OMRON Healthcare India, the leading player in the digital home blood pressure monitoring segment, has announced the initiation of India’s first-of-its-kind AI-based collaborative trial program in the field of remote patient monitoring. The program, targeted at patients that have undergone surgical procedures or ablation for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases, aims to establish the relevance & role of remote hypertension & ECG monitoring for strengthening the treatment & care regime to reduce cardiovascular complications and deaths. 

According to worldwide surveys on human atrial fibrillation, around 27% of the patients experience recurrence of atrial fibrillation (AFib) after ablation treatment. This underlines the importance of real-time and continuous monitoring of ECG along with blood pressure at home in order to help the doctors take more informed and timely decisions. 

“OMRON aims to expand its presence in the remote patient monitoring segment which is gaining lot of significance in the healthcare ecosystem of India. Post collaborating with varied AI based healthcare applications in the personal healthcare monitoring domain, we are all set to move ahead and strengthen our value addition in the hospital care management with this endeavor. With the right partners on board, we are optimistic of receiving good results from the trial. It will help us to propel ahead our vision of ‘Going for Zero’ cardiovascular diseases by collaborating OMRON’s vital sensing technology with AI of Tricog & doctors’ support at Sakra World Hospital,” said Masanori Matsubara, MD, OMRON Healthcare India. 

The study in the trial will explore two core possibilities – how technology can enable monitoring of ECG at home and how AI can enable timely intervention in the postoperative cardiovascular patients. The aim is to achieve further improvement of cardiovascular disease management coupled with high blood pressure management in a remote environment. 

About the trial: 

OMRON Complete™ Blood Pressure monitor equipped with ECG capabilities is provided to Sakra World Hospital’s patients, Bengaluru, who have undergone surgical / ablation cardiovascular procedures. At discharge, patients are trained to use the OMRON device to measure their BP and ECG at home daily. The Vital signs and the ECG data are transmitted to Tricog Health, one of the world’s largest Health AI companies, that provides AI-enabled real-time monitoring of the patient’s condition. Using Tricog’s platform and proprietary AI technology, the multidisciplinary care team of Sakra World hospital monitors the health of their patients, enabling remote diagnosis of life-threatening conditions and preventing complications before they occur. In addition, the patients can connect with Sakra World Hospital’s experts from the comfort of their homes 24×7.

According to Dr Charit Bhograj, Founder and CEO of Tricog Health, “Our vision is to enable access to the best of medical care, that is majorly available at tertiary care hospitals only, to the patients at home and that too at the time they need it the most. Empowering doctors to save more lives with the help of innovative technology and advanced AI algorithms is the future of healthcare where problems are detected before they lead to serious adverse events. We are happy to find it completely in sync with OMRON’s vision of ‘Going For Zero’ cardiovascular events and hope to achieve a significant milestone in the remote cardiac healthcare management sector in India with this trial.” 

Dr Sreekanth of Sakra World Hospital, Bangalore said “For patients with blood pressure, risk of heart arrhythmias and stroke is persistent and threatening over the long term. Identifying intermittent out-of-hospital events will help early initiation of appropriate treatment.  Monitoring heart rhythm need not end at the moment of discharging patient from the hospital.  This trial will show us how the device and analysis on the data will effectively improve the patient care after discharging patients of cardiovascular diseases.”

As per World Heart Federation, Cardiovascular disease, including heart disease and stroke, is the most common non-communicable disease globally, responsible for an estimated 18.5 million deaths, of which more than three quarters occur in low-income and middle-income countries (including India). By the year 2030, the UN Sustainable Development Goals aim to reduce premature mortality from non-communicable diseases by a third. 

Hypertension, the ‘silent killer’ has long been recognized as one of the major risk factors for cardiovascular disease and premature deaths worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, in 2015, raised BP was responsible for 7.5 million deaths, about 12.8 per cent of the total of all deaths globally. 

In India, it is a growing problem and causes significant burden on the health system. According to the GBD study, hypertension led to 1.63 million deaths in India in the year 2016 alone. It also showed that over half of the deaths due to ischemic heart disease (54.2%), stroke (56.2%) and chronic kidney disease (54.5%) were attributable to high systolic BP. A cross-sectional, population-based study on a large nationally representative sample of 1.3 million individuals revealed that the crude prevalence of hypertension in India was 25.3 per cent between 2012 and 2014. Its prevalence is common even among younger age groups. It says approximately one out of every 10 individuals aged 18-25 suffers from it.

In 2015, OMRON Healthcare announced its Going for Zero vision for its cardiovascular business, with the goal of achieving zero cardiovascular events, expanding its business domain from blood pressure measurement to innovative devices including a wearable blood pressure monitor, and healthcare management services across the globe. Along with India, the company has also rolled out remote patient monitoring services in US, UK and Singapore. Under these new services, biological data sets, measured at home, can be shared with healthcare professionals, supporting them with better insight in their patients’ health conditions and required treatment plans, contributing to the Going for Zero vision.