Well David Albert, M.D., shows up again with another interesting application. Known Dave for over 20 years when I lived in Oklahoma City. (His father was Carl Albert the senator from Oklahoma.) Dave has had quite a continued adventure in medical technology. He first founded a company called Corazonics of which provided SAEKG (signal averaged EKG algorithms), which was a part of the HP XLi cardiograph (I sold a tone of these), but because of patent disputes with ART, the company went away. It was somewhat of black magic for EKG intepretation. Then the idea of putting the EKG on the real old hand mobile computer led to the concept of Data Critical, of which the previous company I worked for VitalCom was then sold to Data Critical of which was then sold to General Electric. OK, enough of the history here, now this application.
Well this is very interesting because it is a take on the Old King of Hearts device (Heart Card) from Instromedix (company that was sold) out of Hillsboro, OR. Event monitoring is much better than holter monitoring.
My first glance is this is technology trying to find a home. For instance, it is assumed that everybody will have an I-Phone. The majority of patients that are prescribed event monitoring may have a syncopal episode, (the reason why they come the doctor probably in the first place), or the physician says here take this event monitor and wear it for few weeks. When feel a pain, they hold up the event monitor or press the button and it captures a loop of pre, during, and post rhythms (Sorry the reason I know this stuff as I actually was in the business and also cardiac pacing). Then the stored information is transmitted to a receiving center.
Several questions come to mind to establish business value and not just have another cool I-Phone application among the tens of thousands.
1. Does this provide looping capability?
2. How much storage of EKG information, up to 30 days?
3. Are hospitals going to pass out I-Phones free for patients to use?
4. Are hospitals going to pay for the 3G/4G services to transmit the data?
5. Lead I by the two electrodes can be transmitted, what about II, III, and augmented leads?
6. What algoritms are in place to decrease baseline artifact?
www.alivecor.com
