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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome back to the final part of this week's Tech Talk. This is Jess Kelly with you here on Newstalk. As ever, if you have any questions for me, techtalkatnewstalk.com is the email address or you'll find me on Instagram at jesskelleynt. My next guest is the founder of HeartPath and is an advanced nurse practitioner in heart failure.
And she is joining us to talk about a very special mission that she is hoping to set out on that would transform health care for millions of people. Karen Kelly, you're very welcome to Tech Talk. There is so much going on in the med tech space and there has been for quite a while. A few months ago, we had Martin Curley, the former CIO of the HSE on this program, talking about
the importance of embracing innovation in the health tech space. Before we get into this particular project you're working on right now, can you just give us a bit of an overview as to what it is that you do?
So I have been working, I suppose, I know Martin quite well. He's a good friend of mine and we would have met in the HSE while he was there. I was working in a hospital in the Midlands in heart failure.
Chapter 2: What is Nurse Karen Kelly's mission in Gambia?
embracing a lot of med tech at the time and learning about it. So we would have brought in one of the first remote monitoring platforms for heart failure patients during COVID. Very simple tools, so a digital scales and a
Blood pressure monitor that was linked in with an app that allowed us to get patients home quicker and monitor them at home and basically let them feel, help them to feel more empowered that they were being monitored 24-7 and also help them to learn better. how to manage their own illness at home because heart failure is something that you can live quite well with once it's managed well.
Another tool that you probably hear Martin talking a lot about is point of care ultrasound and handheld point of care ultrasound. So I learned how to use that during COVID and it really changed the way I could actually manage patients and find out whether they had fluid on board or not. So within seconds, you could manage a patient. And some patients who are very,
mobility-wise might have been an issue and very elderly, you wouldn't even have to take them out of a car or out of a wheelchair. You wouldn't have to put them through x-ray. In seconds, you could see whether they had fluid on board and you could change the management of their care.
So very quickly, I became an avid fan of how digital health and digital tools, when used correctly, can augment practice and really help patients and care. And I... built relationships with a lot of companies over the years, one being Echo Health, who have the most amazing digital stethoscope that can do loads and portable tools that have a backpack that's full of portable tools.
So that's kind of where I got into the health tech space as a nurse was learning how tools can bridge health equity gaps and how they can really augment practice.
Yeah, and this is something that we spoke to Martin about, I think it was in February. And what really struck me was how transformational these tools can be, not only in terms of patient care and patient well-being, but also in terms of taking pressure off the health service as well, because there's less faffing around, there's less queuing for machinery. But
But despite the benefits of it, it's not ubiquitous because there is a cost associated with this technology and there's also a bit of a training gap as well. So do we still have a bit of a digital divide within our healthcare service in terms of getting our hands on this transformational tech?
Definitely. There's definitely a learning curve, 100%. And there's also... I guess you have to make sure that what we're using them for, who we're using them for, and you're not widening the gap. So you have to make sure. So the likes of remote monitoring, We had a lot of patients don't have a mobile phone. So, you know, who are you using it for?
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Chapter 3: How is technology transforming heart failure management?
And he's so he's in radiology, but he's brought out in the humanarium in the RCSI and they have He's done a lecture there recently about the heart outside the hospital. And he talks a lot about AI tools and about digital tech. And it's not all about AI. It's about how do we augment. Clinicians practice and patient service, and we are definitely taking on the tools.
It's slow and it is a slow process, but also some of the companies. So, for instance, the Echo Stethoscope, it's a brilliant tool. It's a fantastic stethoscope. We don't have all the functionality of it here. because of licensing. So it's an FDA and some of their platform is FDA, but it's not all CE. So we don't have it here yet. So I'd love to have it.
I've been working with it for three years, but we have to wait until it gets in here. But we have fantastic clinicians. We have fantastic hospitals that are bringing in really amazing services up in Letterkenny over in Galway. Susan Connolly is doing amazing things in Galway. The Heart Failure and their spirited team up in Letterkenny are doing amazing things. John Sheen's doing amazing things.
So there is fantastic things going on around in certain parts of Ireland. It just takes time, but it is happening, definitely.
And that is good to hear. And it's exciting as well that this innovation is going to be so transformational when it becomes the norm. But as you said, it's just a bit of a waiting game at the moment. But I want to talk about a fundraiser that you're working on at the moment. Can you just tell me a little bit about what this is for and why it's needed?
So I was very fortunate last year to be invited by GE to go to Helsinki to Congress for Nurses to show nurses how point of care ultrasound can augment practice and how it can help to triage patients and to help inform your practice. And while we were there, I have been doing for the last three or four years, I've been doing a lot of social enterprise screening.
So I work a lot with family carers. I've done some work with the men's health shed here or the men's shed. And while I was over there, I met a nurse called Alhaje Drama, who's from the Gambia. And he was doing a similar thing in the Gambia with a team of 15 nurses. But they've won cardiologists to 2.8 million people in the Gambia. And that statistic, I just couldn't even fathom it.
And if I go out and I do a screen in like if I do a pop up screen or if I go somewhere, I might screen 15 people in a day myself. their team of 15 would screen 500 to 600 people in three days. And some of those people would walk five hours to see them just to have their blood pressure checked. So we spent a couple of hours every day chatting just around what he did and what we did.
I mean, they're exactly the same people. They have exactly the same statistics, except people over there are dying at 30 and 40 years old of stroke because they don't know that they've high blood pressure. The incidence of chronic kidney disease over there is huge and it's all to do with risk factors. So, you know, when you've got cardiovascular disease, I mean, we know 80% of it is preventable.
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