From the March 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine



“Even though it’s expensive, it’s a lot less expensive than having to deal with [heart disease] after it’s so far advanced that it’s affecting [the patient’s] ability to work and function,” he adds.

Echocardiography is here to stay
The most commonly used imaging modality to diagnose heart disease is ultrasound. That’s because clinicians want something that is non-traumatic and easily accessible to the general population, says Watson.

In August 2016, GE launched its most advanced portable cardiovascular ultrasound system, Vivid iq. It can perform 4-D transesophageal imaging and it weighs less than 10 pounds.



“Our customers can take this system and put it in the trunk of their car and drive to another clinic,” says Al Lojewski, general manager of cardiovascular ultrasound at GE. “They continue to look for portable, laptop ultrasound systems because of the space premium in some of these care areas.”

For the Vivid S70, Vivid E90 and Vivid E95 cardiovascular ultrasounds, GE introduced its 4-D ultrasound software called cSound in July 2015. Since it depends on algorithms to interpret images, it has greater versatility than conventional hardware-based beam-forming machines that process each piece of data separately.

Transthoracic echocardiograms are inconclusive 10 to 15 percent of the time. GE believes that the cSound software will help to reduce that amount.

“If [the physician] doesn’t see a certain section of the heart because the patient’s rib is in the way and there’s noise in the image, then that would be [considered] non-diagnostic,” says Lojewski. “Overall they are not so concerned about the technology, but they are concerned about reducing non-diagnostic imaging patients.”

Philips Healthcare launched the Heart- Model tool for its EPIQ 7 ultrasound in July 2015. Conventional cardiac ultrasound technology takes up to three hours to perform 50 studies, but HeartModel can cut that down by almost two-thirds.

Cardiologists are under pressure to perform more studies in a day in this new health care environment. As a result, health systems are looking to purchase technology that can rapidly provide an accurate diagnosis.

“There are so many uses for echocardiography right now and the volumes have been increasing and increasing,” Dr. Wendy Tsang, a cardiologist at Toronto General Hospital, told HealthCare Business News when HeartModel was launched. “But it’s not like hospitals are hiring more physicians because they’re trying to maintain cost.”
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