Hi, I'm Eric Bustowski, and this is another segment of EP on EP. It's really fun for me to have my next guest, Dr. Sana Al-Khatib, who I've known for many years. She's professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center. And Sana, welcome to the show. Thank you very much for having me. So we're going to talk today. There's a lot of things I could discuss with you. You're a trialist. You've done so many things, but today I'd like to talk about your new assignment, which is HRX with the Heart Rhythm Society. So first of all, tell us what it is. What's it all about? Yeah, of course. No, thank you, Eric. So I'm very excited about the HRX meeting. This is a meeting focused on digital health, but unlike other digital health meetings, this meeting is going to bring together all relevant stakeholders to not only discuss challenges to the implementation of digital health in clinical practice, but also to propose solutions to those challenges to facilitate implementation of digital health, keeping the clinician and the patient at the center of all discussions. So to give you an example, you know, of course, digital health covers so many different things, including patients with wearables who send us tracings, remote monitoring of devices. In fact, I would expand beyond that to talk about remote patient management, which is becoming really expanding. It's growing. It's becoming very significant in our clinical practice. Machine learning, you know, artificial intelligence for prediction of outcomes, risk stratification, mobile apps. I mean, there are so many digital health applications that clinicians have heard of, but there's uncertain regarding how these can be implemented in their own clinical practice, how they can help them become more efficient, achieve better care, better outcomes in their own clinical practice. And so that's the hope, is to bring all these people together to brainstorm about these things. Well, it sounds exciting, but what I'm still unclear about is the format. So am I going to go there and have a bunch of lectures, small groups? What is the format of the meeting? So the biggest thing with this meeting, Eric, is that we want it to be very different. We want it to be a unique experience. So not only will the content be different, but the delivery of the content is going to be different as well. So no, we don't want people to come and lecture, and we want to make this very interactive and an immersive experience for people. So people may give a presentation that lasts for five minutes, what have you. The rest of the format is going to be discussions. And even the layout of the space, the floor plan of the space is very unique, because we are going to have a center stage, and we'll have several headliner, main tent speakers presenting. And we have three main streams. Oh, what is the stream mean? So the three streams, one is focused on digital health in general, one is on health data acquisition and management, like for example, remote monitoring of CIDs would fall into that category. And one is a bootcamp related to digital health applications, and part of that will be like a pitch competition of some interesting and new and novel ideas. And so for the main sessions and main speakers, everybody will be focused on that center stage. Then for other sessions, we will break the hall into three different streams, and people will have like headphones, and they can listen in to the stream that they're interested in. And let's say you are listening to one stream, and you decide, you know what, I want to check out this other stream, see what they're talking about in that stream. They can actually switch and follow that discussion, that content. So is it just listening, or will there be some interaction? So let's say I'm there, and I want to be a part of the discussion, not just sitting there listening to a stream. Absolutely. Well, is the concept that it's going to be an interactive learning experience? Very much so. Okay. So like even when you're listening, you're not listening to a lecture. You're listening to a group of experts and stakeholders discussing some ideas. And we absolutely will open it up for people in the audience to participate in those discussions and to ask questions as well. That sounds cool. So you've just sort of given me an idea about who you're pitching this to as far as the people you think will get the most out of it. And I had assumed initially you're talking mostly maybe clinicians, but when you're talking about boot camp, and when you're talking about administering, like how do you handle things in a clinic, it almost seems like if you had a person who's running your device clinic and you have thousands of patients, that might be a person who would come because that person seems like they'll get something. Do I have this right out of that? And maybe some younger person who's a junior person in the field and are working with you who wants to just learn more about it, that might be the boot camp. So am I understanding that right? It's not just being focused on one, like just the clinician. That's exactly right. As you know, this meeting, even though the focus is on clinicians and making sure that discussions revolve around patients and patient care, we are absolutely excited to have other relevant stakeholders. And what I mean by that, certainly innovators, researchers, as you mentioned, busy clinicians. Certainly fellows in training, junior people who are interested in learning more about digital health, engineers, even health system, administrators, clinic managers, this discussion will impact the work that they do. We would love to have all of those people there because we want to hear from all those people. We want them to inform those discussions. So at the end of my being there, are you going to promise me that no one's going to send me strips anymore that I didn't ask for? No, I'm only kidding. I'm only kidding. I'm only kidding. I can't promise you that. However, what I can promise you is hopefully we can come up with ways, you know, with solutions. Exactly. Like workflows that will help that process. That would be very useful to all of us. So is this planned as a one-time event? What's HRS planning this? You must have a big kind of game plan in mind. This will be your first, but is it going to be an ongoing project? Yeah. So that's a great question. Absolutely. We hope to continue to have this meeting on an annual basis. This meeting, by the way, is going to be September 8th through the 10th of 2022. Yes. You got that in. The hope is to make sure that we continue to have it year after year. The focus now is on digital health because this is such a big priority for HRS at this point. We are leaders in this space and having a meeting focused on digital health will absolutely solidify this goal and this plan for us. And I absolutely see us continuing to build on this foundation. And the site, where's the meeting going to take place? It's going to be at a country club in San Diego. A country club? Yes. Well, that's not too bad. I like it. Well, San, anything else you want to tell us about? I think you've really covered the concept of it, who's going to get something out of it, who should go, and the date. The only thing you haven't covered yet is how you're going to get rid of all my unnecessary tracings that have been sent to you and me, but hopefully at the meeting, you'll figure it out for me, right? I hope so too. Absolutely. Yes. Sanne, thanks for being a guest on the show. Of course. My pleasure. Thank you.

HRX meeting

digital health

remote patient management

machine learning

artificial intelligence