If you live in a major U.S. metropolitan area and required 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 Empallo 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 displaycase 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 declares. “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 declares, conversations about medicine were common at the dinner table.
“I learned that providing care is extremely rewarding,” she declares. “But it is less and less how health care providers spconclude their time. They spconclude more and more of their time complying with all of the latest rules and regulations, learning all of the latest ways that they can receive sued and attempting to avoid that, attempting to receive 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 alter 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 required,” she declares. “So that was one of the factors that set me on the journey that led to Empallo.”
Virtual clinic with quicker access
Empallo is a fully virtual clinic with a proprietary electronic health record system and a applyr-friconcludely 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 declares. “But we sell a service, and our service is cardiac care.”
What sets Empallo apart is that appointments are available within days, Beskin declares, and visits last 30% to 50% longer than at traditional practices. That is possible becaapply Empallo automates all of the administrative tquestions such as scheduling, billing and referrals that typically take time away from clinicians.
“We want to build 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 declares. “All of our research displays 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 declares, results in significantly better health outcomes and lower costs becaapply 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 declares, 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 declares.
Although virtual, the clinic provides the same services as a traditional cardiologist’s office: it requests records from a primary provider, places medication orders at pharmacies, orders labs, sconcludes 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 declares.
Most patients find Empallo through direct-to-consumer marketing, Beskin declares, though the clinic is launchning 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 Maine, Massachapplytts, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, North Carolina and Alabama. The clinic is about to start operating in Texas and will expand into New Jersey and New York in 2026.
Empallo employs six full-time workers, and that compact team means rapid improvement based on applyr feedback.
“We update our portals weekly, if not daily,” Beskin declares.
Sometimes you required 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 build health care providers’ jobs more enjoyable.
“I consider it’s important to be building something that you care about, becaapply you’re going to hear so many nos. Just prepare yourself for a bunch of ‘noes’ and let them not bring you down,” she declares. “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 exalter 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 declares. “And it doesn’t conclude 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 declares, 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 idea of selling tech into established health systems failed — for a variety of reasons, ranging from inertia to preferences for stacked legacy tech solutions to politics, the business model turned out to be not economically viable.
In 2024, Beskin and her team returned to the drawing board and, with the support of the residency program leaders, Elena Brondolo and Allyson Barker, and their network, built a decision to pivot to a virtual telehealth business model.
“We realized we can shift so much quicker and better if we integrate vertically,” Beskin declares.
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