Economic
Lost income
$203B / year
in US labour income lost to heart-disease morbidity, far exceeding the losses from premature death alone.
Today’s care is intermittent, fragmented and reactive. Patients are observed for a handful of minutes across a year, while cardiovascular deterioration unfolds over days and weeks, so decline is too often detected only once it has become a crisis.
66M+
people across the US and UK living with heart disease or COPD.
#1
cause of unplanned admissions and readmissions.
70–80%
of first heart-failure diagnoses made in the acute setting.
80%
of US counties have no practising cardiologist.
The core problem
Heart failure isn't hard to diagnose. The problem is the door it comes through.
The economic case doesn’t rest on treating heart failure more cheaply, it rests on where the diagnosis is made. A patient found in primary care enters a planned pathway. A patient found in the emergency department enters through the most expensive door in the system, and the evidence shows those diagnosed acutely have worse one-year outcomes and higher subsequent use.
Found earlyPrimary care. Titrated medication, scheduled follow-up, no ambulance, the patient stays home, in work, and in their family for longer.
Found lateEmergency department. A full diagnostic work-up, a longer stay, $25k–$37k of first-year cost, and higher one-year mortality.
The wider burden
The hospital bill is only the visible tip.
Heart failure behaves less like a hospital cost line and more like a multi-generational household event, and earlier detection is what keeps a patient at home, in work, and in their family.
Household
Financial strain
1 in 7
US families with a heart-failure member spend more than a fifth of their income on that care.
Human
Unpaid caregiving
Up to 52 hrs
a week of unpaid family caregiving, over a commitment measured in years, not weeks.
Wider-burden figures are drawn from peer-reviewed study populations and national analyses, and are best read as ranges and orders of magnitude rather than precise totals.
Why now
The at-risk population is growing fast.
By 2030, roughly 90 million Americans will be aged 60 or older, the age band where cardiovascular risk climbs steepest. Most of them will see a primary-care clinician at least once a year, for reasons that usually have nothing to do with their heart. Each of those visits is an opportunity to catch silent deterioration early, if the right test can be run in the time a routine appointment allows.
There's a better place to find heart failure.
See how Docomed moves detection upstream, into the routine visit and the patient’s home.
Or email us directly at enquiries@docomed.ai