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Eur Heart J Digit Health
Eur Heart J Digit Health
ehjdh
European Heart Journal. Digital Health
2634-3916
Oxford University Press UK

10.1093/ehjdh/ztae054
ztae054
Cardiopulse Digital
AcademicSubjects/MED00200
Eurheartj/23
Eurheartj/24
Meet key digital health thought leaders: Jagmeet (Jag) Singh
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0272-5617
Bruining Nico Department of Cardiology, Thoraxcenter, Erasmus MC Rotterdam, Dr. Molewaterplein 40, 3015 GD Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Corresponding author. Tel: +3107033934, Email: n.bruining@erasmusmc.nl
Conflict of interest: none declared.

9 2024
25 7 2024
25 7 2024
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06 8 2024
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology.
2024
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com.
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pmcCardioPulse Digital talks to Professor of Medicine Jagmeet (Jag) Singh, MD MMSc DPhil, Cardiologist/Cardiac Electrophysiologist, Harvard Medical School; Founding Director, Resynchronization and Advanced Cardiac Therapeutics Program, about his pioneering vision on Digital Health & Artificial Intelligence.

Some information about yourself: I am a cardiac electrophysiologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. I originally grew up in India, where I did my early medical training in Pune and Mumbai. I subsequently went to Oxford, UK on a scholarship for doctoral studies, following which I landed up in the USA as a research fellow at the Framingham Heart Study. I then completed my internal medicine residency, cardiology, and cardiac electrophysiology fellowship at the Mass General Hospital and joined as a faculty in 2003. I started one of the first multidisciplinary programmes caring for patients with heart failure and device therapy in 2006 and then took on the role of the Clinical Director of the Cardiology Division at the Mass General Hospital (2015–20). During this period, I also completed a master’s in clinical investigation and an executive programme in artificial intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston. I am currently the national and global principal investigator on five ongoing multi-centre clinical trials in device therapy and sensor strategies for heart failure and atrial fibrillation. Much of my current efforts are focused on healthcare redesign, digital health, and medical device innovations.

You authored the book Future Care. Could you tell us more about it and what inspired you to write it?

I started writing this book a year before the pandemic engulfed our lives. As a cardiologist and specifically as a cardiac electrophysiologist, I had always been interested in innovative device technologies. It was in 2008 that I started paying attention to sensor technologies, especially those embedded within the devices (e.g. pacemakers and defibrillators) that I was implanting in my patients for a variety of clinical conditions. I was struck by the downstream potential of remotely monitoring my patients through these sensors and then intervening early, based on this information, to improve their clinical trajectory and outcomes. The true stimulus for the book came around the time I was the Clinical Director and leading the clinical operations of the Cardiology Division (this was pre-COVID), when I thought that we could do a much better job at providing patient-centric care and at preventing disease. I felt at that that time itself that we needed to adopt virtual care and sensor technologies in the daily care of our patients. We needed to move away from the conventional transactional practice of medicine to a more holistic, continuous care approach. The digital transformation was happening across all the industries outside of healthcare, with the slowest adoption within the hospital systems. Even though this led to many frustrations, I felt motivated to be a part of the movement to facilitate this change. I believed that writing a book across the broad spectrum of evolving technologies may help readers to understand the essential components of delivering care in the future. I felt that one of the ways to overcome the inertia within the healthcare system was potentially through education, and a book for a wider audience could help bring change from the outside in.

What are some of the most exciting advancements you’ve seen in digital health technologies, and how do you envision them shaping the future of cardiovascular care?

There is a lot happening in the world of digital health technologies. So much so that it is getting progressively difficult to keep up with the changing landscape. I think the future of cardiovascular care will be shaped by the use of virtual care that is sensor aided and powered by AI with thoughtful integration into clinically sustainable workflows. Sensor technology is exploding, be it implantable, wearable, or ambient. This, combined with generative and multimodal AI holds considerable promise in making care more patient centric, enabling patients to be more engaged in their own care and thereby making it potentially sustainable.

As digital health continues to develop, what advice do you have for aspiring cardiologists and healthcare professionals who are interested in leveraging these technologies to improve patient care and advance the field of cardiology?

I would say this is an amazing time to be engaged in digital technologies. However, there is a lot more work to be done here. It’s good to be open to new technologies, but always examine them with a hint of scepticism. Make sure the fidelity of the signals is good, that they are reproducible and measure what they were set out to and have been clinically validated appropriately in clinical studies. It is important to not to be taken up by these shiny new gizmos and make sure that they positively impact patient experience and clinical outcomes.

Artificial intelligence is generating excitement around digital health, yet its implementation proves to be challenging. What steps do you believe we need to take to optimize its utilization?

There are several parts to this equation that need to be solved to help implement and optimize the use of AI. We need the right data sets that are of high quality, well curated, and unbiased. The data have to be heterogeneous and representative of the patient population being studied. Privacy and security of the data must be maintained, while ensuring that we address the regulatory challenges for using the technology safely, equitably, and ethically. We have to make sure that there is transparency, trust, and accountability in the AI algorithms. Importantly, we need to foster interdisciplinary collaborations between AI researchers, data scientists, healthcare professionals, and industry experts to help optimize the utilization. Everyone brings a different level of expertise to the table, and it’s important to recognize that and work together.

Is there anything else you would like to share as a digital health ambassador?

We are in the midst of a healthcare revolution and at the forefront of the ‘age of intelligence’. We need to embrace innovation, push the boundaries, and create a future where technology and human expertise work together to provide the best possible care. Becoming digital means changing the value proposition of care delivery, it is a willingness to evolve from the conventional transactional practice to one of continuous caring. We need to endeavour to enhance access and provide individualized care in an equitable and efficient manner, as we strive to improve the lives of our patients.
