The NHSX AI in Health and Care Award – designed to fund and integrate the most innovative AI solutions into the NHS – is approaching its first anniversary of operation. This milestone feels like a good time to hear from the sites benefitting from iRhythm's Zio service, one of the first Award winners. If a cardiologist from 25 years ago found themselves transported to the modern day, they would probably find most technological developments overwhelming. Put that cardiologist into an NHS cardiology clinic, and when they see the 24-hour tapes and the cumbersome external monitors with ECG leads stuck to patients, they would feel right at home. Professor Jay Wright, who is the lead clinician for heart failure and cardiac devices at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital (LHCH), is someone who might well have known this hypothetical cardiologist from 25 years ago.

It's no secret that big tech companies like Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Alphabet (GOOG), the parent company of Google, are investing in digital healthcare. The market opportunity is pretty enticing when you consider that the U.S. alone spent $3.65 trillion on healthcare just last year. Google made the latest headline-grabbing move when it announced that it would buy wearables-maker Fitbit (FIT) in a deal valued at $2.1 billion. Analysts have noted that the acquisition is part of the company's overall strategy to build an ambient intelligent system where Google is omnipresent. Another motive behind the purchase – pending regulatory approvals – is that Fitbit gives Google access to a treasure trove of healthcare data that it can feed to its London-based AI lab DeepMind or its life sciences subsidiary Verily, which is already collaborating on at least one AI healthcare device for remote patient monitoring.

It's no secret that big tech companies like Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Alphabet (GOOG), the parent company of Google, are investing in digital healthcare. The market opportunity is pretty enticing when you consider that the U.S. alone spent $3.65 trillion on healthcare just last year. Google made the latest headline-grabbing move when it announced that it would buy wearables maker Fitbit (FIT) in a deal valued at $2.1 billion. Analysts have noted that the acquisition is part of the company's overall strategy to build an ambient intelligent system where Google is omnipresent. Another motive behind the purchase – pending regulatory approvals – is that Fitbit gives Google access to a treasure trove of healthcare data that it can feed to its London-based AI lab DeepMind or its life sciences subsidiary Verily, which is already collaborating on at least one AI healthcare device for remote patient monitoring.

Alphabet's Verily Life Sciences and iRhythm Technologies are bringing together data analytics and artificial intelligence to improve the condition of Atrial Fibrillation (AFib) patients. "We expect … that [in] a two-year-time frame that we will be showing the product from this collaboration," Karti, told MD DI. San Francisco-based iRhythm is a company known for operating in the intersection of cardiology and AI. The firm has developed Zio Patch XT, a wearable technology that can monitor heart rate activity for up to 14 days. Karti said the collaboration will focus on asymptomatic patients that potentially have AFib. "This [collaboration] is aimed at a very significant patient population," he said.

NIH-funded researchers have created an electrocardiogram-analyzing deep neural network that showed comparable outcomes to cardiologists' interpretations in a study. The network correctly classified a range of distinct arrhythmias, leading the researchers to talk up the prospect of it being used to better triage patients. However, the network is yet to be validated in clinical settings and could suffer from problems including false positives unless it is tailored. Computers have come to play a central role in the interpretation of EKGs since they were introduced into the field decades ago. Many of the more than 300 million EKGs captured globally every year are automatically analyzed.