This week I am talking to Branislav Vajdic, CEO and Founder of HeartBeam (@HeartBeami) which has developed a credit card-sized medical-grade heart attack detector that anyone can use anywhere.
Branislav shares his personal story that includes his place in history in developing the Solid State technology that we all use and depend on for our storage today. It is interesting to note that when they first came out with the concept there was initial push back from some of his colleagues at Intel asking if there really was a market for this technology.
His career direction took a turn for healthcare when his cardiologist father complained of chest pain but did what most people do and disregarded the symptoms. Unfortunately not long after he succumbed to this heart attack in progress. This experience has stuck with Branislav and he turned his attention to solving the problem of earlier heart attack detection
As he points out this is not only a healthcare challenge but also a finical one with approximately 85% of chest pain patients who show up in our emergency room not caused by a myocardial infarction (heart attack) consuming valuable resources and time but as cardiologists will say
“Time is Muscle”
So getting the right treatment as early as possible is essential
The problem affects millions of Americans who have cardiovascular disease with someone having a heart attack approximately every minute in the US.
We discuss the history of the ECG which as he rightly points out has not changed much in 100 years – carried out the same way just with different technology to acquire the same signals and content. In conjunction with 2 nuclear physicists, they came up with a new approach to signal acquisition that performs the same 3D rendering of signals viewing the heart like a radio antenna. Their incremental insight came from their novel approach using the adjacent possible for the signal acquisition and as Branislav described it coming to this problem with “no baggage”
The end result is a credit card-sized, 3D vector ECG recording device currently working through the FDA approval process that uploads data to the cloud for reading and automation that is able to determine if the patient is having a heart attack. Critical to this capability is their ability to serve every individual personalized version of their ECG
Listen in to hear how they are applying this technology to offer an automated review of signals for patients suffering chest pain filtering out the cases that need urgent review from those that can be safely watched, perhaps even from the comfort of their home
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Raw Transcript
Nick van Terheyden
Today I’m delighted to be joined by Branislav Vader. He is the CEO and founder of heartbeat, Branislav, thanks for joining me today.
Branislav Vajdic
Thank you for having me.
Nick van Terheyden
So, as I do with all my guests, I think it’s always important to get a little bit of perspective about you your background. Tell us a little bit about your history, how you reached here, your PhD and how hotbin came about.
Branislav Vajdic
Yes, I was born and raised in Africa Slavia I was always fascinated by chips, you know, being being generation that, that just saw our initial baby of chips, entering the markets, etc. I wanted to study that I finished electrical engineering back in Yugoslavia, and Serbia, and came to the ISIS state to get my PhD in fifth design. I did so back in 1984, and shortly after graduating from University of Minnesota, I was recruited by Intel technology development to work on next generation of technology. Two years out of school, I was designer of the first flash memory for Intel. So I hold two patents that were critical enabling the passions of art, and dance. I’m a co inventor of flash. Next thing I know is they made me a manager, right? You know, what do you do? Good technical guy, you make him a manager. And I managed actually as a senior manager of Pentium two Pentium four, and spent over 20 years at Intel in various senior management positions in the technology development world of Intel. Fast forward 2007 I invested into a is an angel investor invested in a technology that was cardiovascular related, and became keenly interested in in cardiovascular space after all, heart is an electrical device. And so my background was kind of relevant for studying cardiovascular disease. And there is a personal story that I’d like to share that sheds a bit of additional light on how a chip designer became a cardiovascular Insider. Back in Europe, my father was a famous physician. And one afternoon he developed this chest pain, indigestion type of feeling. And you know, he reacted the way most people do, which is denial and procrastination. Unfortunately, that was a heart attack in progress. And we lost him a couple of hours later. And you know that that was an additional motivation for me to basically leave Intel and become a cardiovascular device Insider. Fast forward 2015, I looked around and was looking for a technology that would help that chest pain patient, like my father was at home, detect heart attack, and there was nothing there was nothing user friendly, that could be with the patient 24/7. And I decided I’m going to tackle that problem. That’s how heartbeat was started to solve that very problem that killed my father. And then I studied a bit further the problem, it was apparent to me there was a huge problem. And a patient that has a chest pain. They it’s about three to four hours before they react to that chest pain on an average. During that three to four hours of indecision by the patient, the mortality rate goes up by 40%. And due to this delay, there are about 300,000 heart failure cases in the United States every year due to the muscle cardiac muscle that is lost and cardiologists often say time is muscle When it comes to a heart attack, the more you wait, the more muscle you lose, the worse, the prognosis is for the outcome. So all in all, not only that, that problem has a human toll in terms of lost lives, but he has a clear economic side to it, which is many people rushed to the emergency room for no good reason, just indigestion, poor muscle, etc, to the tune of about 85% or so of these chest pain related visits to the emergency room are really not related to heart, and in such that those patients should not be in the emergency room. Huge cost over $10 billion to the healthcare system. So overall, two sides of the story, lost lives, lost health care dollars, wasted healthcare dollars, and no user friendly, patient friendly technology to tackle that.
Nick van Terheyden
So first of all, thank you for sharing the story. And I’m I’m sorry to hear about that with your father. That’s, you know, a sad testament to some of the challenges that we have in medicine, and specifically in cardiovascular services is, you know, detecting and earlier detection, as you’re clearly focused on. If I may, before we launch into that, I just want to be sure that I’m correct. In my understanding, when you say, flash memory you’re talking about, essentially, all of the hard drives that we now use are essentially flash map. That’s the technology that you’re referencing, that you were part of the development.
Branislav Vajdic
Yes, very much. So I was, I was the designer of a very first flash memory device. And the my interestingly, innovation is always met with some resistance, right? And there was some skepticism inside the Intel if this, the new device has a market, believe it or not, and today, no digital camera, no cell phone, as you pointed out, you know, solid state drives, etc. You know, in a way, Flash has impacted many aspects of our lives. And yet, at that time, you know, there was a great actually hesitation inside, is this a product? Or is this just a couple of PhDs project?
Nick van Terheyden
Well, I’m just delighted to hear that story. I’m not that surprised. I mean, there’s you think about lots of technologies, you think about Kodak and the image processing and how they sort of No, no, nobody would ever want this. So not surprising, but I’m just eternally grateful, because every year I buy bigger and bigger drives have a clearly, you know, contributed to by your insights and patents. So thank you for that. Back to heart beam, and you know, some of the technology. So you’ve clearly got a insight into the challenge that we have. And you talked a little bit about this. The difficulty and I come at this is an emergency room physician was always rollouts. And you know, we talk about rollouts from heart attack, as rule a rule out myocardial infarction, the number of chest pains that you reference, and I couldn’t have quoted that number. But I, as I think back probably not surprising 85% And you’re right time is muscle. The sooner you do that, we’ve got delays and so forth, you’re essentially have created a solution that starts to focus in on that problem. And that’s the heart beam device. Tell us a little bit about the process that you went through to get to that, if
Branislav Vajdic
you would? Absolutely. It, you know, when I started the company, and I told me, some physicians and some colleagues of mine in the technology field medtech. The field about my vision of having a credit card sized device is seen as couple of of stacked credit cards in my wallet at all times and being able to get a standard of care type of signal, lovely DCG I was met with great skepticism. And, of course, it hasn’t been easy to actually overcome all the barriers that we faced. But interestingly enough, I paired with two nuclear physicists. So you have a team or a chip designer to nuclear physicist looking at this problem that was deemed to be intractable? Yeah, basically, you can’t, you can’t have a planar device, small device like that replace all these viruses running around the body, right. And we basically said, well, heart is an antenna. Basically, to simplify things. We said, heart is an antenna, like an FM station antenna, it’s source of electromagnetic waves. And we will model it in that manner. Once we have done that, then we came up with a way to measure three components in 3d of their heart, heart’s electrical activity. In other words, heart is a three dimensional organ, and electrical currents rule in the 3d space. So once you measure the components of that movement in the 3d space, electrical movement in the 3d space, then you have the complete information about that cardiac cycle or that call that that person’s heart activity. And, and that was not known 100 years ago, when 12 lead ECG was invented. And amazingly enough to that this day, this is one of those rare technologies that really did not see any significant improvement. That ECG 70 years ago, and today, you know, and how it is actually diagnosed by revision, physicians did not change very much piece of paper, they, they look at it, they’re highly trained to recognize the changes, but it still is about 100 year old technology. So we took this new look at this, and I credit that sort of no baggage that we had, with our inventions by now we have three issued patents 10, pending patents that all deal with, how do you do that? So all you know, right now, we have a technology that has this credit card side device, that you press against your chest for 30 seconds. And it goes, the signals go up to the cloud, a lot of processing, 3d signal processing happens in the cloud. Next thing, we supply all that information to the physician, including the 12 lead ECG that they’re trained to, to interpret our diagnostic suggestion. And at that point, they can engage with their patient, and the loop is closed, patient did not feel well. We collected all the relevant information, we shared all the signals, and information with the physician and the physician is in a great shape to advise that patient call 911 or likely a indigestion or poor muscle. Maybe do a recording couple hours later again, just to verify by stay at home.
Nick van Terheyden
So for those of you just joining, I’m Dr. Nick the incrementalist today I’m talking to Branislav VEDA, which he is the CEO and founder of heartbeat, we were just talking about the history of the ECG. And I can tell you as a medical student, you know, one of the areas that I certainly struggled with, and one of the insights that you sort of intimated and I think it’s important for people to understand, when you think about this 12 lead ECG is, it’s essentially a visual of electrical activity from different locations in the body. So it’s like looking, that was the most helpful insight that I ever received from a cardiology was a cardiologist was, you’re looking at the heart through this little telescope, and just seeing the electrical activity that way. And that helped me understand but, you know, you make an important point. And, you know, I guess maybe a little bit surprising to folks is how old this techno show we’ve added some new capabilities, we can do it faster. It used to be, you know, a much more involved process, we can do it much faster. But hey, you’re doing it in an entirely different way. And I think I want to call out something that you highlighted that I see as an incremental step in this, which was the no baggage comment. It’s, you know, you didn’t have the history of Well, that’s the way it’s done. You looked at it an entirely different way. And it sounds like the adjacent possible from the nuclear physicists that you talked about that maybe they were seeing it in a different way that they were accessing different imaging, albeit not ECGs. Was that the way that you came up with this concert?
Branislav Vajdic
He Yes, absolutely. You know, without a novel approach This problem was not going to be solved, right? Because there is no way to get that verbally ECG without all these wires running around running around the body. And turned out that our 3d model is superior to that 12 lead ECG, that standard of care, you’ve done a number of studies, we have shown that our 3d signal collection and subsequent processing give more accurate data in regards to that possible heart attack, that there are panel cardiologists reading that smell the DCG standard of care, very significant. And another thing that we have innovated in on top of this three dimensional signal collection and processing is a personalized market, we came up with a way to actually detect heart attack, by differential differentiation between your current state and your normal state, very important, every normal is a bit different, in our case, is personalized. So then you become a subscriber, we build your model, that’s just your model. And then then you don’t feel well, the actually go and subtract your normal from your current and see the difference. Very important. So do those two things are crucial in making this technology possible. And again, you know, there is no other technologies we are aware of, it’s capable of doing that with with a device that’s always with the patient 24/7. effortlessly.
Nick van Terheyden
Fantastic. So, you know, clearly some tremendous advances with different thinking that provided a way of looking at the electrical conduction, and importantly, focused on some specific problems that we have with cardiovascular disease. And the challenge and, you know, obviously, a very personal story, from your perspective, tell us a little bit about the problem that you’re solving, because it’s it’s extensive, but maybe not widely appreciated.
Branislav Vajdic
Yes, the problem, the first problem, perhaps the most important one that we we are solving, and we believe we have sold is that dilemma that that chest pain patient is, is is facing. And again, time is muscle. And in many cases, it does not end well because intervention, timely intervention, and a late intervention make a huge, huge difference. So in the value that we be offered to the patient is in easy always with a patient way to reassure them that they are fine, or if they are not timely intervention, that that that that in many cases is just around the corner, in terms of being able to call 911, et cetera, et cetera, you know, that people ask me sometimes, what is the standard of care right now? Well, I’m afraid the standard of care right now is patient is on their own, really, because they have to three hours themselves, they have to decide, is that one too many taco bits I ate? Or is this really a heart attack, and they’re not qualified to do that. And and, and so if you lower that barrier, as we did, to taking this device out of the pocket, and having your physician perhaps in a tele visit a few minutes later, then the value to the patient is very, very clear. But I’d like to point out that in our investigations or, you know, in talks with the other stakeholders, like providers and insurance companies, payers, we find a huge resonance, right, you know, if you talk to the payers, they’re keenly interested in, in having a, you know, a more continuous look at that high risk patient, because all of a sudden, instead of once a year, you you’re doing your checkup once a week, it’s a 32nd investment. And it’s a normal, it does not really go to your physician unless it’s found to be abnormal. So the data is being built. We apply AI to that data, that data rich data set, and, and all of a sudden, and we strongly believe that’s going to happen. You have prevented The value in predictive value, not only that you have a reactive value for the for, for that patient that’s symptomatic. But collecting that longitudinal or lifelong data will yield, in our opinion, huge possibility of preventing and predicting some of these events.
Nick van Terheyden
So, you know, it’s interesting you talk about that differential. I mean, that’s and you know, you said, most people are not qualified, let me be clear, I have the same problem of I’m a physician, when I have chest pain, I’m worrying about it. And you know, the value of applying data to this, I think, is extraordinary. I think some folks might look at this and say, Well, okay, so this is an ECG. How is this not just we’ve got devices that do this is, is this different?
Branislav Vajdic
Yes, this is very different, right? There are a whole bunch of variables Apple Watch the most progress most, most familiar one with has ECG technology, well, ECG technologies, Apple and others have, have done well for a fee for written detection. And that’s their relatively narrow diagnosis and important one, but they’re relatively narrow diagnosis. And they are specifically in their FDA clearance, stating, they are not able to detect heart attack. So the differentiation is huge, between a 12 lead capable and in our case, even beyond that, going beyond that, and a single lead ECG that’s capable of detecting only a retina and, and, of course, our technology offers that value as well. So our vision is, is you know, sort of a one stop shopping if you want for all cardiac patients and worried well, population that is interested in monitoring their cardiac health.
Nick van Terheyden
So it clearly different, some automation that allows you to get to some rapid review of content without the requirement to include individuals. This device being you’re going through the process to get FDA approval, you’re doing some trials, and so forth. Tell us a little bit about why you see this going.
Branislav Vajdic
Well, in our mind, this is going to be in cardiovascular space, for patients and for wallet, well, so like a technology that will be widely accepted. Because it’s so easy to use, it’s effortlessly with the with the user, in this case, patient or non patient. And again, cardiovascular disease, number one cause of death worldwide. Finally, you can do something to monitor your cardiac health, and God forbid if you don’t feel well to react in time.
Nick van Terheyden
So I think an exciting time, you’re essentially focused on a specific set of needs and a problem that exists in cardiovascular patients extending beyond that distribution of these devices that would be in the home. But in the future. I mean, it sounds like this might be something that everybody has, and is always available so that you can answer that question quickly and easily. And it’s tied to both the technology that it gives you that three dimensional imaging plus all of the automation and the preview, I think it’s important to have the, the normal or the individualized ECG that says this is next ECG. Oh, this is Branislav. So ECG.
Branislav Vajdic
Absolutely. Again, this is part of one of the key innovations that we we came up with and, you know, the markets are huge, right? You know, there are about 40 million people with diagnosed coronary artery disease, very high risk for heart attack. And worldwide market is, of course, even much bigger. And so we are very excited about the impact, you know, you know, talking about flash memory again, you know, it has huge impact on our lives. And I’m equally excited today, with the prospect of this technology changing, touching so many lives and removing fear in prolonging life. It’s very timely intervention.
Nick van Terheyden
Fantastic. Well, unfortunately, as usual, we’ve run out of time just remains for me to thank you for joining me on the show. Exciting times. I think. Maybe there’s another patent that’s going to be long lived and We’ll be saying the same thing and years to come Wow Branislav had this additional patent all around cardiovascular disease so thanks for joining me Branislav
Branislav Vajdic
thank you so much it was very much enjoyable organization today
