Digital transformation continues to take place across many sectors of the healthcare world, and the cardiovascular field is no exception. Heart disease remains one of the deadliest and most costly health threats facing Americans. Every 33 seconds, someone in the U.S. dies from cardiovascular disease, costing the country more than $250 billion annually.
A number of new technology solutions have emerged in recent years to address the country’s heart disease challenges, including wearables, algorithms and 3D bioprinting tools. It’s easy to get excited about technology’s potential to improve cardiac care, but there are some things healthcare leaders need to keep in mind, Dr. Sumeet Chugh said in an interview at the Heart Rhythm Society’s HRX conference in Atlanta this month.
Dr. Chugg is the director of the Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and director of AI in Healthcare.
Data Management
When companies release new solutions like wearables, Dr. Chugh noted, they need to have two goals: first, to create a product that collects data that is useful to clinicians, and second, to manage that data.
Wearables typically collect data on a patient’s daily life on an ongoing basis, but clinicians don’t have the processing power to independently organize the vast amounts of data collected, he noted.
“These companies are trying to do both — record the data, manage the data, spit out summaries of findings and make them available to[clinicians]at the point of care. Not all companies are going to do that, but the ones that make more sense to me are the ones that are enabling both capabilities,” Dr. Chugg explained.
cost
New technologies are often very expensive, Dr Chugh noted.
“Right now, purchasing it doesn’t reduce costs to the health care system,” he asserted.
Vendors often tell providers that their tools will save patients money in the long run, either by reducing healthcare utilization or by performing tasks that previously were done by humans for a fee, Dr. Chugg noted.
That argument may be valid, but most hospitals think about their financial situation quarterly, not long-term, he said.
Fairness
Healthcare technology developers need to be careful to put the patient at the heart of their products, Dr Chugg said.
“When you develop these technologies and make them very expensive, it creates huge inequities. It creates huge distrust. Maybe we need some kind of honest broker at the national level, and that should be the government,” he asserted.
There’s no denying that the health of Americans varies widely across different ethnicities and social classes, and technology developers need to ensure their tools don’t exacerbate those inequities, Dr. Chugg said.
Photo: kieferpix, Getty Images
