Future Perspective: Technology and Cardiovascular Care

Covid–19 made us change the way we communicate almost overnight. Digital communication has now become the “new normal”. This can be seen in many aspects of the health industry. Patients can communicate with each other; doctors or clinicians and data is being used to monitor performance.  Some people find this very welcoming, but others find it quite difficult, as they are not used to the technology or they may have limited access to it.

Remote consultation can be done from work or home and it allows workers to consult with their healthcare team. Remote Monitoring can collect information regarding blood sugar, blood pressure, heart failure and make this information visible to the healthcare team. These are both developing rapidly.

Above, you can see the evolution of the ECG Machine from the earliest version to the newest.  Before the pandemic, patients had to go to a clinical setting to test their ECG.  Now, there is a digital setting on smartphones or smartwatches which can test patient’s ECG and send the results via PDF to anywhere in the world.

Remote monitoring has a range of technology to monitor heart failure. There are more straight forward methods including weighing scales, blood pressure etc., and complex devices which can monitor using implantable devices, like an ICT or CRT.