3 Things To Keep In Mind About Tech Innovation In the Cardiac Space

Digital transformation continues to play out across various corners of the healthcare world, and the cardiovascular space is no different. Heart disease remains one of the deadliest and costliest health threats facing Americans —  in the U.S., someone loses their life to cardiovascular disease every 33 seconds with an annual cost to the nation exceeding $250 billion.

Many new tech solutions — including wearables, algorithms and tools for 3D bioprinting — have emerged in recent years to address the country’s heart disease problem. While it’s easy to get excited about technology’s potential to improve cardiac care, there are a few things that healthcare leaders must keep in mind, said Dr. Sumeet Chugh during an interview this month at the Heart Rhythm Society’s recent HRX conference in Atlanta.

Dr. Chugh is director of the Heart Institute and director of AI in medicine at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.

Data management

When a company releases a new solution like a wearable, it should have two goals, Dr. Chugh noted. The first is to create a product that collects useful data for clinicians, and the second is to manage that data.

Wearables usually collect patients’ data continuously as they go about their daily lives, and no clinician has the bandwidth to independently sort through such a vast amount of collected data, he remarked.

“These companies are trying to do both. They’re trying to record the data and manage the data — so that they can spit out a summary of the findings and enable [clinicians] to use it at the point of care. Maybe not every company is trying to do that, but I think the ones that make more sense to me have both functions enabled,” Dr. Chugh explained.

Costs

New technologies are often quite expensive, Dr. Chugh pointed out.

“At this point, they’re not lowering healthcare costs for the system if you buy them,” he declared.

Vendors often will tell providers that their tools will lead to cost savings in the long term, either by decreasing patients’ healthcare utilization or by doing tasks that humans were previously paid to do, Dr. Chugh noted. 

That argument may be true, but most hospitals think about their finances on a quarter-by-quarter basis rather than considering the long-term picture, he said.

Equity

Technology developers in the healthcare space must take care to ensure the patient is at the center of their product, Dr. Chugh pointed out.

“When you develop these technologies and you make them really expensive, there’s so much inequity. That’s where a lot of distrust comes in. We may need some kind of honest broker at a national level, and that better be the government,” he declared.

There is no denying that Americans’ health varies significantly across various ethnic and social demographics — tech developers need to make sure that their tools aren’t furthering these inequities, Dr. Chugh noted.

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