video visits billed to insurance. By November 2023 Ballinger told Fitt Insider it reached 15 states. In March 2025 it launched Radar, a composite score built from more than 40 wearable and lab biomarkers, and said it had helped 30,000 people. In December 2025 it announced 100,000 patients, 30 states and revenue up 30 times across the year.
The entities behind that are visible in the provider registry. Three professional corporations carry Empirical Health as a trading name: 525 Medical Group PA in Florida and Raquel Rodriguez Martinez MD PC in California, both enumerated June 29, 2023, and 525 Medical Group of New Jersey PC, enumerated December 13, 2023 at a Manhattan address, all three listing the same authorized official and telephone number.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Practice registration | NPI 1619691938, Empirical Health, Inc., enumerated Sep 29, 2022. Primary taxonomy: Clinic/Center, Primary Care. Authorized official: Brandon Michael Ballinger. Former legal name: Slice Health, Inc. | Public record |
| State entities | Three NPI records trade as Empirical Health: 525 Medical Group PA (FL), Raquel Rodriguez Martinez MD PC (CA) and 525 Medical Group of New Jersey PC (NY address). Same authorized official and phone on all three. | Public record |
| Clinician licensure | NPI 1700240603 lists family medicine licences in NY, CO, CA, MA, FL, TX, HI and WI. Eight states, updated Aug 29, 2024, against a company claim of 30 or more. Registry licence lists are self reported and are not a clinician roster. | Differs from company claim |
| What the watch is cleared for | Apple holds De Novo grants for irregular rhythm notification (DEN180042) and the ECG app (DEN180044), both Sep 11, 2018, then clearances K213971 for atrial fibrillation history (2022), K240929 for sleep apnea notification (2024) and K250507 for hypertension notification (2025). FDA classification text for both cardiac software codes reads: “This device is not intended to provide a diagnosis.” | Public record |
| Screening evidence | USPSTF I statements on atrial fibrillation screening (2022) and on adding hsCRP, ABI or coronary calcium to risk assessment (2018); a grade B for statins at a ten year risk of 10% or greater (2022). ApoB and Lp(a) sit in no USPSTF screening recommendation; the 2026 ACC/AHA guideline treats them as risk enhancers. | Public record |
| Machine learning work | JETS, pre-trained on 3 million de-identified person days of wearable data across 63 channels, accepted to the Timeseries for Health workshop at NeurIPS 2025. A workshop paper, evaluated by linear probing on the company’s own dataset. | Public record |
| How that result is described | The company blog reports 87% AUROC for hypertension; the press release says 87% accuracy; Wareable reported an AUROC of 86.8%. AUROC and accuracy are different quantities, and the work is risk prediction, not diagnosis. | Wording differs |
| Patient outcomes | No registered trial and no published event, hospitalization or mortality data for Empirical Health patients found as of Sep 24, 2026. | Not found |
| Scale and payers | 100,000 patients and 30 states, revenue up 30 times in 2025, monthly growth averaging 41% over six months. In network with Aetna, Anthem, UnitedHealthcare and Medicare, per a March 2025 report. | Company-stated |
Read plainly: the licensure record is checkable, the machine learning is real and early, and the clinical claim rests on the company’s own numbers. Nothing public shows that an Empirical Health patient has fewer heart attacks than one in ordinary primary care. That is not an accusation; the company is three years old and nobody has run that study. It is the distance between a risk model and an outcome.
What to watch
- Whether licence records catch up with the 30 state claim. The registry shows eight states against one named physician and three professional corporations.
- Whether JETS moves from a workshop paper to a peer reviewed publication, validated on data the company did not collect itself.
- What the 2026 ACC/AHA dyslipidemia guideline does to the product. It moves primary prevention onto the PREVENT equations and treats ApoB, Lp(a) and hsCRP as risk enhancers, not screening tests.
- Any outcome data at all, or a payer willing to put a shared savings contract behind the model.
In their words
“Empirical Health’s goal is to shift healthcare from reactive to preventive. In short, we do digital primary care, which is the fulcrum of the healthcare system.”
Brandon Ballinger, CEO, Fitt Insider Q&A, November 2023 · Interview
“While smartwatches track dozens of biomarkers, they don’t tell the full story.”
Raquel Rodriguez, MD, chief medical officer, March 2025 launch release · Company release
“The USPSTF concludes that the current evidence is insufficient to assess the balance of benefits and harms of screening for atrial fibrillation.”
US Preventive Services Task Force recommendation statement, January 25, 2022 · Public record
“The important caveat about that is we’re comparing these screening tests to usual primary care, and the task force considers checking the pulse as usual primary care.”
Carol Mangione, MD, vice chair of the USPSTF, to TCTMD, January 2022 · Independent
“And lower LDL cholesterol for longer, just like lower blood pressure for longer, results in much greater protection against future heart attack and stroke risk.”
Roger Blumenthal, MD, chair of the ACC/AHA guideline writing committee, March 2026 · Public record
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordNPPES record, Empirical Health, Inc., NPI 1619691938
- Public recordNPPES record, Raquel Rodriguez Martinez, NPI 1700240603
- Public recordNPPES records, the three Empirical Health professional corporations
- Public recordopenFDA device records for Apple, Inc.; classification 870.2790 and 870.2345
- Public recordScreening for Atrial Fibrillation: USPSTF statement
- Public recordRisk Assessment With Nontraditional Risk Factors
- Public recordStatin Use for the Primary Prevention of CVD in Adults
- Public record2026 ACC/AHA Dyslipidemia Guideline
- Public recordPassive Detection of Atrial Fibrillation Using a Smartwatch
- Public recordJETS: A Joint Embedding Time Series Foundation Model
- IndependentEmpirical Health App Brings Proactive Primary Healthcare To The Apple Watch
- InterviewEmpirical Health CEO Brandon Ballinger on Wearable Data in Primary Care
- IndependentEmpirical Health launches Radar
- IndependentResearchers use Apple Watch to train a disease detection AI
- IndependentData Around Screening for AF in Asymptomatic Adults Still Lacking
- CompanyEmpirical Health Surpasses 100,000 Patients
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
