Nearly half of all Americans, according to the American Heart Association, are afflicted with a cardiovascular disease (CVD)—a group of disorders that includes strokes, heart failure, heart valve disease, and atrial fibrillation. Ensuring these millions can access the care and treatments they need has become a daunting but necessary task. Patients, after entering a healthcare network, should be tracked over time and directed to the right kind of care. Inevitably, some fall through the cracks.
Enter Egnite, a California–based digital healthcare company that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to help physicians ensure patients receive faster access to the treatments they need. The company’s proprietary technologies comb through massive data sets—millions of electronic medical records and charts—to give healthcare professionals a more complete understanding of their cardiovascular patients, tracking how much time has passed after a diagnosis and identifying those with the highest priority for physician followup.
More than 50 healthcare systems nationwide use Egnite’s flagship platform, CardioCare, to help identify potentially untreated cardiovascular patients, prioritize care for lifesaving treatment, and better understand their cardiovascular populations. For those with CVD, that kind of actionable information can mean the difference between life and death. According to Kahla Verhoef, chief product officer at Egnite, CardioCare can boost lifesaving treatments by as much as 25% on average.
“We partner with health systems to get patients off the sidelines and connected with specialists who are qualified to make decisions about their care,” says Verhoef. Helping cardiovascular patients access the care they need has earned Egnite a spot on Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2024.
PUSHING RESEARCH FORWARDIn 2023, Egnite added capabilities to CardioCare that matched cardiovascular patients with current clinical trials and novel treatments. The platform now automates the once time-consuming and costly process of determining which patients from a large group (as many as several hundred thousand) meet the criteria for participation.
Now, enrollment times have been cut in half—which means medical devices and other therapies can get to market faster. AI assistance can also help lower the cost of cardiovascular research by reducing the hours that used to be required to manually identify and vet potential study candidates.
“Our desire to help with clinical trials came from the same desire that led us to start the company,” Verhoef says. “We know the patients are there, and we know the therapies are there. We just need to help connect the two.”
CONTRIBUTING TO CLINICAL EVIDENCEFrom its enormous database, Egnite can extract vast knowledge about CVD and has published research based on de-identified patient data gleaned from millions of medical records. One such study demonstrated high untreated mortality risk for patients with moderate aortic stenosis—a narrowing of one of the four heart valves—indicating this patient population may benefit from further study of earlier treatment.
Findings such as these are important to medicine because healthcare innovation is an iterative process. As knowledge increases, treatments improve—but new questions also emerge. Collaboration, Verhoef emphasizes, is vital to progress.
“We’re highly engaged with our physician partners, our end-users at health systems, and our industry partners to keep thinking about how we can improve the process of care from beginning to end,” she says. “For us, innovation is something that never stops.”
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