Us2.ai: A.I. Brings Clarity to Cardiac Ultrasound, and Beyond The Bleeding Edge of Digital Health

Historically, echo analysis has been too expensive or inaccessible for many heart disease patients to receive the care they need. Today’s guests, James Hare and Dr. Carolyn Lam of Us2.ai, are changing that. Us2 is a decision support tool that uses artificial intelligence to automate reading any DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine), anytime, from any device. It is FDA-cleared, vendor-agnostic, and delivers peer-reviewed results that are shown to be interchangeable with expert human sonographers. Us2’s mission is to give everyone full access to their heart health with easy, mobile echo analysis.Today, James and Dr. Lam discuss why echos can be tricky even for medical experts to get right, how Us2 supports both physician and patient use across a variety of cardiac conditions and the healthcare democratization movement. Notable Quotes“It should be accessible to everybody to look at the heart. Why shouldn't you be able to look at the heart and see you've got a hole in your heart or a part of the heart that's not working well or a valve is not working well? I mean, we should be able to do that everywhere.” – Dr. Carolyn Lam (04:02)“There's a lot of well merited skepticism about new AI technologies and the burden is on us to prove that what we have done is useful and it works. But once we push beyond that, once people actually see it, it's just the best feeling in the world. And the reality is that everybody in this, as skeptical as they are, everyone knows what the future is. It's just a matter of how soon we're gonna get there.” – James Hare (18:37)In This Episode(03:36) Us2’s origins (15:20) How it works(19:40) Use cases and the intricacies of heart failure that Us2 can identify (25:38) Us2 uses beyond heart failure(31:30) Us2’s commercial outlook (33:25) The biggest challenge during Us2’s development(35:13) Finding a shared language across business, medicine and tech(39:05) The future of Us2 in hospitals and physician officesOur GuestsUs2.ai CEO and Co-founder James Hare previously served as the Co-founder and President of eDreams, which IPO’d in 2014 and has become one of the world’s most successful e-commerce sites. Before starting Us2, James worked at organizations including EFI, UbiSoft and Netscape, and earned his MBA from Stanford and BA from Harvard.Dr. Carolyn Lam is the Co-founder & Non-Exec Head of Medical Affairs, and is a tenured Professor at Duke-National University in Singapore, where she founded and continues to run the first Women’s Heart Clinic. Dr. Lam received her Masters from the Mayo Clinic, graduated from the Stanford Executive Program and then earned her PhD from the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands.

Resources & Links
LinkedIn: Mike Moore
LinkedIn: The Bleeding Edge of Digital Health