Implicity
Optimize patient management and anticipate complications with AI-powered Telecardiology

Arnaud Rosier, Co-Founder and CEO, Implicity

From Transtelephonic monitoring to smartphone apps, the technological innovation in the remote cardiac monitoring field has been fabulous over the years. The trend in electrophysiology toward the use of advanced remote monitoring of implantable devices such as cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs), cardiac monitors (ICMs), and more has gained significant traction. Yet millions of patients with cardiac implantable devices worldwide are still not telemonitored despite the clinical evidence on benefits because remote cardiac monitoring is a time-consuming and complex process. “Remote monitoring has been shown to decrease patient morbidity and mortality by providing early warning of cardiac problems and alleviate the volume of in-office patient follow-ups, which allow physicians to monitor more patients,” begins Dr. Arnaud Rosier, Founder, and CEO of Implicity.

A universal remote monitoring platform for electrophysiologists to improve patient care

To facilitate and improve telemonitoring practice for patients with cardiac implantable devices - pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, and loop recorders - Implicity has developed a universal remote monitoring platform. This platform transforms “burden” into the opportunity to deliver better patient care. It is designed to enable electrophysiologists and healthcare professionals to automate the remote monitoring of their patients.

This single platform normalizes and aggregates discrete data from all cardiac implantable devices across manufacturers [Abbott, Biotronik, Boston Scientific, MicroPort, and Medtronic]. This solution can integrate patient clinical data (from the hospital’s Electronic Health Record) and other connected devices incoming data (as weighing data for heart failure remote monitoring). The platform serves as a hub of secure yet accessible patient data for professionals. Founded in 2016 by Dr. Arnaud Rosier — electrophysiologist and researcher in artificial intelligence (AI)—Implicity has gained a strong footprint in the market. The company’s platform is used today by more than 60 centers in Europe and the United States to monitor remotely approximately 30,000 patients.

The adapted platform for routine care and research

“The platform aims to simplify health professionals’ workflow and answer their needs —whether it is clinical research, routine care, recalls management, collaborating to handle patients’ alerts, face-to-face, and remote monitoring management — it is now possible with a single tool,” explains Dr. Rosier. Unified and efficient, Implicity’s cloud-based platform analyzes and filters implantable devices data to help electrophysiologists optimize time and focus on relevant patients’ requirements. The patient monitoring platform does not require software installation and updates. The ‘plug-n-play’ design enables users to implement Implicity in 24 hours.

AI-based medical-grade software to improve productivity and predict clinical events

Implicity is working on a module that concerns the automatic triage of alerts to help diagnosis. The AI algorithms can determine each alert’s criticality based on the context of the patient’s medical record. Implicity has developed technologies to select relevant alerts so that the nurses can save a lot of time reviewing the data, and physicians can focus on other important tasks - implanting or ablating. Therefore, productivity-wise, AI-algorithms help bring scalability to medical teams while containing costs. “By integrating AI to Implicity platform, we want to increase the productivity and efficacy of healthcare professionals,” states Dr. Arnaud Rosier.

The company is working on an Artificial Intelligence technology that takes the patient’s medical history, such as medication, medical history, and implantation indication, to predict cardiac events as part of patient monitoring. “With the clearance we received from CNIL1 in the Health Data Hub2, we are working on developing a machine learning “medical device” software that will use patient clinical history along with all the data coming from implantable cardiac devices to predict acute heart failure episodes and help physicians prevent them, which is currently the largest problem in cardiology among western countries. We are very excited to see the positive impacts this project can bring to patient care. It’s going to help a lot in terms of heart failure event prediction and management”, concludes Dr. Rosier.

From 250 to 1600 patients telemonitored in less than two years for Rythmopôle

To further illustrate the efficacy of Implicity, we have a very interesting case study of Rythmopôle, one of Paris’s largest medical centers. The latter lacked an efficient tool to monitor its patients remotely. When the medical center started to use Implicity, only 250 patients were telemonitored. Less than two years after, the number of telemonitored patients reached 1600. Though the medical team were experts in electrophysiology, they lacked the tools to provide efficient remote monitoring for all their patients. Two years after adopting Implicity, the medical center can efficiently remotely monitor patients and help in the early prediction of cardiac rhythm disorders using the platform.

Remote cardiac monitoring – the revelation of Covid-19 crisis

With the outbreak of COVID-19, many clinics and facilities find themselves overwhelmed and have difficulties delivering follow-up consultations to their patients with cardiac implanted electronic devices. Remote monitoring is a boon for these cardiac patients. It allows to reduce routine nursing visits and provide medical teams with the necessary time to support urgent needs. Hence, at-risk patients are able to benefit from the highest medical standard while ensuring compliance with social distancing measures.

In that unprecedented context, using remote monitoring is a real opportunity for healthcare facilities. They are able to follow-up patients remotely, to continue billing, and conduct scalable research with the collected data. Furthermore, Implicity’s platform is tailored to enable academic medical centers to use raw data readily available for research. Data collected during the Covid pandemic via the Implicity platform were used by a consortium of hospitals to analyze the clinical impact of the pandemic on patients with cardiac implantable devices. This study shows the massive opportunity for research if the appropriate tools are available.

1 The National Commission for Data Protection and Liberties, in France
2 Health Data Hub is a health data platform put in place by the French government to combine existing health patient databases and facilitate their usage for research and development purposes