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Access to specialized healthcare is a growing challenge, particularly in neurology, where patients often face months-long wait times for crucial care. Liz Burstein, co-founder and CEO of Neura Health, recently joined Ashley Lemon on Kellogg Healthscape to discuss how Neura is reshaping the neurology care landscape with its innovative virtual clinic model.

The Inspiration Behind Neura Health

Burstein’s journey to founding Neura Health began with her own frustrating experience navigating the healthcare system. After suffering from a trapped nerve, she spent two years seeing various specialists before finally being referred to a neurologist—only to be placed on a six-month waitlist, even in a major city like New York. This ordeal highlighted a glaring issue: access to neurology care was severely limited. Unlike primary care or mental health, which had seen rapid digital expansion, neurology remained underserved in telehealth solutions.

Recognizing an opportunity to improve access and continuity of care, Burstein set out to build Neura Health—a membership-based virtual neurology clinic designed to provide patients with faster access to board-certified neurologists and comprehensive wraparound support.

How Neura Health Works

Neura Health functions as a membership-based model designed to close the neurology access gap. Patients benefit from:

• Fast-tracked virtual neurology appointments – guaranteed within one week versus the typical months-long wait.
• Personalized treatment plans – developed by specialists and supported by an integrated care team.
• Ongoing care coaching – covering lifestyle factors such as diet, sleep, and stress management, which are critical for managing neurological conditions.
• Symptom tracking and round the clock messaging – allowing patients to share real-time updates and get immediate support.

Neura operates with a flexible pricing model: patients can choose from annual, quarterly, or monthly membership plans, with visits either covered by insurance (Neura works with over 40 health plans) or available at competitive cash prices.

Why Neura Health Stands Out

In an increasingly crowded digital health market, Neura Health differentiates itself through deep specialization in neurology and a commitment to technology-driven efficiency. Unlike generic telehealth platforms, Neura’s focus allows for hyper-personalized care pathways.

Neura’s approach also delivers proven clinical outcomes, including a 73% reduction in ER and urgent care visits—a key metric that has fueled its rapid adoption by health plans and systems. By integrating AI-powered efficiencies like intake summarization and automated prior authorizations, Neura optimizes both the patient experience and operational scalability.

Navigating the Digital Health Investment Landscape

Despite recent fluctuations in digital health funding, Neura Health continues to thrive by focusing on smart growth and financial sustainability. Rather than relying solely on rapid expansion, Neura balances profitability with scale, ensuring its technology investments translate into tangible efficiency gains.

Burstein also emphasized the role of AI in enhancing Neura’s care model, not as a replacement for neurologists, but as a tool to streamline administrative tasks and optimize patient-provider interactions.

The Road Ahead

As Neura Health continues to grow, Burstein remains focused on expanding access to neurological care nationwide, strengthening payor partnerships, and leveraging technology to further enhance patient outcomes. With an ever-increasing patient base and strong industry recognition (including features in CB Insights Digital Health 50 and Future Tech Hotshots 2024), Neura Health is well-positioned to drive meaningful change in neurology care.

Final Thoughts

Burstein’s discussion on Kellogg Healthscape underscored a fundamental truth: neurology is long overdue for disruption, and Neura Health is leading the charge. By making high-quality neurological care more accessible, affordable, and continuous, Neura is not only transforming patient experiences but also setting a new standard for specialty telehealth.

For those interested in learning more about Neura Health’s mission and services, visit Neura's unique approach to care.

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Transcript: 

Ashley Lemon:  Hi everyone, and welcome to Kellogg Healthscape. We're brought to you by Northwestern Kellogg's Healthcare Club and we're here to explore the biggest issues, trends, and changes in the healthcare ecosystem. My name is Ashley Lemon and I'm currently a full-time MBA student at Kellogg. Today we are speaking with Liz Burstein, the CEO and co-founder of Neura Health.

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A membership-based virtual neurology clinic providing proactive, longitudinal support for the end-to-end neurological care journey to over 12,000 patients, providing their services primarily through health plans and systems. Neura Health connects patients with a neurologist video visit within a week, instead of a months-long wait list that local providers typically have.

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Patients receive a personalized treatment plan, a dedicated health coach, and a concierge team to manage their neurological disease. Neura Health addresses a 145 million American patient population and top five spend category for health plans and systems with proven clinical outcomes. Neura has raised 10.3 million in venture funding from top VCs, including Norwest Venture Partners, Next Play Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Pear VC, Index, and Bessemer, and has received many honors, including CB Insights Digital Health 50 in 2023. And future tech hotshots in 2024. Prior to founding Neura Health, Liz led product development teams at digital health companies including Maven Clinic and ZocDoc.

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She holds dual degrees in computer science and philosophy from Stanford University.

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Liz, thanks so much for joining us today. We're excited to talk to you about Neura Health and your entrepreneurial journey. Before we get started, can you tell us about how your experience is? Both professional and personal got you to where you are today, founding and leading Neura Health. 

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Liz Burstein: Sure. I was inspired to start Neura based on a personal patient journey with a trapped nerve. I was on a two-year diagnostic odyssey, bouncing between pain specialists, physical therapists, orthopedic surgeons, and radiology. And ultimately, I was referred to see a neurologist. That doctor thought that the nature of my pain could be neurological. And at that point, I was on a six-month wait list to see a neurologist, even in New York City.

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During that time, of course, telehealth was really skyrocketing, so I thought, why not look around online to see if I can consult with a neurologist sooner? I virtually saw nothing. There was a ton of telehealth and primary care mental health, but when it came down to the specialty of neurology, I really wasn't able to find anything.

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And so that got me curious about, why is access so bad? Doing a bunch of market research, and talking to lots of neurologists, learned that the category is really undersupplied. And so then I started to wonder, is this a category where you can actually do a good amount of the care just virtually?

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That became the next big question to kind of suss out is what in this appointment is actually requiring me to be co-located with my clinician. For my case in particular, there was actually nothing, it was just talking. There was no physical exam in my particular condition.

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And with that, got to ideate around what would be a better patient experience. And first and foremost, something that I could access more seamlessly from the comfort of home came to mind. And then the other big part of it was after the neurologist appointment, there was nothing in the way of wraparound support.

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I was kind of left to my own to figure out what's next and will to exist a way where I could continue sharing my pain diary with the doctor, or I could continue to get advice based on my symptoms around what medication adjustments I should be making. And it was really my own personal patient journey that inspired this vision around having more accessible neurologists in your pocket with whom you could share your symptoms in real-time and get more of that continuous care and guidance.

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Lemon: Awesome, thank you so much for sharing that. We want to move into talking about the business model, and the first thing I'd love to hear from you is to hear a little bit more about how Neura Health works operationally. What does membership look like? How do patients sign up? Who pays for it? And how does Neura Health get paid?

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Burstein: Yeah, operationally we were built to close the access gap, right? That long wait time that patients have to see a neurologist. To help solve that and to really offer that wraparound support, we function as a membership model for patients. And what that membership covers is access to specialists and on-demand video visits.

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So rather than waiting months, you're guaranteed a visit with a board-certified specialist within a week. The membership also covers access to care coaching, so that's behavioral health and wellness coaches that are there to help with lifestyle change if that's what the neurologist recommends. A lot of neurological issues, not only do they need a prescription or some kind of treatment, but they also need the patient to really get under control, diet, stress, or hydration or the sleep patterns.

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And that's part of why the membership covers not only access to specialists but care coaching. We offer an integrated diary, so with that, we're helping the patient share their symptoms in real-time with their dedicated care team, personalized care plan, and then lastly, concierge with whom the patient can message 24/7 with any questions about prescriptions that were recommended, labs that were ordered.

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That's how the membership is structured. From a payment perspective, there are three different options. There's an annual plan, a quarterly plan, and a monthly plan. Quarterly is our most common, and so that's $35 a month. And then it's $199 for an initial visit and $144 for a follow-up. That's if a patient is just paying cash, so just paying out of pocket.

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And we set those prices to be very competitive with if you were to go to a brick-and-mortar neurology clinic and pay cash for the same services you'd often be paying a lot more than that. Most of our patients, we take their health plans. We're now covered by over 40 health plans, and you still have the same membership fee of around $35 a month, but the visits are then just the copay. That can be a $20 copay, or a $50 copay, and of course, that is what makes our service the most accessible to patients. 

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Lemon: Hearing you describe the business model got me thinking about how the product has evolved since you first founded the company and heard from your customers.

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So have there been specific elements that you shifted based on patient, provider, or payer feedback? 

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Burstein: Yes, we're a product team in the sense that both founders have come from product and tech backgrounds. So we are regularly shipping improvements to our app and our product fueled by user feedback or data insights.

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Just to give you a couple of examples. The way in which we organize our app, the information architecture of where patients go to find the care plan versus prescription renewal versus requesting video visits, the design of that has shifted quite a few times to what it is today to really make it super simple, very frictionless for patients to sign up. It takes a few minutes and then less than a minute to book that visit and find a convenient time with the right neurologist. We've also expanded our app. We started out with iPhone and web, and then we later layered in Android because we had a lot of patients coming in wanting to use our product and engage with it on the go, but they were Android users.

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That's an example of a product roadmap item that came on board. Just based on quantifying how many patients were asking for that feature or that platform. 

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Lemon: That's really great to hear. And kind of building on that, what do you think makes Neura Health unique and able to deliver unique value to its stakeholders?

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Burstein: For us, it's the specialized focus in neurology and the really short SLA to be able to talk to a high-quality specialist, so that ability to get patients in a video visit with a board-certified neurologist within less than seven days is a big part of what makes us unique, and by virtue of the fact that we're so focused in neurology, there is a ton in the product that really speaks to that audience, really makes them feel understood, and then is all the more effective for their treatment plan. In our personalized care plan, there are over 500+ different care pathways based on that individual's particular diagnosis and particular needs. They'll be assigned that commensurate care plan and it's really that focus on neurology that allows us to deliver such a deep level of personalization.

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When it comes to stakeholders like health plans, systems, and employers, first and foremost, it's all about patient access, really helping them take what is typically called a network hole, so having very few neurologists within their coverage to complaints around the sheer number of months or even years that some patients have to wait to then fix that with much better access.

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Typically within a week is the core value prop from a patient perspective. And then from a financial perspective, we also look at by virtue of helping avoid unnecessary wasteful utilization, which in our case will be ER visits, urgent care visits, and redundant PCP visits. We will help to bend the cost curve by getting the patient with the right type of specialists and avoiding unnecessary utilization, we actually published a study on that, which is really what allowed us to start growing rapidly with systems and plans where we showed a 73% reduction in ER and urgent care visits.

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And we were one of the first solutions to publish that in a peer-reviewed neurology journal. Massive need, over 143 million patients need the service. And by being one of the first folks to really prove out in a measurable way how we're able to make a dent in that cost curve. That's really what is getting plans excited and what is getting systems excited to partner with us.

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Lemon: That's awesome, Liz. Thank you for walking us through how Neura Health works and how you're creating value in the market.

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For our next topic, I want to get your perspective on the digital health VC landscape more broadly. For our listeners, digital health funding boomed after COVID, more than tripling from almost 16 billion in 2021 to 52 billion in 2022. And in 2023, funding dropped dramatically, down to 27 billion. Now, we're seeing the market stabilize with 15 billion in 2023 and 2024. So in a crowded market with potentially fading hype, how is Neura Health thinking about standing out from the competition and the noise and continuing to grow and scale? 

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Burstein: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think about this a lot as someone who's been both on the digital health product side and also spent time in venture capital focused on consumer health and technology investments.

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Really the big differentiator for us is thinking deeply about product and how we can be so much more than just a doctor in a box, kind of commoditized telehealth solution. When I look at that landscape of virtual clinics there are so many that have really focused on just the telehealth visits and operations, and I think to build a really sustainable,

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efficient business there has to be a lot more than that from a technology platform perspective and from a wraparound care perspective. So for us, it's a heavy investment in provider workflow tooling. We have our own proprietary provider portal, and we're investing in intake summarization and assisted diagnosis assistant treatment.

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We leverage AI for prior authorizations so our team's not wasting time there that can be leveraged. And with that, we're able to have really stellar care delivery margins. While there are a lot of clinics, virtual clinics, brick and mortar clinics that are really struggling with that gross margin profitability, is that deep focus in technology-driven automation and efficiency that, I think before in that hype cycle was really more of a nice to have, and in today's environment, it's 100% a need to have, and so we're constantly investing in either building that technology in house or being very quick to adopt. There's this amazing ecosystem of tools that are being built for digital health companies like ours.

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And that's really what has allowed us to continue to succeed in this, in the more difficult component of the digital health investing market. 

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Lemon: That brings up an interesting point for me about your conversations with investors regarding AI. What are those conversations like and do they have certain expectations for you in terms of how AI is powering your business and how do you incorporate that into your strategy moving forward? 

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Burstein: Yeah, AI is hugely important at this time, and a big part of that is related to what we're just talking about as it relates to efficiency. For us, we're leveraging AI the way we think about it to empower our neurologists to deliver stellar care with unprecedented efficiency,

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and that for us is kind of looking at the whole provider journey, the whole care concierge journey, and breaking apart all the tasks that are done. And for each of those thinking about what do we have to do in-house? What does an MD have to do versus what can be done by an RN versus a PA versus technology?

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Everything from supply-demand forecasting to being able to predict across so many different states, and so many different conditions within neurology. How do we guarantee that we have visits available for example, epileptologists within California at the P. A. Level? And we leverage a lot of algorithms to help us reasonably predict and meet our SLAs across the country. Patient triage, so being able to assess based on intake answers, if a patient is mild, moderate, or severe, are they someone who has to be treated by an MD or can they be treated by PA,or  NP? Intake summarization is something that typically takes a long time, with our technology we're able to really surface relevant insights in a way that's more quickly digestible by a clinician on our platform. Such that they're able to spend more of their time with the patient building that relationship, quickly understand what's relevant, and move into the treatment plan. So for us, it's really important to stay on top of AI advancements, whether it's building technology that is really great

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or buying it in the case of, for example, medical scribe we're able to take advantage of a lot of the really great technology that's continuing to come out. 

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Lemon: Yeah, that's really interesting to hear how you're incorporating AI and making it clear how exactly it supports and powers Neura Health's greater mission.

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And I wanted to ask you about your funding strategy moving forward. You most recently had an 8 million seed round and won the UCSF Rosamond ADAPT Program 100K Award in 2023. And this year, you're planning to raise again. Something we've seen play out over the last few years is the negative impacts of over-evaluations.

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So, in this context, how do you and Neura Health think about smart growth? 

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Burstein: Yeah, I think there's two components here. There's smart growth from a business perspective, and then there's also being smart about not taking in too high of a valuation, which we think about every time we raise. For that first piece, we're always focused on growth and profitability.

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It's not 2020, 2019, when startups could really just focus on growth and tell investors, hey, I'm gonna figure out profitability later.  For us, very early in the business life cycle, we started to think about growth margin profitability. How do we leverage technology to be more efficient?

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How do we think about leveraging physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and registered nurses versus having MDs who are just more expensive do all the labor? With regards to valuations really just doing all the homework, all the diligence and really understanding where the market is, what's reasonable.

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We look at a lot of benchmarks, both with our existing investors, and industry analysts that we collaborate with to really understand what is a reasonable valuation and that ties into what is a reasonably achievable growth goal for the next round.  A lot of that just comes back to practices in financial modeling reading the market, and really talking to as many players in the field as we can to arrive at a reasonable number. 

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Lemon: That's really interesting to hear. And on a related note, is there anything in particular you're watching this year that you feel will shape or determine the future of the industry? And have an impact on Neura and your trajectory going forward?

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Burstein: Yeah, there are a couple of digital health IPOs that I think the virtual clinic ecosystem is really excited about such as Hinge Health and others that were just wanting to succeed and really excited to see how they'll do particularly in neurology in the kind of regulatory space, there's also the CMS guide program.

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So that is a newer program that was released to help incentivize holistic, comprehensive caregiver support. And very excited to see what is going to convert to longer-term in the way of reimbursement avenues for comprehensive dementia care, comprehensive caregiving, and medical support for seniors who suffer from neurological issues.

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Lemon: That's awesome. Excited to see how it plays out.

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For the last part here, I want to move to hearing more about you and your startup journey. My first question is, what's been the most rewarding part of starting a company? And what's been the most challenging? 

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Burstein: Yeah, the most rewarding has been the ability to go from zero to scaling impact to thousands of patients and just seeing the testimonials right on Google reviews.

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We receive many testimonials every week, patient stories around the compassion and empathy that they haven't been able to feel in our existing healthcare system. For me, that is really one of the biggest fueling forces that keeps me working hard, and keeps me really engaged in building the company and leading the team.

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With regards to challenges, healthcare is very large, bureaucratic, and moves slowly, particularly when you're selling into large systems and large plans. And, really deeply understanding those sales cycles, understanding the individual buyers, building up the right level of patience, and ability to grow the business, and consumer methods and other channels while we wait to continue growing some of our large system business. I think that's really one of the biggest challenges is just the pacing of health care.

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Lemon: Yeah, for sure. Another thing I'm eager to get your perspective on is company values. What are the core values or cultural principles that guide your firm? 

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Burstein: Yes. From really early on, we set out our codification of our company values. as well as our culture and kind of how we describe the culture.

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Patients first are our number one value, which is really core to who we are, right? So many times we're facing trade-off decisions about doing something for the patient. It has a certain financial impact on the business. It might also have a certain impact on a health plan that we're working with.

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We have these multi-stakeholder trade-off decisions that we're making. And having the codification of our values of patient-first is really critical, it helps our team scale, particularly the care concierge team who's on the front lines with so many patients day to day. Pursuing greatness is really important.

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Startups are incredibly competitive. There's a very low percentage of startups that progress from seed to pre-seed to series A to series B. We're always very selective in our hiring processes and really hold our team members to really high standards of excellence.

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With that constant improvement in the sense that most of us are wearing so many hats, and so there always is room to improve, room to be humble work with managers to understand how to continuously grow, both in the current role and in the role that one is looking to have in the future.

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Continuous learning, so I've been part of companies that have always invested in learning, growth, and development. And I find that leads to very engaged team members who are very hungry and excited to continue to understand more about their role, the space, the company, the opportunities.

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And then the last two are instilling trust and acting like an owner. Trust is super critical, especially in a clinical function. And then acting like an owner, I think, for so many startups is an amazing value. We're, in many ways, looking to find other folks who are also entrepreneurial, even if they're not necessarily founders, they still have that ownership mindset.

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They're shareholders, they're doing what's best for the company, and they're not always just thinking about what is in my job description, but more, what can I do to advance the company mission and vision?

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Lemon: Yeah, something we talk a lot about in our leadership classes at Kellogg is how to lead in uncertainty and how to make difficult decisions.

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Can you share an example of a time when you had to go back to those core values and principles that you talked about when making an important or difficult decision?

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Burstein: We often deal with this challenge of medication-seeking patients. These are patients that are coming to us with a particular medication in mind that they're kind of from the beginning dictating that this is what I need to get access to.

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And there's often this tension, especially with customer support around, I want to make my customers happy, I want to drive customer delight. And of course, with clinical rigor, and that's where we come back to a values discussion of clinical guidelines following that is obviously going to trump filling the requests of medication-seeking patients.

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And yeah, there are so many cases where we're coming back to the values and kind of how do we stack rank those and leverage that framework to make the right decision. 

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Lemon: That's super insightful. Thank you for sharing such a great example, Liz. Before we close, I want to end our conversation today moving away from Neura Health and away from DigitalHealth VC and founding companies entirely and finish with something to get to know you better.

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So if you weren't running this startup, what do you think you'd be doing? 

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Burstein: Well, I'll say, I'll share professionally and personally. Professionally, I think I'd still be running product at a large digital health company. I'm just very passionate and very excited about the field and it's a job but also a passion.

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And so that was the path that I was on before starting Neura, was at Maven and ZocDoc before that. I think with the potential free time that I have by not working on a startup, I would get more into- I'm very into running and racing and training for half marathons. So, would love to invest more time and take that on more seriously and potentially run with a team and do it at a more competitive level.

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Lemon: Sounds like you'd be a competitive high-achieving person. That's awesome to hear.

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Thank you so much, Liz. This has been an incredible conversation, and we are so excited to get to share your perspectives with our listeners. 

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Burstein: Thank you for having me.

‍Lemon: Thank you for listening to Healthscape. If you enjoyed this episode, or have thoughts and feedback on topics and want to connect, check the episode details for a link to our LinkedIn post. And stay tuned for the next one!