Remote ECG interpretation is a service in which a clinic records a patient's ECG, sends it over the internet, and receives a heart specialist's reading within minutes. It is also called tele-ECG or tele-cardiology. It is built for clinics, health centres and small hospitals that have no cardiologist, or heart specialist, of their own. In India, most cardiologists work in large cities, so the service matters most in towns and villages.
An ECG, or electrocardiogram, is the tracing of the heart's electrical signals. Ten stickers, called electrodes, are placed on the chest, arms and legs. The machine records the heart's signals from 12 directions, called leads, usually for 10 seconds. A heart attack, a dangerous rhythm or a strained heart each leaves a typical pattern in the tracing. But reading an ECG well takes years of training, and a general doctor can miss the signs.
Consider a primary health centre in a district of Odisha, 120 km from the nearest cardiologist. At 9 p.m., a 52-year-old farmer arrives with pain in his chest and left arm. The doctor on duty records his ECG on a machine connected to the internet. The machine sends the 12 tracings to the service's cloud. There, an AI model reads them first and marks the case as urgent, because the pattern suggests a heart attack. Sorting cases by urgency in this way is called triage. A cardiologist on duty at the service's reading centre sees the urgent case at the top of the list and confirms the reading. Within about ten minutes, the reading and the cardiologist's advice reach the health centre's doctor in an app. The doctor gives the first treatment and sends the farmer by ambulance to a hospital in the city.
The service reads ECGs from many sources. These include clinics' ECG machines, the bedside patient monitor, a health kiosk and a personal ECG monitor at home. Its reports can be stored in the hospital EHR. The AI model that reads the tracings first is described in AI ECG analysis.
How is this different from a tele-ICU? A tele-ICU watches patients in intensive care all the time, through live feeds from their monitors. Remote ECG interpretation reads one recording at a time, when a clinic sends it.