AliveCor brings wearable medtech to NHS

Strictly speaking, AliveCor sits outside TechMarketView’s core software and IT services (SITS) research focus area. But the California-headquartered start up has a powerful story to tell around ‘wearable medtech’ and it’s hard not to get excited about the difference that innovations like AliveCor’s could make to the NHS and its patients. These innovations are the future of healthcare IT and SITS suppliers need to be adapting their propositions for the sector to match.

AliveCor has developed a credit card-sized mobile heart monitor known as Kardia that instantly captures medical grade electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings on a smartphone and uses algorithms to detect, monitor and manage heart arrhythmias. It also detects incidents of possible atrial fibrillation (AF), which is responsible for a third of all strokes and costs the NHS over £2.2bn annually.

Statistics like this illustrate why the NHS is keen to encourage the take up of AliveCor’s Kardia product and other medical innovations that promise to transform care in a similar way. Quite apart from the impact that strokes have on patients and their carers, the high cost of treating stroke patients means that the NHS needs to do all it can to prevent them occurring, faced as it is with an ageing and ailing population and increasingly limited budgets.

But, historically, getting take up of medical innovations in the NHS has been slow and frustrating. Can NHS England change that now?

PublicSectorViews subscribers can read our analysis of AliveCor and the NHS’ new approach to innovation in AliveCor: Wearable Medtech & Innovation in the NHS, published today.

Posted by Tola Sargeant at '14:52' - Tagged: startup   health   research   medtech