Most doctors who grow frustrated with the system write about it. Dr. Valerie Kirchberger built a company around it.
She is a physician with a Master’s in Public Health, a Founder and co-CEO of Evela Health, and a former COO at Heartbeat Medical Solutions, now serving on its board. Her career sits at the intersection of clinical medicine and health systems reform, and she has spent over a decade working to make that intersection practical, not theoretical.
From Clinic to System:
Dr. Kirchberger earned her doctorate in 2009 and began her career in pediatric medicine, practicing at the Children’s Hospital of Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich from 2009 to 2011, and then at Charité, Berlin’s major academic hospital, from 2011 to 2016.
Her focus eventually shifted toward outcome data and systemic change. At Charité, she led the implementation of patient-reported outcome measures and spearheaded value-based healthcare initiatives.
From 2017 to 2021, she led value-based healthcare strategy at Charité’s Strategy Department, reporting directly to the Chief Medical Officer. That is not a junior advisory role. It means she was accountable for whether outcome-based thinking actually moved inside one of Germany’s most complex institutions.
Building at Heartbeat Medical:
In February 2021, Dr. Kirchberger joined Heartbeat Medical as Chief Medical Officer, bringing her expertise in aligning medical treatments with measurable, patient-centered quality of care.
She later took on the managing director and COO role at the company, serving in that capacity for three and a half years before transitioning to the board in mid-2024 to pursue her next chapter in care delivery.
During her time there, she was also a member of the regional leadership committee at HIMSS for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and part of the Conference Advisory Board at ICHOM, the leading body for standardising patient-reported outcome measures.
The Evela Health Chapter:
In early 2024, Dr. Kirchberger co-founded Evela Health alongside Eva-Maria Meijnen and Dr. Cornelius Remschmidt. The company focuses on a problem that has been systematically underfunded and underaddressed in European healthcare: menopause.
Traditional gynaecologists in Germany are constrained by five-minute appointment slots and €16 reimbursements, leaving little room for the kind of comprehensive care perimenopause and menopause require. Evela Health is structured to fill that gap.
The Berlin-based company secured €600,000 in pre-seed funding in May 2025, backed by angel network Better Ventures and several individual investors. Its model distributes a web app to female employees aged 40 and over through employers as a corporate benefit.
The data behind it is pointed: one in four women affected by menopause symptoms reduce their working hours, and one in ten leave the workforce early. For anyone interested in women in HealthTech or the intersection of FemTech and workplace policy, this is the kind of problem that has both a human and an economic argument behind it.
By September 2025, Evela Health had completed a €2 million funding round, combining investment from Impact Shakers, Better Ventures, angel investors, and €1.2 million in non-dilutive funding from IBB Berlin. The funds are directed toward tech and AI expertise, sales, and platform development.
Dr. Kirchberger describes her operating philosophy simply: digital before outpatient, before inpatient. That framing reflects her broader career, which has consistently pushed toward earlier, more structured, more data-informed care.
What Her Work Points to:
Dr. Kirchberger is a practitioner who moved into systems, then into products, and now into founding. Each step built on the last one. She knows what patient records look like, what hospital strategy looks like, and what a startup’s funding round looks like. That combination is uncommon. Founders in digital health often come from one direction: clinical, technical, or commercial. She has operated in all three.
What she has built at Evela Health reflects that range. It is not a consumer wellness app dressed up in clinical language. It is a care model built around evidence, designed for a market that existing systems have consistently underserved.
