GE Healthcare recently partnered with an independent diagnostic testing facility called LifeWatch to offer their patients cloud-based ECG monitoring services.

About 610,000 people die of heart disease in the U.S. every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Part of that could be due to the fact that it's difficult to monitor at-risk patients outside the hospital.

"Today, IDTFs monitor patients for their heart condition in and out of the hospital setting by monitoring their ECGs," Ashutosh Banerjee, general manager of diagnostic cardiology at GE, told HCB News. "[They] monitor in real time every heartbeat from every patient connected to their device, and identify abnormalities."
The devices that IDTFs typically use are Holter monitors, mobile cardiac telemetry or event monitors, depending on what the physicians prescribed for a patient.

GE's cloud-based Algorithm Server can help IDTFs triage normal and abnormal ECGs that come into their monitoring service. That's made possible with GE's patented, FDA-approved intelligent algorithms.

GE offers a total of 21 algorithms for detecting and interpreting a variety of abnormalities in the human heart. The majority of them have been developed in partnership with clinical researchers around the world.

The company has the only clinically proven algorithm in the world today that detects pacemakers and adjusts them so they can continue to accurately interpret ECGs.

The first algorithm running on the cloud as part of GE's Algorithm Server suite is called EK12, which received FDA approval in June. The Algorithm Server is expected to be commercially available later this year.

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