Hi, this is Heart Rhythm TV. I'm Janet Han, and we're live from HRX 2022. And I'm sitting here with some two wonderful people in the Digital Health Conference, Jason Hale from PaceMate, and of course, Andrew Russo, our past president of HRS. So welcome to the show, both of you. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Of course. So, you know, we have been talking a lot in the past two days. And now it's our third day talking a lot about sort of data and data management. And that is a big worry from us as physicians and the NPs and all the people in clinic, because we really in EP have been at the forefront of data management because, you know, we have these devices. And we said, yes, let's put us in the guidelines, everyone needs to be on remote monitoring. And we said, it's a great thing, do it. But we never had workflow in the beginning, right? So now we have this issue where we're inundated. So I wanted to talk to you both a little bit about, you know, you guys are experts at this. What are we doing to sort of manage the data? And how is the best way to sort of manage data, right, from these devices? So you want to say something about this, Jason? What PaceMate is doing is we're, you know, solving interoperability challenges by integrating any technology into our software in any format. We're also building FHIR API connections with Epic and Cerner and Athena to be able to pull in data. And really, the goal is to eliminate non-clinical tasks that is that are bogging down clinicians and doctors, and let them practice at the top of their license, you know, instead of clicking their day away. Yeah, I think I like sat and counted clicks one day. And I don't want to tell you how many clicks I counted. But there were a lot of clicks to count just to get one note into the chart, bringing that data from the device patient, and their meds, and their past history, and, you know, X, Y, and Z. So I feel like, you know, we got to remember that we are trying to keep the patient at the center of this. And I think what you're doing is great to try to pull in things from each spot, right? So you're not just pulling just the device report, am I right? I think the challenges in the past have been with other platforms, the data is stale, it's manually entered data. You know, take for instance, anticoagulation, we're seeing more and more patients that are being taken off their anticoagulant after a successful ablation. And if there's a new recurrence of that AFib, it a lot of times is misdocumented because of the stale nature of the data. With FHIR APIs, the future is to be able to pull that data in automatically. That's what PaceMate is doing now. And I think it has great possibilities for research as well, just, you know, restoring all that data. And we're partnering with research institutions to, you know, solve problems of the future, you know, regarding atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias. Yeah, I think that's what's a little bit concerning, right, is I know there's lots of copy paste that happens in the charts. And I think that's where you're alluding to with the stale data that people sort of have what I call chart lore, right? Like things get carried forward and it's not necessarily current. So that's a nice problem to be able to tackle and solve for sure. And then I wanted to hear from you, Andrea, you know, past, present, I'm sure you've heard all of this as the issue and as a user. What are your thoughts? Yeah, no, Janet, you brought up it, just the overwhelming amount of data that we see now and then our staff get just getting overwhelmed. So for us, it was an although initially having some hesitancy with trusting an outside source, with looking at this data and screening it, you realize you just can't do this anymore. You have so much data from not just implanted devices, you have it from, you know, other wearables, you know, patches, then you have patients bringing in their own data, you know, sending it through MyChart constantly. And so we needed a solution, we couldn't keep hiring more staff. I mean, the hospital doesn't let you just keep hiring staff, even if you wish for it. But it was really not practical because you have to train that staff and it's just not practical. And then the other part of it, which we don't really talk much about, is that it's really not a 24-hour day, you know, 24-hour day, seven-day-a-week service, particularly with some of the implanted monitors. You can have things happen on the weekend and you might not know about it until Monday. So we realized we had to have a solution. I looked at, you know, many or several different companies at length and then looked at, you know, what did we need in particular? Well, we needed more than just some place to store in one single place. We needed some more interoperability with Epic. And so I think one of the nice things is, not only do you have to not click back and forth and look between all the different device companies, the different manufacturers, and then go to your Epic chart and then write your note there and then call your patient and write the note, our staff, the workflow literally overnight changed. So we went from spending, you know, it could be hours sometimes dealing with one problem or at least an hour for a particular patient to everything in one place. We get our alerts. We label which alerts are red alerts and what we want to know about, you know, any time of day. But our staff gets alerted. All the information's right there. All the electrograms are right there. The report is there, written very nice and succinctly. You can change, you know, some things if you wanted to add. But it was so easy overnight that our staff were able to do other things, things that they should be doing. So we can go back to clinic and see patients with us and do other things that are more meaningful for them. And not to mention the other part of it is having a company that the disconnections and we don't realize, I think as the physicians, how often the staff are on the phone trying to help people reconnect and troubleshoot. So all of that's often. And then I think one of the nice features we also really like is that instantaneous look at is the patients, if they have a fib, are they on anticoagulation? It comes up right there. Are they on it? Or we thought they were on it. But you know what? They were admitted somewhere else and someone stopped it because they had some small bleeding from their nose or something. And then we realized, oh, this patient needs to be back on their anticoagulant. So it's really been great. Yeah. I think you hit on a nice point about connection versus disconnection, right? And I think people, patients cannot benefit from remote monitoring if they're disconnected. So Jason, talk about the connection, disconnection issue. I mean, it's a scaling problem. Communication with a patient that's an 85-year-old pacemaker patient can take some time. There's an art to communicating with patients. We're doing it with a mix of compassionate human beings and technology. So our software will automatically identify when a patient is disconnected and send them a robo text or a robo call. Even the voice of your nurse or even yourself as a doctor. So we're really trying to leverage technology and compassionate clinicians to scale this. And currently we're managing 150,000 patients on our full service platform. And so- That's a lot. Yeah. And we're fully capable of 10xing that, we feel. But leveraging technology is what we continue to do and we'll never be finished. It will be always a work in progress. Yeah. I think you brought it right back to where we are at this conference, is remembering to keep keeping the patient at the center of this, right? And not losing that human touch with this advancing digital world. So I wanted to thank both of you for sitting down at this awesome conference and taking the time to chat with us a little bit about this. So thanks again, everyone, for watching HRX 2022 Live from the Floor. We'll be bringing you more as the day goes on. Thank you, Janet.

data management

cardiology

technology integration

automation

patient care