Talking HealthTech: 343 – AI driven analytics set to revolutionise cardiac rehabilitation patient care. Helen Souris, Cardihab

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Capacity constraints and rising costs of care mean there is an urgent need to scale models of care beyond traditional. 

We know digital models of care can help us achieve this, but in parallel, we need to harness the power of the data lakes behind these digital models to enable scale and impact. 

Solutions like Cardihab can help healthcare organisations deliver this end goal and truly help them to deliver high-quality models of care at scale. 

In this episode, Pete speaks with Helen Souris, the CEO of Cardihab. This company delivers innovative solutions that leverage technology and data capabilities to improve outcomes for patients and healthcare professionals. This episode discusses how artificial intelligence can help with cardiac rehabilitation. They also talk about the different funding mechanisms like grants that health tech innovators can access and much more.

Meet Helen Souris 

Helen has a BA in Statistics and Computer Science with 20+ years of commercial expertise in FMCG, digital innovation, MedTech and BioTech. As Cardihab CEO, Helen focuses on delivering innovative solutions that leverage technology and data capabilities to improve patient and healthcare professionals’ outcomes.

Helen is a strong advocate for evidence-based digital health innovations that support the growth of the Australian digital health ecosystem.

About Cardihab

Cardihab is a company that helps improve access to programs for patients that have had a heart attack or a cardiac procedure. They offer a digital therapeutic solution to people who need help recovering from heart related events. Their TGA registered digital solution has been adopted across Australia in several health settings, such as private health insurers, public hospitals, private hospitals, and community care. And they’re making significant inroads towards achieving their goal of improving access to cardiac rehab.

Cardihab is excited about its data lake, which they have been building and generating over time through their digital cardiac rehabilitation program. They are now able to bring value and meaning back to their customers and create an analytics environment to provide useful, timely insights to clinicians and patients. They are also leveraging their unique lake of health data to help their customers do more with their services and treat more patients.

Cardihab’s Data Lake and CROPS

The data lake is the composition of all the information that Cardihab collects and harnesses from their patients, such as heart rate data, walking data, medication adherence, stress monitoring, and clinician overviews. It captures care, program process data, patient-reported and clinical outcomes data. CROPS stands for Cardiac Rehab Outcomes and Process Synopsis, and all that comes from their lake.

At the Australian Healthcare Week conference a couple of weeks ago, it was discussed that a lot of data that goes into an EMR doesn’t actually come back to a clinician to help them make a decision about the patient that they’re seeing in front of them. The data is lost in sight, and currently not available to the doctor, nurse, or allied health care person, when they might do something meaningful with it at the time they are in front of the patient.  

Through C.R.O.P.S., Cardihab can enable the use of meaningful data so that when you have someone in front of you, and you see their blood pressure readings spikes and troughs, and you can see that when you’re talking to that patient, you can do something about it. Another example, relates to medication adherence or activity like steps. 

The power of having data visible in clinical decision-making is that it can significantly impact patient outcomes, healthcare administrator outcomes, and business decision support outcomes. For example, if you have ten nurses available to manage a hundred patients, how do you optimise that so you can get more patients into care and reduce wait lists? To do this, you must look at improving your systems and efficiencies to treat more patients without blowing out your resources. Process data can help clinical teams and health services appropriately plan their workforce and resourcing.

AI and Cardihab

Artificial Intelligence is being used to improve processes. This includes processing terabytes of data quickly and flagging those patients who need more help or urgent care, and optimising the platform to enable more people to be cared for. AI Algorithms can be used to identify patients that are not doing well based on key measures, such as sleep, medication adherence, heart rate and blood pressure, and stress and anxiety. AI Algorithms are being used to identify those who are not doing well, and these are both essential elements of optimisation for the platform.

The data journey is about deciding what is strategically relevant to what happens next. It is also about building some of those fundamentals and capabilities, such as benchmarking and looking at what’s relevant not just within Australia but in a global context. Finally, it looks at what outcomes should be resourced and increased digitally, such as in general practice or Allied Healthcare community services, virtual hospitals, and health channel comparisons. 

Cardihab’s Accelerating Commercialisation Grant

Investment, time, effort, and funds are necessary for organisations to expand their capabilities and access funding.

Capital to deliver on a vision is hard in Australia, so the company applied for the Accelerating Commercialisation grant to keep going with its data vision. The grant requires the idea to be novel, meaningful, and something customers want.

The process of applying for the accelerating commercialisation grant is as important as getting the money, as it helps to sharpen and refine the product and articulate the vision. There is a lot of governance around it. The Cardihab team is thankful for the initial funding and will make the most of it as they go through this first stage.

Compliance and Ethical Use of Data 

Cardihab has a novel data lake that no one else has, and they have a responsibility to use it with the proper focus and purpose to benefit their customers and patients. They have partnerships to help them deliver this program of work, but they also have the same challenge as everyone else in this data space: to do the small stuff in a considered and governed way. They appreciate the sentiment around data protection and governance and the standards and frameworks that need to be in place to ensure data is used appropriately. They also want to ensure that whatever they’re producing within this product sits firmly within consent and within the customer’s desires for how they would use the data. It is a big responsibility to do it ethically and competently.

Responsible and considered ethical use of data in healthcare and the need to build trust along the way is essential. Having the right approach to data use in healthcare and having a meaningful impact is crucial. It is also important to raise the next round of funds to do even more as healthcare moves at the speed of trust.

The Future of Cardihab

The focus of the Cardihab is to provide access to Cardiac Rehabilitation to as many patients as possible as it is proven to improve outcomes. The team are keen to reach out to any hospitals, healthcare services or providers that would be interested in discussing how data analytics could help them improve their processes and efficiencies. The company is now working with some of its customers on the C.R.O.P.S. data product, and they are seeing efficiencies and growth opportunities and can share insights into how to best leverage these.

Cardihab welcomes anyone passionate about seeing a change in adopting digital health solutions in Australia. Part of their alternative or parallel ambition is to see that digital therapeutics are not seen as just an app. They’re not just something that you add to your clinical workflow. It’s something that needs to be designed into the clinical workflow as a part of the care pathway. They are passionate about that because they’ve seen incredible examples of when it’s done well and what a difference it can make. We must look back at this moment five years from now and think, how did we ever live without a digital therapeutic cornerstone in the workflow, not seen as an extra app that sits on the side?

_{Source talkinghealthtech.com}