By Stuart Long

Personnel shortages are an issue across many industries—but none are as critical as those affecting healthcare. The World Health Organization anticipates a shortage of approximately 10 million healthcare workers globally by the year 2030. Cardiology, in particular, is impacted in an outsized way. In the U.S., nearly half of all counties lack a practicing cardiologist, a gap that drives up cardiac costs, degrades patient outcomes, and disproportionately affects rural and underserved areas.

Cardiovascular disease already costs healthcare entities $252.2 billion annually, with projections soaring to $1.8 trillion by 2050 due to aging populations and rising risk factors like obesity and hypertension.
Because of this shortage, particularly in rural counties, patients must travel an average of 87 miles round trip for specialized care. This leaves primary care physicians to handle local, complex cardiac cases without adequate resources. This burden on care teams not only overwhelms hospitals and compromises patient outcomes but also leads to provider burnout. A recent survey found that 42% of cardiologists said they were experiencing burnout, which has been linked with decreased job satisfaction and retention, only further compounding the problem.

While technology cannot fully alleviate the clinician shortage, it can help. Within cardiology, one promising technology is AI-powered remote cardiac monitoring. By radically reducing the manual intervention required to monitor the heart and radically increasing the scalability with which cardiologists can interpret and intervene, AI-powered remote cardiac monitoring acts as a powerful companion to the cardiologist—a force multiplier that can bring demand into closer alignment with clinician availability.

What’s behind the power of AI-powered remote cardiac monitoring?
The potential of AI-powered remote cardiac monitoring lies in its unique ability to combine hospital-level acuity with artificial intelligence to simultaneously drive precision and scale. Let’s take a closer look at how this transformative technology works.

Using convenient wearable devices and advanced sensors, AI-powered remote cardiac monitoring tracks continuous, near real-time cardiac data, including heart rate, rhythm irregularities, and other vital metrics. The wearable device then transmits data to a secure platform where AI algorithms rapidly analyze it, identifying anomalies and patterns with unparalleled precision. Together, high-acuity data and AI-powered analytics surface potential and existing issues, streamlining the flow of actionable insights directly to the cardiologist.

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