If there are any positive outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic, international acceptance of digitalised healthcare would be high on that list. Over the past 18 months, Frog Capital has conducted extensive sector mapping of digital healthcare to identify companies that are successfully using innovative technology to improve patient outcomes. One particular sub-segment that caught our attention was digital aftercare for patients discharged from rehabilitation clinics. As the hype around pre-surgery digital solutions such as tele-consultations and hospital booking apps grew during the pandemic, it became evident that the post-surgery market was heavily underserved and hence represented a unique opportunity for a digital player to breakthrough and enable more sustainable recoveries for patients.
When Senior Partner, Jens Düing, and I met Max von Waldenfels, the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Caspar Health, we were immediately impressed by the digital therapy platform he and his co-founders had built. Caspar Health started off as a platform that provided instructive videos for patients to address the lack of effectiveness of traditional rehabilitation solutions. The platform has since grown to offer over 1,000 clinical exercises and seminars on orthopaedics, neurology, psychosomatics, geriatrics, oncology, and cardiology. The team had managed to augment the ability for therapists to design patient journeys, receive and provide feedback and add therapist-generated content to the platform.
What really made Caspar Health stand out were two key elements:
- In March 2021, Caspar Health became one of the first tele-health solution providers to receive full regulatory approval by the German Pension Insurance Association (DRV), the main reimbursement association for rehabilitation therapy.
- Perhaps more crucially, Caspar Health was verified by a clinical study that demonstrated that their digital aftercare solution outperformed traditional rehabilitation methods. Confirming that their solution is not only more cost-effective (a major incentive for increasingly budget constraint health care systems), but also superior.
There was also a more personal connection to the work Caspar Health is doing for both Jens and me. Besides having experienced the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of traditional physical therapy treatments through our past injuries, Jens’ family had worked in the German acute hospital sector for decades, whilst I had co-founded a digital musculoskeletal device company prior to joining Frog. As a result, Caspar Health’s vision in building the leading digital aftercare solution resonate particularly strongly for us.
Today, Caspar Health is already the dominant platform in Germany, and we are thrilled to have led the Series B funding round. Jens and I are excited to formally work with Max Michels, Max von Waldenfels, Benjamin Pochhammer, and the rest of the Caspar Health team and support their journey in building a truly innovative digital health platform that benefits patients all over the world.
