Q: Is Using A Mobile EKG Such As Cardia Helpful for My Cardiologist?
If you send every one of those Cardia EKGs to your cardiologist, every two or three minutes, it’s not helpful. But, if you’re recording what’s going on with your heart, and you work together to get that snapshot of what the heart is doing, to your cardiologist’s attention, to make a diagnosis – that’s helpful.
So if we know someone has atrial fibrillation 10 times a day in general, we don’t need a recording of all 10 of those episodes every day. But, if we don’t know that a patient has atrial fibrillation and they get a monitor like Cardia or an Apple Watch, the new one, and they record what their heart’s doing and bring that in o their doctor and they work together to come up with a diagnosis. That’s really helpful.
Or, if we give a patient a medication, let’s say we give a patient a drug that slows their heart rate down and we assume that it’s doing its job, and they catch a picture of their heart going very fast and they’re in AFib, we know we need to change that medication regimen, as a result of it.
So, I think it’s adjunctive. It can be very helpful to have a patient monitor their own heart in moderation.