As part of the startup Interview series, we are going to interview Mr. Ion Mocanu from CardioMedive, a Romanian HealthTech startup devoted to developing a medical-grade device for remote patient monitoring, represented by a discreet and easy-to-wear patch that measures continuously a complete list of vital signs and hemodynamic parameters.

Ion, thanks for taking the time to catch up with us. Can you briefly outline the company’s story, what is CardioMedive’s key goal? Who are the founders and how it all became what it is today? 

CardioMedive was founded by me, Ion Mocanu, a software and hardware electronic engineer with over 15 years of experience in the development of electronic products, being involved in the entire development cycle from idea to series production. With technical and leadership expertise in areas such as automotive, medical, IoT, mobile applications, optical systems, infrared and radar, bio-medical sensors, digital signal processing, ADAS, and ML/AI.

I have a Bachelor degree in Engineering, as Engineer Diplomat, graduated from the Military Technical Academy with a second Bachelor degree in Economic Studies obtained in the Faculty of Accounting and Management Informatics, and a Bachelor degree in Legal Studies following graduation from the Faculty of Law. In addition to this knowledge, I followed the development of my management skills at the Master in Business Management program and became a PhD student at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, where I have been deepening telemedicine solutions and patient monitoring at home.

The idea to build a device for monitoring and managing cardiovascular disease was born in 2014 when my mother was diagnosed with cardiovascular after several consultations and investigations disease. Unfortunately, it was too late so that the disease became chronic. Out of a desire to find a solution for my mother, I found that existing Holter solutions for diagnosing cardiovascular disease are ineffective in detecting them early, being limited to only 24 hours of monitoring, cumbersome and inaccurate that requires a visit to the physician office for interpreting the results of monitoring, detecting the disease most of the time is done too late when chronic disease is already on set.

What kind of products and services does your company offer? 

We have developed an all-in-one affordable solution for addressing patients with lower acuity disease levels. It is the unique one-stop-shop solution for wide-disease coverage with a multi-parameter biosensor for complex chronic disease management, diagnostic and patient monitoring. The first targeted chronic diseases are Cardiovascular(NIHA II-III), Hypertension, respiratory infections, COPD, and sleep disorder. 

The solution comprises a medical-grade biosensor device and a web-based cloud component. It is capable to be easily integrated and used as support for today’s existing telehealth platforms, which are mainly video conference-based and cannot address complex chronic diseases. 

 It changes the current patient examination paradigm, with a new patient-centric approach: from periodic in-office visits, cumbersome paper collection, and manual measurement of a limited set of vital signs to a remote, all-inclusive, tailored to the needs of chronic disease patients, with continuous and effortless health condition monitoring, early alerting the health deterioration.

What’s the latest progress in the project, and what are you focusing on right now?

At this time, after several hardware and software iterations, the current innovative prototype has been validated in a laboratory-controlled environment as well as on human subjects (team members and their relatives). The 3 components of the solution, the hardware bio-sensor, the Cloud component, and the mobile application are in the MVP stage. The following goes the application for the full utility international patent in order to protect the solution, as to be prepared for public discloser. Achieving this goal will allow us to start pre-clinical tests with real cohorts of patients in partner clinics and hospitals coordinated by the 3 doctors of our team, which will validate the solution in the real environment of use.

What pain of your customers are you helping solve? What is your company’s offering and what kind of customers and partners are you looking for? 

Current telemonitoring solutions are addressing only high-risk patients (NIHA IV) because the solutions are very expensive and health systems cannot sustain monitoring needs costs for lower disease acuity patients (NIHA II-III).

The available on the market solutions for NIHA II-III patients are difficult to use. The devices are cumbersome, preventing the patient from carrying out daily routines activities, being primarily designed for NIHA IV patients with limited mobility. On the other side, traditional diagnostic devices (HOLTER) have not evolved in the last years, measuring only one vital signal for a short period of time (24/48h) having low diagnostic yields. 

The physician doesn’t know how the patient’s health evolves during follow-up visits because today’s adopted consumer-grade solutions(WRIST watches) aren’t reliable enough to allow physicians to make a clinical decision regarding treatments schema adjustments. We should also mention existing problems we are solving with our device:

• On top of patient diagnostic and monitoring, there are mandatory in-office scheduled periodic follow-up visits with traditional healthcare in-office examination protocol and procedures, which are overwhelmed and facing a lot of issues. The most challenging issues for chronic disease patients are: long time to obtain an appointment, late intervention time, the distance between patient and physician, the new context of pandemic risk infection, missing or limited paper-based collected vital signals parameters between follow-up visits, needed for better treatment adherence.
• Existing teleconsultations solutions are mainly video-conference based which is unsuitable for chronic disease examinations needs, not allowing measurement of essential vital signals parameters. 
• Patients are using unverified origin and inaccurate home devices or expensive unadapted kit of multiple medical grade devices limiting quality of healthcare service or making clinical decision.
• Wasting physician time due to the set up of many devices’ connections
• Plethora of multi-vendor devices rising integration issues limiting TeleHealth scaling.

What differentiates CardioMedive from its competitors?

CardioMedive’s differentiators reside in its uniqueness in the market being one of the first available solutions to address the needs of chronic diseases all along from examination, diagnosis throughout the entire period of the disease. It changes today’s traditional ways, protocols, and approaches to treating chronic diseases. The pandemic covid-19 showed the benefits of telemedicine solutions. However, in order to take full advantage of the real medical act, there is a need for an innovative solution with specific requirements like IoT capability, a medical-grade device, an all-in-one complete set of vital signs measurement capability, easy to use by regular patients at home. Our solution satisfies all these requirements and allows telemedicine to achieve a new standard of care and quality, by filling today’s gap in the market with our new hardware and integrated platform. Also, it offers the possibility to enhance existing TeleHealth platforms with our 8-in-1 device and the back-end.

A longitudinal approach to the treatment of chronic diseases from prevention, diagnosis, and assisted involvement of the patient in the management of their own chronic diseases. The patient becomes an active element in treating his own disease outside the doctor’s office, which is limited to 30 minutes consultation, but the disease is active 365 days/year. Our product is relieving doctors, who are already overwhelmed, increases patient adherence to treatment, and provides a deeper perspective on the evolution of the disease. On the other hand, doctors being helped to make a more accurate diagnosis and treatment gaining access to the vital signs of the patient they have not had before.

Do you have any projects related to COVID-19 research? If so, can you explain how your product is contributing to a global fight against coronavirus?

 CardioMedive solution reduces patient-physician physical contact by supporting periodic mandatory for chronic disease follow-up, scheduled by a doctor with remote examination and allows timely intervention, on patient demand with 24/7 access with a live physician and remote physical examination. CardioMedive device is reducing outpatients’ hospital visits by triaging patients with episodic palpitation events by the physician. After remote examination acts, upon the severity of emergency level, the physician decides if the patient needs timely intervention or prescribed specific treatment. It allows reducing hospitalization and free-up hospital beds by treating patient at their home. By receiving hospital-at-home service, patients are kept safe, and the pressure on physicians is decreased.

What is your business model and how are you planning to get early customers onboard? Have you already raised money for your operations and building the platform?

We have several economic verticals that can be approached with our solution, by integrating the CardioMedive solution with the existing telemedicine platforms, becoming a solution provider for them, and opening new opportunities to extend the covered services to chronic diseases conditions that cannot be addressed today only by video conferencing technologies.

Another vertical is in-hospital monitoring and post-discharge of the patient.

Diagnostic is another revenue stream we take into consideration integrated with the medical insurers and payors.

What milestones have you had in fundraising and where are you now?

So far, CardioMedive startup has been fully funded by its founders and team members. The first investment round is planned after the application of the patent and the pre-clinical evaluations that will serve as endorsement for validation of the solution.

What was it like growing your team? What are the challenges and surprises you encountered? What tips do you have for building a solid team?

The idea of building a product that can save lives with a direct and major impact on society was the main ingredient being the source of motivation around which levitate the beliefs of the entire team that grew once the product began to take shape, reaching 9 members today. Having common passions and being friends in daily life helped us to build a strong core of our team.

What are your company’s plans for the future, your major dream in 2021? 

After the first investment round, we are planning to expand the team to accelerate the product development and to certify the product in order to launch on the market.

What do you think about the business climate in Romania and in the EU in general?

Romanian Start-Up ecosystem has grown a lot in the last years together, considering accelerators and incubators, a solid foundation was settled. All of this conduct to stable and attractive climate here in Romania for everyone who wants to make a startup. Boosted by today’s pandemic situation business climate in digital HealthCare gained a lot of attention and investment all around Europe, being one of the fastest-growing businesses.

To summarize our interview I would like to ask your opinion about the future of the HealthTech industry, especially considering the impact of pandemics and all this economic turbulence. 

The global pandemic has shown the benefits of digital healthcare solutions at all levels of healthcare services. The pandemic situation has boosted the adoption of the newest telemedicine and telehealth solutions. The attention was increased not only from investors and MedTech companies but also the governments have legislated very quickly these new telemedicine activities. In addition to this, the aging population tsunami and silver economy driven by unsustainable healthcare cost will be the primary vector of Health Tech solutions which will over-perform many traditional and outdated solutions.