Cardiologist Eric Topol Outlines Goals for San Diego’s West Wireless Healthcare Institute

As a scientific advisor to CardioNet (NASDAQ: [[ticker:BEAT]]) (before the San Diego startup went public last year and moved to Pennsylvania), Eric Topol was in a position to see the coming wave of next-generation wireless technologies in healthcare. Among other things, Topol is the chief academic officer at Scripps Health in San Diego and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, a center funded by a $20 million grant from the National Institutes of Health that includes a focus on wireless healthcare.

Yet the prominent cardiologist recently told me he didn’t realize the potential of this emerging field of innovation until he attended a “Convergence Summit” that was organized last year by San Diego’s Wireless Life Sciences Alliance.

Dr. Eric Topol
Dr. Eric Topol

“It really was the most eye-opening experience,” Topol said, “because all of a sudden, I realized this is just not a cardiology play on heart rhythm or blood pressure. This is going everywhere.” At the same time, of course, Topol said smart phones were hitting their stride and it was becoming apparent that 3G wireless networks were capable of carrying video and enormous amounts of data.

Using wireless networks to monitor cardiovascular function was an obvious opening for technology innovation because heart failure is a critical healthcare issue, and because heart arrthymias are often transitory and difficult to detect in a hospital setting. But Topol said the scope of potential opportunities hit him as he listened to presentations on using wireless technologies to measure patients’ blood sugar, monitor sleep disorders, track respiratory function, and a host of other medical applications. He saw how it would be possible to share data with patients on their own cell phones, along with related information. Asthma and allergy sufferers, for example, could get a report on their respiratory function as well as get air quality reports, pollen counts, and weather data.

“It’s an amazing time in medicine where this technology of wireless sensors and wireless systems have been cropping up at quite

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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.