New stethoscope shows the potential of technology to reinvent health care

(MENAFN- The Peninsula)

By Matt McFarland

About 200 years ago a French physician rolled a sheet of paper into a cylinder and held it up to the chest of a patient. The creation was crude and simple but it worked. Rene Laenneac could better hear his patient's heartbeat and the stethoscope was born.

Today the stethoscope remains a fixture in medicine draped around the shoulders of doctors. It's also overdo for a makeover.

Now Eko Devices a Silicon Valley start-up has received federal Food and Drug Administration approval for its digital stethoscope which brings the power of modern technology to an already essential device. The implications could be huge for patient care.

The stethoscope called the Eko Core records the sounds of a patient's heart and transmits them to an iPhone app. This opens the potential for heart sounds to be stored in the cloud for clinicians to reference or to analyze en masse to heighten their understanding of the human heart. High-quality care could be provided at a lower cost. Unnecessary tests could be avoided.

It's been difficult for cardiologists to seize the full power of the Internet. Being in a patient's presence has been essential in order to hear the heart. But with a digital stethoscope that's connected to the Internet cardiologists could sit in their offices and review heart sounds sent from around the world.

"If we can bring the expert cardiologists from Johns Hopkins to the patient in rural Nebraska or the rural village in India that opens up the opportunity to save lives" said Jason Bellet the chief operating officer at Eko Devices.

What's more this data could be gathered by someone who would need only a basic knowledge of how to operate a medical device.

"How do you provide state-of-the-art care in the areas where patients live?" asked Ami Bhatt the director of cardiology and an affiliate of the health care transformation lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. "Both with travel work time that is lost having families and then even insurance in and out of state et cetera it is a challenge oftentimes to get to a big academic medical center generally in a city far away from you."

While other electronic stethoscopes exist Eko's is the first to have a federally compliant smartphone app and integration into the electronic health record. For digital stethoscopes to become the norm they will have to integrate seamlessly into physicians' lives and patients' medical records while protecting privacy.

For physicians who want to keep their existing stethoscopes Eko sells a $199 attachment for analog devices. Eko also has a $299 version that filters out ambient noise so that physicians can focus on the sound of the heart. Use of the related app is free for small practices and Eko will be charging larger operations. It's already partnered with Drchrono a platform for electronic health records to get its data to flow into those records. This week it plans to begin selling to physicians.

The Silicon Valley start-up also holds much broader aspirations. It's developing an algorithm that it hopes will recognize heart conditions.

"Our goal is to have the doctor put the stethoscope on the patient's chest click analyze much like you would click identify a song within the Shazam app and have it say this is a midsystolic ejection murmur" Bellet said.

Currently a professor at the University of California-San Francisco is testing the algorithm to see how it stacks up against an echocardiogram a trusted but expensive machine used to monitor the heart.

The professor John Chorboa met Eko chief executive Connor Landgraf through a university class and was struck by the promise of what Landgraf proposed.

"Maybe it can do it in a better way than the human ear can and maybe it can tell us something about the human heart that we didn't really know before" Chorboa said.

Analyzing huge data sets has proved immensely valuable elsewhere so it follows that there's much to be gained from studying a wealth of data about the human heart and its sounds.

"I hope that someday we will be able to use big data a set of algorithms to say 'When your murmur is changing at this rate that will predict that you could need a valve surgery for this reason in this much time' " Bhatt said. "That's the ideal that's the Holy Grail with these kind of things. It will take time to get here. These are the first steps these are the building blocks for eventually getting to that kind of personalized medicine."

WP-Bloomberg