High Quality, Low Cost HealthCare Video Interview Series: Dr. David Albert and AliveCor

7 Min Read

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Last week we heard Dr Akash Rajpal talk about Ekohealth and how it helps patients negotiate costs of medical procedures and medications.  Today, I have David Albert, CEO and Founder of AliveCor who will talk about and show us AliveCor’s Mobile Heart Monitor for iPhone 4 or 4S.  This small portable monitor takes an EKG in just seconds and can send it immediately to your provider.  And AliveCor.com provides you with anytime, anywhere, fully secure, HIPAA-compliant online access to all of your ECGs. 

This monitor is cleared for use by medical professionals by the FDA and has already started shipping.  Later this year, it will also be available in Droid platform.  Watch the video and listen to Dr Albert talk about the heart monitor and give us a live demonstration of how it works.

To see other videos in this series, please go to this page.  And if you have a story to tell that can reduce healthcare costs and raise quality of care, please comment below or email me at joan@socialmediatoday.com  Thanks!

Video transcription (by transcriptionstar)

Joan:  Hello.  I’m Joan Justice with HealthWorks Collective.  And I’m here today with Dr. David Albert, Founder CMO of AliveCor.  Dr. Albert has a background in medicine, biomedical engineering, and he’s a serial entrepreneur who holds numerous patents and has developed and then sold several medical device companies.

 

AliveCor is portable.  AliveCor is mobile heart monitor for iPhone 4 or 4s was recently approved by the FDA and it takes an instant EKG that you can then send to your provider, but AliveCor’s mission goes beyond this, and they stayed on the website.  We want everyone to have their health at their fingertips.  That’s why we make the vital health signs on people and animals around the globe easily visible and actionable at exceptionally low cost.

 

Dr. Albert, tell us a little about AliveCor?

 

Dr. Albert:  Well, thank you Joan for inviting me to be with you here today.  AliveCor is based on an idea I had back in the 1990, when I saw the power of that the time, our Personal Digital Assistants.  That’s an old term that we used to use for the handheld computers.  But my idea couldn’t at that time because those devices simply didn’t have the power, the computational power, the wireless connectivity needed, but that idea stayed in my head, and so when Steve Jobs as he — the late Steve Jobs said who changed the world when he introduced the iPhone that again back in 2007, 2008 a rekindling of that idea that I could put on electrocardiogram into the pocket of every physician, every nurse, every patient, every veterinarian, and enable cardiac health to be assessed anywhere anytime and to do so at the cost of an iPhone, Smartphone case and so that became my admission which is now turned into AliveCor of we’ve been very fortunate to raise significant equity capital and had excellent partners.

 

And as you stated recently received our FDA 510(k) to begin selling our AliveCor heart monitor and I’ll give you an early notion that Monday we just received word that our app has been accepted by the Apple app store and then Monday we’ll actually begin shipping our product to health professionals here in the United States, and soon they will begin prescribing that product.  Now, I’ll say we have been shipping, but we have been shipping the veterinarians around the world, so well over a thousand veterinarians in the last couple of months and we’ve been doing ECGs on everything from dogs, cats, horses to rhinos and exotic lizards and things at various zoos around the world because they have heart problems too.

 

And so we take the notion that the portability and here’s our device it’s a case that literally just fits on to an iPhone, and you snap it on that this device enables you for less than $200 to do a clinical quality ECG rhythm strip and then instantly transmit that to a specialist, a cardiologist.  And as I mentioned to you there are 250 odd veterinary cardiologists in the United States and about 25,000 human cardiologists so they’re going to become the recipients of a lot more instant data.

 

And we’ve been very fortunate.  I have a very prominent cardiologist, such as Dr. Eric Topol, Dr. Leslie Saxon who are great advocates unpaid, never be given a dime, but you believe that the power of mobility, that the so-called Mobile Health mHealth and we believe we’re on the Mmedicine company and Mobile medicine company that we bring the power of traditional medical technology together with this incredible paradigm shift disruptive technology of the Smartphones, but quite frankly we’re not just in the park that doctors they’re in everybody’s pocket.

 

Joan:  Everyone.

 

David:  Everyone and this is going to be how most people in the world, so our products you know used to be medical technology was only limited to the developed world, the U.S., Japan, Europe, and now Smartphones exist everywhere because the only technology infrastructure that you have in South America, India, Africa, China is cell phone infrastructure.  They may not good electricity or good water, but you got a cell phone and so the Smartphone and the devices and technology so we can interface to it will be the way healthcare is delivered bidirectionally from the patient to a caregiver, from the caregiver back to the patient so we’re just an early — let’s just say we’re early in that, in that Tsunami of disruption, but we —

 

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