One Heart Health During the Pandemic
Since the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, times have been tough for everyone, including for nonprofits like One Heart Health. While the pandemic has stifled our ability to travel and perform heart screenings abroad, we have doubled down in our investment to improve our technologies and uncover new innovations for heart screenings.
Ping & Amy Chao Family Foundation Funding
During this challenging time, funding and support has been critical to our mission, which is why we are excited to announce a new partnership with the Ping & Amy Chao Family Foundation. An ardent supporter of improving health outcomes in disadvantaged areas worldwide, the foundation has generously provided an important investment in One Heart Health to develop a new technology powered by artificial intelligence. Internally, our team has dubbed it the Chao Heart Alert, in honor of the initial stakeholder. The value of an automatic heart alert feature can not be understated. When operationalized, it will give local front-line health workers the ability to immediately warn users, both on-site and remotely, of irregular heart sounds.
Currently, One Heart App’s functionality requires a delay of at least a day for off-site cardiologists to review all heart sounds, not just abnormal sounds, for problematic heart defects. While licensed volunteer cardiologists will remain an important element in our telemedicine solution and will continue to personally screen worrisome heart sounds, this screening tool, informed by a powerful algorithm, will dramatically increase the utility, scalability and sustainability of the One Heart Health solution to screen hearts in remote or rural settings.
West Virginia University Partnership
To enable the heart alert, the algorithm needs to be trained, and for that, we require a source of heart sound recordings to learn from. We do this by collecting a large volume of heart sounds from healthy children as well as those with congenital heart disease (CHD). In late 2020, One Heart Health entered a partnership with West Virginia University (WVU) Department of Pediatrics to add to the database of heart sounds we have already collected. In addition to collecting sounds, West Virginia University cardiologists Drs. Nita Ray Chaudhuri and Lee Pyles are leading a consortium of cardiologists to annotate the heart sounds.
Support this innovation:
While donations from the Ping & Amy Chao Family Foundation and West Virginia University have been extremely valuable in enabling the initial research and development for the artificial intelligence upgrade, we are still in need of additional investments to complete the first release of the technology and deliver the enhanced app for public use. We have reached out to a variety of funders to invest in this game-changing innovation, but we find our greatest support from our friends, family, and MedTech community who understand the importance of pushing forward with this work.
As a 501(C)3 nonprofit, we invite you to enable this technology to become a reality. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to support One Heart Health and its work by clicking HERE or CONTACT US to learn more about this exciting opportunity to change the face of global cardiology.
