Canada cannot prevent heart disease with episodic care
Canada’s cardiac system is built to respond to moments: a symptom, an appointment, a test, a diagnosis, an intervention. But heart disease does not develop in moments. It evolves over months and years, often before a patient feels unwell.
That mismatch has consequences. Heart disease remains Canada’s second-leading cause of death and a leading cause of hospitalization. Yet our response is still weighted toward what happens after symptoms appear.
Prevention cannot simply be a slogan attached to a reactive system. It requires infrastructure that helps clinicians see meaningful change earlier, rather than treating a disease once it’s obvious.
Today, much of cardiac care still relies on snapshots: a blood-pressure reading, an ECG, an imaging study or a specialist assessment taken at one point in time. These tools are essential. But a snapshot can tell us what is happening today; it cannot always show whether a patient’s cardiac performance is changing between visits.
Canada needs a new layer of care between medical appointments and hospital-based investigations: portable, repeatable, and clinician-reviewed measurement that establishes a baseline and tracks change over time. Not for everyone, and not as a substitute for established diagnostics, but for clearly defined groups where the clinical question is not only, “What is happening?” but also, “What is changing?”
This is not a theoretical problem. A recent OurCare National Survey found that 17 per cent of people in Canada still lacked a regular family doctor, nurse practitioner, or primary care setting. Even among those connected to primary care, only 37 per cent of people seeking an urgent appointment obtained one the same or next day, while just 28 per cent were satisfied with how the system was working.
A prevention model that depends on repeated access to clinics, specialists and hospital-based tests cannot succeed when timely access remains the exception rather than the norm.
The answer is not to flood patients and clinicians with more data. Data, by itself, is not intelligence. What matters is whether repeated, standardized measurements can be translated into clinically useful context: who appears stable, who warrants closer review, and who should be escalated to advanced testing. The standard must be clinical usefulness, not technological novelty.
Technologies such as seismocardiography are designed to help fill this gap. SCG records small chest-wall vibrations created by the heart’s mechanical activity. One example is Recordis, a portable, non-invasive, and clinical-grade platform developed by LLA Technologies. It captures standardized mechanical cardiac information for review by qualified professionals. It is not a standalone diagnostic and does not replace echocardiography.
Recordis illustrates the broader capability LLA Technologies is developing beyond the sensor itself: a longitudinal cardiac intelligence layer between episodic clinical encounters. Its role is to complement established diagnostics with repeatable mechanical cardiac measurements that can establish a baseline, support comparison over time and help clinicians assess change between imaging episodes.
It is just one example of a wider shift. Canadian innovators are developing technologies that can move appropriate care closer to patients, create more consistent information between appointments and help health systems use scarce specialist resources more deliberately.
This is also a global challenge. Every country facing chronic disease, aging populations and uneven access is trying to manage conditions that evolve continuously through systems designed around isolated encounters.
But innovation will not matter if health systems have no pathway to evaluate, adopt and fund it. Provinces, health authorities and research institutions should work toward creating structured pilots for longitudinal cardiac technologies, with the patient group, clinical purpose and escalation pathway defined in advance. They should measure reliability, usability, equity, privacy, interoperability and, most importantly, whether the information changes care.
Canada does not need to choose between the tests we trust and the technologies that can extend their reach. It needs to connect them. Waiting for symptoms and then mobilizing the most expensive parts of the system is not prevention.
Heart disease evolves continuously. Our model of care must finally begin to do the same.
David Loban is the CEO and President of LLA Technologies and the driving force behind Recordis™, a clinical-grade cardiac measurement platform focused on helping people understand their heart health earlier and more effectively.
The views expressed are those of the author(s). Canada Healthwatch publishes a range of perspectives and does not necessarily endorse the opinions presented.
