Letter from the Executive Director
Dear Friends of One Heart Health,
As we wrap up 2025, I am overwhelmed by the progress we have made and the momentum carrying One Heart Health into the new year. After years of building, testing, and sharing our technology, we are truly seeing the fruits of that labor in the impact it now has in communities that need it most. You supported us to screen children in low-resource areas of the world for CHD and to develop new cost-effective technology for doctors. This year we took a monumental leap with the deployment of the new version of One Heart App and the launch of expanded screening pilots in Nigeria and Bolivia, expanding to 8 additional centers across both countries.
CHD Screening Expansion
I was privileged to visit our partner doctors, Dr. Olukemi (Pediatric Cardiologist) and Dr. Onakpoya (Cardiac Surgeon) in Nigeria in June of this year to launch the second phase of our screening program. One Heart Health hosted a training day followed by site visits to each of the new centers, visiting with clinicians and patients.
Since our visit, doctors in Nigeria are screening an average of 1,000 children a month, identifying 15-20 with CHD who are then connected to the cardiac surgery unit at Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital for surgery. This is life-changing and helps extend the reach of Dr. Olukemi who can provide consultation for patients suspected of having CHD even if they are living hundreds of kilometers away.
In Bolivia, under the leadership of Dr. Alexandra Heath and Dr. Inge Von Alvensleben, the doctors are now screening an average of 500 patients a month, identifying an average of 10 children with CHD and connecting them to their cardiac surgery unit at Kardiozentrum or the public hospital in La Paz.
One Heart Health has screened over 5,000 children since July, and the monthly average continues to grow as doctors become more familiar with the technology and the screening is integrated into existing routines and workflows. You, as a donor, funded this work that saves lives – thank you!
World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery 2025
Many of our existing partnerships began at the World Congress of Pediatric Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery (WCPCCS) in 2023. When we left the congress, we launched the first phase of the Digital Heart Sounds Study to deploy the One Heart App and digital stethoscopes with our partners in Bolivia, Mongolia, and Nigeria. This year we had the pleasure to bring Dr. Heath (Bolivia), Dr. Olukemi (Nigeria), and Dr. Ulzii (Mongolia) to WCPCCS 2025 in Hong Kong to present and share their experience using the One Heart App to screen children for CHD in their communities. What a wonderful moment it was to see each of our partners, with whom we have shared many early mornings and late-night calls for the past 2 years, present their work, its impact, and provide future directions to other NGOs, doctors, advocates, and government representatives who are passionate about early detection of CHD. Following the workshop, we asked all attendees to join the CHD Screening Working Group. This new initiative led by One Heart Health will drive the conversation with experts and serve as a platform to create sustainable CHD screening networks.
Not only where we able to host a CHD screening workshop and sponsor our partner doctors to speak at WCPCCS this year, but we also presented three posters on our work from the Digital Heart Sounds Study including 1) Automated Phonocardiogram Analysis for Remote Congenital Heart Disease Screening; 2) A Multi-Institutional Study Using a Fine-Tuned Audio Spectrogram Transformer to Detect Congenital Heart Disease in Children from Phonocardiograms; and 3) Automated Heart Sound Quality Evaluation with Data Augmentation and Deep Learning. You not only support life-saving CHD screenings with your donation, but the advancement of new technologies and cutting-edge research that benefits others passionate about early detection of CHD. If the titles of the posters did not scare you away and instead inspired curiosity, I am happy to share a copy of them. You can contact me at aaron.faugstad@onehearthealth.org.
Where Do We Go from Here?
At WCPCCS, the need is clear for new low-cost tools to overcome geographical barriers to screen children early, diagnose early, and build adequate cardiac surgery units that can provide surgery for those diagnosed.
The clinical need for CHD is clear: 2 out of 100 children are born with CHD and 90% of those children receive suboptimal or no care at all. Many of these children will suffer an early death, not because we don’t know how to save them, but because they live in an area that does not screen for CHD or does not have access to cardiac surgery.
One Heart Health is building a coalition and growing that coalition by demonstrating the impact of the One Heart App and digital stethoscopes as a viable tool to screen children for CHD in low-resource areas. Just this week I have had the pleasure to speak with doctors from Fiji, Ghana, Pakistan, Nepal, Uganda, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe who all see the value and are interested in starting a CHD screening program with One Heart Health. This is incredible! One Heart Health has a CHD screening framework built and tested for two years that we will work with these new doctors to implement. In addition, we will continue to provide technical support and strengthen our existing partnerships.
We provide a safe and secure mobile app that doctors can rely on 24/7. We meet with each of our partners monthly to check-in and collect feedback. During those check-in calls we often hear about new features that could be helpful and we bring that feedback to our dev team to incorporate into the development roadmap. Since launching the new version of the One Heart App to our partners in June 2025 we have had 6 major updates to production including 5 new features. For a full-time development team, this would be a great accomplishment. For a part-time dev team who all have very busy day jobs, this is a miracle. It is with that I would like to thank our extremely hardworking team at One Heart Health for their drive and commitment. They are truly the best people I have worked with, and I am blessed to also call them my friends.
For 2026, we intend to:
- Explore and Expand CHD screening programs: Launch initiatives in Fiji, Ghana, India, Kenya, Pakistan, Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe
- Maintain a best-in-class mobile screening app: Ensure high performance on both Android and iOS.
- Improve real-time web dashboard: Boost visibility and data-sharing for hospitals, partners, and teams.
- Enhance AI algorithm accuracy: Increase sensitivity/specificity in murmur detection.
- Screen 25,000 children by end of 2026: Scale programs to reach more children with early CHD detection.
We Need Your Help
You, our donors, have trusted us with your donations to make a change in children’s lives and give hope to those in low-resource areas of the world. In 2025, we:
- Launched and improved the One Heart App to version 1.3.2: Released to app stores with upgraded digital auscultation and AI-ready infrastructure.
- Screened 5,000+ children globally: Enrolled patients across Bolivia, Mongolia, and Nigeria using the One Heart App.
- Published data from the Digital Heart Sound Study: Major milestone validating AI murmur detection. Visit our publications page to learn more.
- Launched the Digital Heart Sound Study 2.0: Frameworks in place and partner commitments secured to screen 25,000 children in 2026.
- Developed machine learning models: Hundreds of models tested and integrated into the app (May 2025).
- Designed pilot CHD screening frameworks: Connected rural clinics in Bolivia, Mongolia, and Nigeria to specialist care networks.
- Hosted international workshop at WCPCCS 2025: Strengthened partnerships and opened expansion paths for 2026.
We need your help to build on this momentum and reach more hearts in 2026 and beyond. Your donations will help cover our technology infrastructure costs, to provide stethoscopes to doctors, to provide small stipends to cover additional costs associated with screening (internet, pulse oximeters, tablet, etc.), and technical resources to keep the One Heart App running and available for doctors. We can expand our screening programs to Fiji, Ghana, Pakistan, Nepal, Uganda, Vietnam, Zambia, and Zimbabwe in 2026, but we need your help and your donation this year to support the additional costs for these expansions.
Please consider donating to One Heart Health and help us build a future where every child with heart disease gets the chance to live a fully and healthy life, no matter where they live.
Thank you,
Aaron Faugstad
Executive Director
One Heart Health
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