Clinical and operational benefits of Cardiologs — the Cardiac Physiologist’s perspective

Carla Purkis is a cardiac physiologist at ECG On-Demand. She is doing cardiac analyses and also regularly training hospital customers on the use of ECG On- Demand and the Cardiologs Holter Platform. She has worked for ECG On-Demand since June 2020, and was a clinical and new product development specialist at Spacelabs before that. Carla also worked for NHS and private hospitals for more than ten years as a cardiac physiologist, specializing in echocardiography, sports cardiology, and pediatrics.

Carla, as a training manager, can you elaborate on Cardiologs’ learning curve?

The system is so easy to use, user friendly and logical that you can navigate your way through it and feel comfortable very quickly, which is a massive selling point for Cardiologs. Whether during in-house or customer training I have done, everybody has said that the solution was brilliant and that they felt confident literally after a couple of cases.

Personally, I found it really easy to use and navigate. Cardiologs is very user-centric, methodical and systematic in its approach and workflow. Everything is logically laid out in a way that a physiologist’s mind works. You’re not just clicking and wondering what happens if you click here and there. It guides you without having to worry where to find menus, whereas in a lot of systems you’re constantly hunting for where you need to be, for labels, sub-menus, reclassification, etc.

How efficient are analyses with Cardiologs?

The efficiency of the system for longer term analysis is really good. There is now a clinical need for longer term monitoring. Seven days used to be the maximum, but now we’ve got that demand for two or three weeks, for optimization of patients suffering from heart failure, or patients with very sporadic symptoms. And it might become more important, especially now patients seem to be getting cardiovascular effects from COVID-19. There’s a gap between short term holter monitoring and interventional implantation, that event monitors aren’t always the best to fill, because you don’t have continuous monitoring. So it’s nice to be able to propose long term Holter monitoring and the Cardiologs system has helped us with that. I did a 21-days Holter analysis with Cardiologs two weeks ago. Normally it’d be very time consuming, and it took me nowhere near at the time I was expecting it would take me, which was a really pleasant surprise. Typically, analyzing a seven day Holter can take you between 20 minutes to one hour, depending on the amount of arrhythmias for that specific patient. So for a 21 day Holter, I was expecting up to three hours, and it actually only took me 45 minutes, which is incredible for a 21 day Holter. It’s fantastic.

What about clinical accuracy?

Yet, the analysis was very in depth and accurate, there was no guesstimation, Cardiologs gave me all the metrics to back up the analysis. It’s key from a clinical standpoint for treatment options to understand whether an arrhythmia is spread out throughout 21 days or restricted to a two days period.

The metrics and bar graphs displayed in the Cardiologs report are invaluable to highlight and pinpoint precisely on a long-term Holter the burden or whereabouts of an arrhythmia, or whether there’s something expediting that arrhythmia. They’re much more in depth than what’s usually available, so you don’t need to mentally figure that out yourself, all the trends are visible right away. In a lot of other systems, you just get a summary.

Any specific feature that makes a difference?

Silly things like multiple selection of patient events — being able to put three or four symptoms in in one event — or the contextual strips so that you can give clarity to a customer and see a little bit before and a little bit after the actual event, or even being able to change the RR interval metric between ms and bpm — all of those little improvements are godsends.

As a physiologist, you need to get a feel for the recording. So being able to have a look at the heart rate density plot initially, and zoom in and out of it is brilliant. It’s also a really good plus point that Cardiologs allows you to reclassify events very easily. You can move episodes from one category to another, extend and shorten events, make sure that you’ve got the right metrics really easily without having to worry about changing classification criteria or going into this or that menu.

It might not seem like a lot, but to a physiologist, constantly having to do the same thing for each recording that you open can be quite frustrating, and time consuming. Obviously we all want to be the most efficient we can be, but you don’t want to compromise your accuracy on efficiency. That’s a balancing act all the time, and the beauty of ECG on demand is we’re very focused on our accuracy level. It’s a big selling point for us as a company, and I think the Cardiologs platform does help with that.

How are you interacting with Cardiologs?

Our interaction with Cardiologs has been amazing with suggestions of new things that could improve our life as a physiologist and that you’ve implemented very quickly. The team has been very responsive, development and improvements cycles are a lot quicker than with other solutions. Direct physiologist feedback is really vital in improving a system, I think it’s really important that we have that kind of integral link with Cardiologs.

For more information about Cardiologs, visit www.cardiologs.com

Legal & Regulatory mentions

Medical Device
The Cardiologs ECG Analysis Platform is a medical device intended for use by qualified healthcare professionals for the assessment of arrhythmias using ECG data in subjects over 18 years of age. Class IIa in Europe (CE2797) in compliance with the Medical Device Directive (MM 93/42/EEC amended by 2007/47/EC).
Class II in the USA according to the 510K clearance.

Warnings
This material with associated pictures is non-contractual. It is for distribution to Health Care Professionals only and should not be relied upon by any other persons. Carefully read the instructions for use prior to use. This material reflects the opinion of Health Care Professionals, not the opinion of Cardiologs.

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