Jason Bellet: Co-founder and COO of Eko (Raise the Line)

Hi, I'm Shivani. Thanks for checking out our raise the line interview series.

In which me and my cohost osmosis, Chief Medical Officer, Dr Rishi Desai explore how to strengthen our healthcare system with some amazing leaders in medicine, technology, education and government and they have some great advice for people starting careers in healthcare as well.

I hope you'll watch these highlights and then go listen to the full podcast interview wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm and today on Raise the line, I'm happy to be joined by Jason Bellet, who's the cofounder and chief customer officer of Echo, which is a digital health company that equips providers with artificial intelligence, powered digital stethoscopes and electrocardiograms to assist them in the de detection and monitoring of patients with cardiovascular disease.

So I already know a lot about your background, but for our audience, which is primarily health professional students and health professionals, we would love to hear a bit about how you even got into um founding and co founding Echo.

So we started Echo as undergraduates at UC Berkeley and it's an interesting story. My, my co-founder Connor was in his bioengineering senior thesis class and made a really, really broad thesis topic which was identify a gap in health care.

Go ahead and do stakeholder interviews with providers and administrators and nobody at the end of the semester, propose a solution.

I mean, couldn't, couldn't be broader um in terms of scope, but he was really interested in cardiology and, and having had a heart murmur, actually really interested in murmurs as well.

And so we spoke with a ton of cardiologists and, and one of them looked down at their stethoscope and said, you know, this is the icon of medicine.

It's worn around the neck of 30 million providers around the world. Yet.

It's a rubber tube with a metal chest piece. Um, and we're so reliant on it in the front lines even, you know, in the age of echocardiography and 12 lead EKG, you know, we still use a stethoscope to pick up the first signs of heart failure of heart disease and pulmonary disease.

Um Yet it's very subjective. Um and the cardiologists are considered the experts.

They even struggle with picking up the nuances, let alone providers who aren't experts in, in cardiovascular care. So kind of the light bulb went off for Conor, can we build a stethoscope that has embedded A I that actually allows providers to better understand what they're listening to and then give them decision support uh to be able to pick up disease earlier on and, and we'll kind of start it out as a pie in the sky.

Let's machine learning to the stethoscope. Ultimately, over the last six years has kind of come into reality with the platform that we built.

Um And it's been an incredible journey, you know, do you have any advice to them about meeting the challenges of COVID and, or you know, anything related to echo that they should know as well.

A institutions and healthcare technology companies need to be focused on provider and, and practitioner safety. Um You know, we went through the PPE crisis, we're still in it.

But now we have to think about how do we deliver care with patient and provide their safety as one of the foremost, if not the foremost concern.

Um And I think medical students need to think about their own safety and, and what tools will they invest in to and, and what institutions will they go work for that, that really prioritize that.

So, uh it's one of those things where I can't, I couldn't even imagine the experience of going into the medical sector in this era.

But certainly Echo is here to try to get creative and think of ways to help providers to provide the same level and caliber of care they provided before COVID.

But in a much safer way, uh given, you know, the infection control concerns, thanks for watching this preview of raised line to hear the full interview, check out all of our podcasts and subscribe to the series, please go to osmosis.org/raised Line podcast or listen wherever you get your podcasts.