By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist – #TheIncrementalist
On this episode I talked to Branislav Vajdic, CEO and Founder of HeartBeam (@HeartBeamInc) which has developed a credit card-sized medical-grade heart attack detector that anyone can use anywhere.
Branislav shares his personal story that includes his place in history in developing the Solid State technology that we all use and depend on for our storage today. It is interesting to note that when they first came out with the concept there was initial push back from some of his colleagues at Intel asking if there really was a market for this technology.
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His career direction took a turn for healthcare when his cardiologist father complained of chest pain but did what most people do and disregarded the symptoms. Unfortunately not long after he succumbed to this heart attack in progress. This experience has stuck with Branislav and he turned his attention to solving the problem of earlier heart attack detection.
As he points out this is not only a healthcare challenge but also a finical one with approximately 85% of chest pain patients who show up in our emergency room not caused by a myocardial infarction (heart attack) consuming valuable resources and time but as cardiologists will say
“Time is Muscle”
So getting the right treatment as early as possible is essential.
The problem affects millions of Americans who have cardiovascular disease with someone having a heart attack approximately every minute in the US.
We discuss the history of the ECG which as he rightly points out has not changed much in 100 years – carried out the same way just with different technology to acquire the same signals and content. In conjunction with 2 nuclear physicists, they came up with a new approach to signal acquisition that performs the same 3D rendering of signals viewing the heart like a radio antenna. Their incremental insight came from their novel approach using the adjacent possible for the signal acquisition and as Branislav described it coming to this problem with “no baggage”.
The end result is a credit card-sized, 3D vector ECG recording device currently working through the FDA approval process that uploads data to the cloud for reading and automation that is able to determine if the patient is having a heart attack. Critical to this capability is their ability to serve every individual personalized version of their ECG.
Listen in to hear how they are applying this technology to offer an automated review of signals for patients suffering chest pain filtering out the cases that need urgent review from those that can be safely watched, perhaps even from the comfort of their home.
About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.
This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.