MD Revolution Offers Blueprint for “Health Management” Practice

On the seventh floor of a medical office building near Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, Dr. Samir Damani has established a prototype medical practice of the future.

The suite looks more like a spa than a doctor’s office, with modern art mounted on chalk white walls and white-washed wooden floors that bespeak understated elegance and calm. Subtle lighting illuminates enough MacBooks, iPads, and desktop monitors to stock an Apple store, and the shelves display a host of wireless health devices, including a Digifit heart rate monitor, MyFitnessPal calorie counter, and Fitbit activity tracker.

In a whirlwind tour, Damani explains the suite is both a clinical lab and a medical practice that brings together a variety of health and fitness monitoring technologies. As both a practicing cardiologist and researcher, Damani says he came to The Scripps Research Institute to complete a master’s degree in clinical investigation; he was focusing on genomics and the biomarkers of disease when he saw that cardiovascular disease was reaching epidemic proportions among older Americans. Instead of waiting for patients to develop chronic illnesses—and using medical interventions and pharmaceuticals to treat them (at a projected cost of $500 billion by 2015)—Damani says he realized he should be working to help patients improve their metabolism and cardiovascular fitness.

The Personal Health Dashboard

Damani says he founded MD Revolution to manage patients’ health by using a variety of diagnostics and sensors to track the most important indicators of cardiovascular health, and to integrate good nutrition, exercise, and other healthy practices into a holistic program. “We’re not in the game of creating the sensors and hardware,” Damani says. “What we’re doing is integrating all these different platforms into a dashboard that patients can understand and use. We have to really engage people to change their behavior.”

Integrating data from heart monitors, calorie counters, and other sources into a single platform was no trivial task, and Damani says MD Revolution has invested between $500,000 and $1 million in the effort. Since the company was founded in early 2011, it has raised $2.25 million from

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.