Heart failure isn’t hard to diagnose. The hard part is the door it comes through — and today, for most patients, that door is the emergency department.
Cardiovascular disease is the single largest driver of unplanned hospital admissions across the US and UK. Yet the clinical problem is rarely that the condition is hard to identify. The problem is where and when it is identified. By the time many patients are diagnosed, they are already in crisis, already in an ambulance, already through the most expensive door in the health system.
The most expensive door in the system
A patient whose heart failure is picked up in primary care enters a planned pathway: titrated medication, scheduled follow-up, education and support. A patient whose heart failure is first found in the emergency department enters an entirely different story — an acute admission, a longer length of stay, and measurably worse one-year outcomes.
70–80%
of first heart-failure diagnoses are still made in the acute setting, not in primary care.
That single statistic reframes the whole challenge. The opportunity isn’t a better test for a cardiologist to run — it’s moving diagnostic-quality assessment to the places patients already are, before deterioration becomes an emergency.
Heart failure isn’t hard to diagnose. The problem is the door it comes through.
— The Docomed thesis
Moving detection upstream
Docomed’s approach is to bring a 30-second, diagnostic-quality cardiovascular assessment into the routine visit and the patient’s home — no new appointment, no specialist referral, no wires or patches. That makes it practical to surface silent risk in the patients already in front of a clinician, and to monitor deterioration in high-risk patients between visits.
- Screen opportunistically during appointments that are already happening.
- Monitor comorbid, high-risk patients continuously, out of hospital.
- Give clinicians timely, AI-enabled analysis rather than raw traces.
What changes when detection moves
When detection moves upstream, the economics move with it. Earlier, planned intervention means fewer emergency admissions, shorter stays and fewer readmissions — and for the patient, more days lived well at home rather than events managed in hospital. Rethinking where heart failure is found is, in the end, rethinking what the system spends its money and its attention on.