As an interventional cardiologist, I spend most of my days inside hospital walls. I know what it looks like when a system works. I also know what it looks like when it fails quietly, in ways that don't show up on any monitor.
My wake-up call didn't come from a patient chart. It came from a phone call with my mother.
She was living in a care facility abroad. By every clinical measure, she was being well looked after. But I had no real window into her daily life, I didn't know how she had slept, whether she had laughed that day, or felt seen by anyone. I was her son, and I was flying blind.
Like millions of adult children, I was navigating the distance between my own life and my parents', piecing together fragments from rushed phone calls and second-hand updates, living with a quiet, chronic worry that never fully goes away. Even with my medical background, I often felt powerless. It wasn’t a failure of love. It is a failure of infrastructure.
A solution built to fill the gap in elder care
In healthtech, we can see extraordinary breakthroughs, AI diagnostics, remote monitoring, precision therapeutics. But in eldercare, I kept encountering a world fragmented by design: seniors, their loved ones, and their care teams sharing the same aging journey yet rarely the same information. The care team had clinical data but limited context. The family had concern but limited visibility. And the elders, too often, had neither adequate connection to their family nor a meaningful sense of presence in their own daily life.
“In eldercare, I kept encountering a world fragmented by design: seniors, their loved ones, and their care teams sharing the same aging journey yet rarely the same information.”
Dr Ragui Ibrahim
Founder & CEO · Avenant
Driven by a simple, personal need
I founded this company because I needed it myself, and because I had watched families around me need it, over and over again. Avenant is built around a simple premise: providing companionship to elders, so they never feel alone, while empowering care teams to provide the best of care and giving families the continuity they need.
The cath lab has taught me that good outcomes come down to intervening in time, with the right information, and with genuine attention to the patient as a whole. That is exactly the philosophy Avenant was built on, because our parents deserve nothing less.
Why this matters
The goal of Avenant is not simply to add years to life. It is to compress morbidity, to shorten the window of frailty and dependence at the end of life and extend the years of autonomy, connection, and health that precede it. That is the outcome families want, the outcome operators are paid to deliver, and the outcome health systems are desperate to finance. Healthspan is the product; the companion is how it is delivered.