Meet Viz.ai at ACC 2024 to explore how AI-powered care coordination enhances cardiovascular care.

Jul 27, 2021

5 min

How Viz.ai is Improving Access to Stroke Care

In episode 132 of the BackTable podcast, host Dr. Bryan Hartley and Dr. Chis Mansi, co-founder and CEO of Viz.ai, discuss how the company is

The Viz.ai origin story

Viz.ai is improving how healthcare is delivered in the world. Viz.ai CEO and co-founder, Dr. Chris Mansi, started his path as neurosurgeon. He was trained in the UK, and after his time as a physician he went on to receive his MBA at Stanford. It was here where the idea for Viz.ai was born.

While at Stanford, Chris was a student of Eric Schmidt (the CEO and chairman of Google at the time). He pitched the idea of Viz.ai in a business plan competition, and as luck would have it, Eric liked the idea. So much in fact, that he ended up contributing to the seed funding of the company.

Chris Mansi’s “AHA” moment

As a physician, Chris discovered that very few patients who were presenting to hospitals with large vessel occlusion (LVO) strokes were being treated in a timely manner. The issue wasn’t that these patients weren’t being looked after, it was that if they showed up to a hospital without an interventional specialist or stroke neurologist, their case wasn’t being picked up or being referred in time.

In some cases, the medical workflow wasn’t appropriate, or the ambulance would take too long to show up. There were a huge variety of reasons why these patients were not being treated as quickly as they should be.

“What if within a minute of the scan, an algorithm would read that scan and alert the right neurologist or neurointerventionalist so they could go, yes, these images show a patient who I could potentially treat, let’s transfer them over.”

All of a sudden you would turn healthcare from a push model, with numerous steps and handovers and three to five hours of delays, to one where decisions could be made within minutes. This would drive the workflow to the team that really understands the time sensitive nature of the disease and could potentially shorten patient time to treatment significantly.

How AI-powered stroke software works

Viz reads scans coming off a CT/MRI scanner, then sends an alert to the relevant stroke team; vascular neurologist, neuro interventionist, as well as the local emergency room physician and radiologist. They’re immediately connected, can all see the patient scan at exactly the same time, usually in a matter of minutes, at which point they can immediately communicate in real time to plan out the course of treatment for the patient.

Improving care coordination

“When we were looking at the standard workflow, we realized that we needed to focus on the user experience and you needed something to trigger it. The Viz platform replicates having a neuroradiologist in every CT scanner, so that the neuroradiologist could trigger that workflow.”

“We conducted a study where we found time savings in even the best centers around the country. Not only did we reduce the time from scan to alert of the specialist by around an hour, but most importantly, we reduced the variation of alerts from well over 120 minutes down to 7 minutes.”

Time is brain

Viz.ai is constantly striving to improve patient outcomes. We’ve learned that “Time is Brain”, and you can improve the patient’s outcome from the moment a patient has a stroke, to when they get the clot removed. Viz not only saves lives with our AI-powered technology, but we also promote educational campaigns. We educate people on stroke awareness, because the sooner you get help, the better your chance for a healthy outcome. When time is brain, every minute counts.

Dedicated to your success

Our mission is to fundamentally improve how healthcare is delivered in the world, through intelligent software that promises to reduce time to treatment, improve access to care and speed the diffusion of medical innovation.

At Viz.ai, it’s not just about the software, it’s also about the team that comes with it. We provide all hospitals and centers we work with with a customer success team that ensures you are maximizing the Viz platform, as well as providing 24/7 dedicated support for your care team.