PaceMate Names New Head of AI

PaceMate has appointed Sean Shoffstall as head of AI, Innovation, and Data Strategy. He joins the company after holding senior roles with Beginly Health, Welby Health, and Auditdata, where he played an integral part in the launch of the first HIPAA-compliant AI-generated audiogram analysis tool in the industry.

In his new role at PaceMate, Shoffstall will drive the company’s AI ambitions forward with a focus on transforming data-driven insights into automatic actions, beginning with the transformation of manual workflows that impede clinics and take up time that could be better spent on patients.

For more than a decade, PaceMate has centralized discrete data from a wide range of cardiac monitoring devices, EHR systems and clinics’ internal operations, offering clinicians a holistic view of the necessary items needed to deliver the best possible patient care–and actionable insights to conduct it more efficiently. For PaceMate, this work has resulted in one of the most robust cardiovascular datasets on the planet, according to the company. This data-rich backdrop will enable the company to introduce a number of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning applications that will take these operational efficiencies from streamlined to scale. Doing so will require U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval and HIPAA compliance that have so far hindered the introduction of AI solutions to the remote cardiac monitoring space.

To naturally progress the evolution of PaceMate’s platform, Shoffstall will drive forward an AI roadmap with an initial focus on three core areas: 1) surfacing the insights that matter most, with the necessary urgency, 2) optimizing clinics’ operational efficiency and care, and 3) fueling medical and industry research.

Since its founding, PaceMate’s innovation roadmap has been shaped by the clinicians and care teams who directly rely on it. Shoffstall seeks to maintain this approach by partnering directly with some of the more than 1,000 clinics that already use PaceMate to streamline their remote cardiac monitoring workflows. He will lean on his decades of experience in healthcare technology to innovate responsibly with ethical AI practices and transparency at the core. The priority is ensuring that new AI applications handle the data analysis and pattern recognition enabling healthcare providers to spend more time caring for patients. This includes enhancing the daily workflows to meet the clinical demands of cardiac care rather than focusing on futuristic use cases that do not meet clinics’ real-world needs.

“The amount of data that PaceMate is sitting on to drive better outcomes is very exciting when viewed from an AI standpoint. And the remote cardiac monitoring space is overdue for AI applications that are regulated and safe for physicians to use in their daily workstreams,” Shoffstall said. “PaceMate has been producing clinic-level insights for years. With AI, we’ll now be able to give practitioners the option to act on some of them to automatically cut down their daunting workloads. And we’ll put historical and industry insights to work to progress healthcare at large. I’m honored to join PaceMate at this critical moment and look forward to working in tandem with the team and clients to define the next stage of remote cardiac monitoring.”

Shoffstall’s hire is the latest move by recently appointed PaceMate CEO J.R. Finkelmeier to drive innovation across the company’s products and client services, in support of its own operational scale.

“At PaceMate we’re dedicated to providing clinicians the software and services they need to provide the best patient care while overcoming legacy remote cardiac monitoring and operational roadblocks,” Finkelmeier stated. “Our natural next move is layering AI and machine learning capabilities on top of our data in a way that allows us to improve triage, enable population health, and even fuel preventive strategies. Shoffstall brings deep expertise in delivering such purpose-built solutions and is acutely aware of data sensitivities in the healthcare industry that can stand in the way of meeting regulatory requirements.”

PaceMate is a constant cardiac device management platform that clinicians use to optimize their practices, prioritize critical patients, and deliver better and faster care. The company’s cloud-based system enables care teams to manage cardiac device patients through a single, end-to-end platform that integrates with all EHRs. With up-to-date, comprehensive data, PaceMate delivers actionable insights for providers to optimize practice performance and drive better patient outcomes. PaceMate is helping integrated delivery networks (IDNs) and academic health systems, including Duke Health, Advocate Health, and many others modernize and scale cardiac care delivery. The company is headquartered in Tampa, Fla.