Heart and Lung Sounds Become Part of EHRs for the First-Time

digitalstethFor the first time in history, clinicians are able to capture patients’ heart and lung sounds and integrate them into the electronic health record (EHR). This milestone represents a groundbreaking advance in longitudinal patient care.

Three companies have joined forces to launch this groundbreaking effort: Direct Urgent Care, Eko (@EkoDevices), and drchrono (@drchrono). Using a quick three step process, clinicians can now seamlessly incorporate heart and lung sounds into patient health records.

  1. Direct Urgent Care, a Berkeley-based urgent care provider with 30,000 patients, enables providers to record important heart and lung sounds using the Eko Core Digital Stethoscope
  2. The Eko Core Digital Stethoscope wirelessly transmits stethoscope sounds to a HIPAA-compliant Mobile App on a smartphone or tablet.
  3. The information is then uploaded to the drchrono EHR, an online medical platform with comprehensive EHR capabilities, to enable clinicians to seamlessly incorporate heart and lung sounds alongside patient health records.

Direct Urgent Care will be able to streamline cardiology and pulmonology specialist referrals, reference sounds between patient visits and improve long-term care for patients of all ages. “Improving patient care is one of the most critical pieces to healthcare today, and this EHR-integrated stethoscope is a game-changer in the industry,” said Dr. Caesar Djavaherian, Founder of Direct Urgent Care. “The ability to share recorded heart and lung sounds with specialists who may not be in the same location as the patient dramatically improves the time to diagnosis and treatment of the patient. An EHR-connected stethoscope is truly revolutionary.”

Listed by “TIME Magazine” as one of the “Top 25 Inventions of 2015,” the Eko Core is the only FDA-cleared digital stethoscope on the market that amplifies 40X, wirelessly pairs with a HIPAA-compliant mobile application, and enables telemedicine clinics to stream heart and lung sounds to remote clinicians in real-time. “While the stethoscope has been around for two centuries, this represents the first time that doctors are not only hearing heart and lung sounds but also saving them to the patient’s record. This is a really decisive moment in digital healthcare and we are pleased to partner with industry experts to bring this technology forward,” said Connor Landgraf, CEO of Eko Devices. “This partnership represents the beginning of better, more integrated and more efficient healthcare.”

The timing of the partnership pairs with drchrono’s massive growth, having added more than 90,000 physicians and 6 million patients to the drchrono platform.“This is a partnership designed to create the mobile medical toolkit of the future,” said Daniel Kivatinos, COO and co-founder of drchrono. “Like the Direct Urgent Care team, doctors of the future will be mobile, carrying a digital stethoscope and iPad or iPhone. The stethoscope, iPad and iPhone should be connected.”

About Eko:
Eko Devices (Eko) has built a platform of non-invasive cardiovascular monitoring devices, clinical software, and point-of-care decision support algorithms to improve the delivery of cardiovascular care. In 2015, Eko launched the Eko Core Digital Stethoscope, the first FDA-cleared digital stethoscope on the market to wirelessly stream heart & lung sounds to HIPAA-compliant software. For the first time in history, patient sounds can be integrated with electronic health records (EHRs) for more seamless referrals, documentation and monitoring.

About drchrono:
drchrono creates the best electronic health record (EHR) and practice management experience for physicians and their patients; the platform was built for iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch and web. drchrono includes a medical API developers can build on. The company has more than 90,000 physicians and 6 million patients signed up to date. The company was ranked by Inc. 500 as one of the fastest-growing private companies in America, and Black Book Rankings voted drchrono’s EHR the #1 mobile Electronic Health Record four years in a row.

About Direct Urgent Care:
Direct Urgent Care was founded on the principle of providing timely, effective and efficient healthcare to the members of our community in a modern and welcoming clinical setting. Founded in 2013, Direct Urgent Care treats over 20,000 patients annually in Berkeley, Mountain View and Oakland and looks forward to to extending its services to San Francisco in July 2016.