Her sudden loss launched a virtual cardiac care startup
Empallo, launched by Claire Beskin, a 2025 Innovator Fellow, offers faster, longer cardiology appointments through a virtual platform.
If you live in a major U.S. metropolitan area and need to see a cardiologist, prepare to wait at least a month for an appointment.
In rural areas, patients also might have to drive a few hours to the nearest heart specialist — nearly half of U.S. counties do not have any cardiologists.
This access gap is what Claire Beskin, a graduate of Northeastern University’s Roux Future of Healthcare Founder Residency on the Portland, Maine, campus, is determined to close with her telehealth cardiology clinic, Empallo.
Beskin has spent the last three years developing a new model of delivering cardiac care. She launched a telehealth platform in January.
Northeastern’s Women Who Empower recently named Beskin one of the inaugural Innovator Fellows of the 2025 Innovator Awards. The nine-month fellowship provides mentorship, global connections and venture support, culminating in a showcase at the 2026 Northeastern Global Leadership Summit in London.
“I am really grateful for all of the experiences that I’ve had with Northeastern,” Beskin says. “It’s really an amazing entrepreneurial ecosystem that they’ve created.”
A personal story behind a startup
Growing up, Beskin wanted to be a doctor. With several health care professionals in the family, she says, conversations about medicine were common at the dinner table.
“I learned that providing care is extremely rewarding,” she says. “But it is less and less how health care providers spend their time. They spend more and more of their time complying with all of the latest rules and regulations, learning all of the latest ways that they can get sued and trying to avoid that, trying to get their bills paid by insurance.”
Beskin chose to pursue a different career path. She worked in finance in Hong Kong at Goldman Sachs and management consulting at the Boston Consulting Group before discovering the potential for startups to drive change through an internship.
While she was developing several ideas for her own health care venture, Beskin’s grandmother died from undiagnosed heart failure.
“The fact that it was very sudden and that it was undiagnosed opened my eyes to this whole area of huge need,” she says. “So that was one of the factors that set me on the journey that led to Empallo.”
Virtual clinic with faster access
Empallo is a virtual-first clinic with a proprietary electronic health record system and a user-friendly online platform. It provides patients with access to cardiologists who can diagnose and manage a range of heart conditions, including arrhythmias, cardiomyopathy, heart failure, hypertension and vascular diseases.
“We built a product,” Beskin says. “But we sell a service, and our service is cardiac care.”
What sets Empallo apart is that appointments are available within days, Beskin says, and visits last 30% to 50% longer than at traditional practices. That is possible because Empallo automates all of the administrative tasks such as scheduling, billing and referrals that typically take time away from clinicians.
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“We want to make sure that there’s plenty of time for educating patients about their condition and all of the options available to them, and the pros and cons of various options,” Beskin says. “All of our research shows that patients really want to be listened to, despite the fact that we’re in an AI boom. Health care is very human … and patients want an emotional connection with a human provider who’s listening to them and guiding them through the decisions ahead of them.”
Earlier diagnosis, she says, results in significantly better health outcomes and lower costs because a lot of reactive cardiac medicine is expensive and avoidable.
Innovative clinicians
Empallo attracts doctors and nurse practitioners with flexible scheduling. Providers can pick up shifts by the hour on the platform, and some have reduced their workloads at traditional jobs, Beskin says, to take on more hours at Empallo.
“We’re finding these innovative clinicians who want to be on the forefront of bringing better care to patients,” she says.
Although virtual, the clinic provides comparable services as a traditional cardiologist’s office: it requests records from a primary provider, places medication orders at pharmacies, orders labs, sends patients an in-home sleep apnea test, does at-home heart monitoring, coordinates Echo, CT and MRI testing and provides durable medical equipment such as CPAP machines. It is also building a referral network state by state.
“We coordinate all that testing, and those results come back to us, and we’re able to diagnose and treat,” Beskin says.
Most patients find Empallo through direct-to-consumer marketing, Beskin says, though the clinic is beginning to receive referrals. It accepts most major insurance plans and offers affordable self-pay rates for the uninsured or out-of-network clients.
Patients can book appointments in Alabama, Florida, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. The clinic is about to start operating in Texas and will expand into New Jersey and New York in 2026.
Empallo has a small team, which enables rapid improvement based on user feedback.
“We update our portals weekly, if not daily,” Beskin says.
Sometimes you need to pivot
When Beskin joined the Roux Future of Healthcare Founder Residency in 2023 at Northeastern’s Roux Institute, Empallo’s business model was different. Initially, she aimed to sell automation technology to hospitals to make health care providers’ jobs more enjoyable.
“I think it’s important to be building something that you care about, because you’re going to hear so many nos. Just prepare yourself for a bunch of ‘noes’ and let them not bring you down,” she says. “There’s a lot of valuable feedback in there that will steer you in a direction that has more promise. Thoughtful ‘nos’ are actually a gift.”
A year-long residency included a $50,000 investment plus curated programming, mentorship and institutional support in exchange for an equity stake. It was funded by Northern Light Health and MaineHealth, two of Maine’s leading health care providers, as well as the Maine Venture Fund.
“It was a very well-done program,” Beskin says. “And it doesn’t end after one year. I’m still often at the Roux, working out of that space, seeing fellow founders. … It’s a really vibrant startup community that Roux has created and grown in Portland.”
The residency, she says, has opened doors to a lot of other opportunities with Northeastern, including hiring co-ops and participating in the Women Who Empower Innovator Awards.
But she eventually had to admit that her original approach of selling tech into established health systems was not viable for a variety of reasons, ranging from inertia to preferences for stacked legacy tech solutions to politics.
In 2024, Beskin and her team returned to the drawing board and, with the help of the residency program leaders, Elena Brondolo and Allyson Barker, and their network, made a decision to pivot to a virtual telehealth business model.
“We realized we can move so much faster and better if we integrate vertically,” Beskin says.
