We care too late_

We pick up on heart health too late, and the cardiovascular burden on our society continues to grow.The heart is the organ that carries most of the weight of our modern living—from the sedentary hours behind desks, to Type II diabetes and an increasing obesity epidemic. Hospitals are places we go when we are broken to seek treatment, but what if we could evolve from treatment to prevention and provide consumer-facing services to help avoid those icebergs down the track? What’s the value of being able to skip that unscheduled hospital visit?

A sorting challenge_

I met Robin, or Dr Van Lingen as his many patients know him, a few years ago. He wore all the hallmarks of someone who went into an honourable profession (to genuinely save lives) but was scarred by the system. He could see ways to improve and empower patient well-being, but every opportunity for innovation was stymied.

The challenge is clear – if we could pre-sort the cars parked outside of Robin’s cardiology practice between those with an underlying condition requiring urgent treatment, and those with a benign symptom that need to be reassured, Robin would use the same limited slots in the day saving more lives. This, he explains to me, is why he became a cardiologist. This is not to suggest that alleviating the concern of those symptomatic patients is not valuable. It is simply a recognition that patients are beginning to die on NHS waiting lists, deaths that could be prevented with better detection and early intervention.

On the role of ai_

It is inherently evident to those in the business of providing health (rather than delivering technology) that the most sophisticated, empathic, human-scripted, neural-network-enabled, artificially intelligent algorithm is incapable of providing the human empathy of a cardiac nurse.

For these folks, including Dr Robin van Lingen and our medical advisory panel, the business of health and wellness should always be defined by the quality of care and empathy at the individual patient level.

Tools to decode very large data sets and recognise patterns have a critical role in providing better health services. At Metronome, our purpose in exploring the role of AI has been to help review and sift through the large volume of (near) medical-grade data, to listen and learn to our engagements in the virtual clinic of cardiac nurses and cardiologists, and to look for patterns and connections beyond symptomatic snippets of ECG to help with the core challenge - better detection and early intervention.