FibriCheck’s 2023 wrap-up

At FibriCheck, we are always innovating and working towards improved efficiency and innovation in heart healthcare. This year, we’ve made important strides towards those goals, as we worked on a variety of interesting projects together with our partners, and made several improvements to our product. As 2023 reached its end, we’re delighted to share some of our biggest accomplishments of the past year.

In 2023 we welcomed 130.000 new users to our products. Our users interacted with us for variable durations depending on their individual needs. This resulted in more than 8 million monitoring days and over 235 million analysed heartbeats, marking another year of growth for FibriCheck!

We’re continuously collaborating with hospitals and universities, insurance companies, remote patient monitoring companies and pharmaceutical and industry partners in order to shape the future of heart healthcare. 

This year, we joined forces with Inhealthcare to tackle cardiovascular disease in the UK by providing easy-to-use remote patient monitoring services, integrated our services in other telemonitoring apps such as Medcor, Advanced Health Intelligence and DrGo, and were deployed by various hospitals such as the Groene Hart Ziekenhuis in Gouda as part of their clinical pathway. 

As we expanded our scope to a more comprehensive approach to healthcare, we were also excited to collaborate on the EHRA-PATHS project, which aims at increasing the awareness of treating comorbidities and risk factors for patients with atrial fibrillation to improve overall outcomes. We also collaborated with various partners to combine our PPG-technology with ECG-confirmation, in order to work out an end-to-end pathway from detection to diagnosis and monitoring after treatment. 

Want to know more about our partnerships? Visit our collaborations page.

Our collaboration with Helan proved to be a success, as Helan members performed more than 200.000 heart rhythm measurements during the first year of this collaboration. By extending this offer into 2024, we want to underline the important message that heart rhythm disorders can appear at any moment, and that performing regular heart rhythm measurements is important to collect longitudinal insights, even when users are not experiencing any symptoms.  

We also expanded our collaboration with CM, which is now offering its members free use of FibriCheck Essential through a reimbursement. This way, CM-members are also empowered to take control of their heart health for free. 

Through our partnerships with these major players in the Belgian health insurance landscape, 1 out of every 3 Belgians can have free access to FibriCheck, which helps support the detection and monitoring of heart rhythm disorders on a large scale.

At the beginning of 2023, we created an action plan on how to improve our technology even further leveraging real-world data. We used over 1 million datasets to re-train our AI model, which showed us ground-breaking improvements in diagnostic accuracy. Independent validation studies have been conducted and the promising results will be published shortly! 

Another important change to our algorithm had to do with the user-friendliness of FibriCheck. By using AI, we figured out a way to redesign the way a PPG signal is acquired. FibriCheck already had a very low data rejection rate, and we were able to make additional improvements here. This means that less users need to retake measurements to get a high quality reading, resulting in a significant amount of time that can be saved. This update results in an estimated 20.000 less measurements that have to be redone yearly, which translates to 330 hours of time saved for our users. Thanks to this phenomenal improvement, the trust and credibility of FibriCheck increases for both its users and healthcare providers, as we are able to deliver high quality data when it really matters!

At the beginning of 2023, we launched our very own FibriCheck Academy, to provide educational content, the latest clinical studies in the field, and the opportunity to discuss heart health topics with subject matter experts. We’re happy to share that over the past year, we’ve added 11 new chapters of educational content about heart health by our subject matter experts, as well as several FibriCheck use cases and 75 publications about the different scientific contributions of FibriCheck, ranging from our algorithm to PPG readability and the detection and management of AF patients.

At FibriCheck, clinical research is the driving force behind everything we do. In 2023, we reached a total of 75 published studies featuring FibriCheck and were part of more than 20 clinical studies! 

In a study about the transformation of the clinical pathway at the Essex Cardiothoracic Centre led by the leading arrhythmia nurse, 147 patients were followed up with FibriCheck after undergoing an ablation procedure. FibriCheck detected AF recurrence in 39 (26.5%) patients. By deploying FibriCheck, an estimated 147 ECGs and 55 seven-day Holters were avoided. This increase in efficiency by using FibriCheck translated to an estimated net savings of £19,040 and 73.5 outpatient clinic hours.

Another study investigated the feasibility, detection rate and impact on therapeutic implications of smartphone-based AF screening at large scale. This study concluded that smarthone-based AF screening is feasible at large scale, with 60,629 participants performing 585,614 PPG measurements over the course of a week. The yield of screening for AF increased from 0.5% to 1.3% after the 8-day screening period, with positive screening results leading to therapeutic implications in over half of the subjects with clinical AF.

This year, we also conducted studies into the performance of FibriCheck compared to other state-of-the-art digital devices through 3 highly impactful studies: 

• Validation of digital heart rhythm devices in the detection of atrial fibrillation (NCT06023290)
• Digital monitoring after atrial fibrillation ablation (NCT05486364)
• Real-world validation of photoplethysmography (NCT06028893)

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In September 2023, we added a blood pressure feature to the FibriCheck app that allows users to log their blood pressure results and share them with their health care provider easily. This new feature was developed with the crucial link between atrial fibrillation, hypertension and stroke in mind. Given that 69.2% of AF patients have hypertension as an underlying risk factor, keeping track of blood pressure is advised for a more comprehensive approach to heart health management. We built on the input from cardiologists and created this feature to provide healthcare providers with a more holistic view of the patient’s health, aiding in the early detection of heart conditions and supporting informed decision-making.

We have over 95.000 users in our database that indicate that they suffer from hypertension. Since we’ve deployed the blood pressure functionality, we’ve had over 11.300 users that logged their blood pressure readings, demonstrating the relevance of this functionality, as well as the ability of fast and seamless adoption! 

Visit our blood pressure article for more information about this new functionality

In 2023, we listened closely to our healthcare providers on how we could improve our product. Based on this feedback we re-invented the way healthcare providers interact with FibriCheck, focusing on efficiency, usability and streamlining clinical workflows. Some of the new features include special filter & sort options to organize patients in a specific order, with search functions to find patients easily, adding alert modules, simplifying data in interpretation, giving high level metrics and providing additional insights into patients’ heart health which can easily be obtained by activating a first of several new modules: the blood pressure functionality. 

We look forward to supporting our users and healthcare professionals continuously in 2024. Want to be the first to know about our exciting new projects and product updates? Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter and keep an eye on our socials!