Dr. Waqaas Al-Siddiq, Founder & CEO of Biotricity, sat down with me to discuss his journey from computer engineering to healthcare, innovation in the cardiac monitoring space, the concept of Mobile Cardiac Telemetry (MCT), and more.
Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:
Q: If you’re an individual that, let’s just say, for example, you have an arrhythmia, or you’ve had a congestive heart failure in the past and now need to be monitored. Before the advent of Biotricity, what was the pathway? What was the patient journey like before you ever entered the scene? So what was literally the problem statement?
A: What the problem was with patients before we essentially came out on the scene was you’ve got a high-risk patient, they’ve got high comorbidity, bad data, high risk of having a stroke, heart attack, or A-Fib; they’re coming in complaining of palpitation or an issue and the doctor has two tools available to them, truly. They have a halter monitor, which they know if they send the patient out for long term, there’s a high risk that the patient is going to have an event, and they’re going to end up in the ER, maybe even pass on or check them into the hospital and monitor them at the bedside. The idea of sending home on a monitor which is passively recording is creating patient risk versus putting them onto the bedside is creating an expense.
Doctors would not always make the right decision. There are many patients that look better, their blood work makes it look like they’re in better shape than they actually are. And so, some patients would end up in the hospital and other patients end up on a monitor, go home, then have a massive event (stroke, heart attack, or maybe they go into heart failure), and they never wake up. That was the essential problem — how do we take medium to high risk patients and enable them to go home and monitor them over a long period of time while creating this safety net of active monitoring.
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Dr. Waqaas Al-Siddiq, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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