The snow was just a dusting across Matt Pemberton’s driveway — hardly even worth moving, except that guests were on their way over. It was nothing like the hefty, wet, deep snow that he’d spent more than three hours shoveling just one month earlier at his home in rural Wisconsin.
Yet, despite the lack of heavy lifting on that day in December 2020, Matt started to run out of breath after only a few minutes of work. He headed inside, ate breakfast, and drank some water. His wife, Keely, asked what was wrong. Matt said he was probably fine and went back outside.
But soon he came in again, hand on his chest.
Keely was uneasy. “You can’t be the guy who designs ECG systems and dies from a heart attack,” she said.
Matt is the director of core solutions for diagnostic cardiology at GE HealthCare. He’s been with the company for 23 years, and he works daily with engineers and physicians developing ECG devices, algorithms, and stress tests that help to uncover heart attacks and other serious problems. But he was in disbelief that he could be having a heart attack himself. He was only 48 years old and had no family history. And hadn’t his heart just performed beautifully when he shoveled that wet snow a month earlier?
Matt and Keely Pemberton. Top: Matt Pemberton; Life Care Solutions Chief Technology Officer Roshy Francis; General Manager for Diagnostic Cardiology and Remote Patient Monitoring Ashutosh Banerjee.
Still, Keely had a point. Matt remembered that at a recent staff meeting, Ashutosh Banerjee, general manager for diagnostic cardiology and remote patient monitoring, had given out handheld KardiaMobile six-lead ECG devices made by AliveCor. Matt knew enough about reading an ECG to give it a try. He compared the graph of the electrical signals of his heart with a previous ECG stored on his phone.
The new reading looked a little off, but he wasn’t sure. He called Bob Farrell, principal engineer, who designs the algorithms for GE HealthCare’s ECG devices. Farrell suggested that Matt see a doctor if he was having chest pain, to be safe.
But, feeling his shortness of breath was brief and minor without any chest pain, Matt went out to the driveway a third time. This time, when he started feeling shortness of breath, he took the ECG right away. And this time there was a telltale notch in the graph that, to his eyes, showed that his heart was in trouble. Keely and their guest drove Matt to the hospital, where he was admitted.
The next morning, he failed his stress test so badly that he cut it short, fearing he would collapse on the treadmill. In the cath lab, where doctors used imaging equipment to visualize his arteries, he was diagnosed with a 90% blockage in his left anterior descending artery. There’s a name for that type of blockage: the widowmaker.
In December 2020, awaiting open-heart surgery.
“My whole world stopped, because I know how bad that is,” Matt said later. According to the American Heart Association, the survival rate for that type of heart attack, when it happens outside of a hospital, is only 12%.
Because Matt had a 2-millimeter aneurysm in the damaged blood vessel, ballooning under the pressure, doctors couldn’t insert a stent. He also had significant blockages in two other arteries.
The day after his 49th birthday, Matt had open-heart surgery. Doctors removed an artery from his chest and reconnected it below the clot that had caused the blockage, restoring normal blood flow through that area.
While his recovery was challenging, he used it as a time to change his lifestyle. Today he eats vegan meals most of the week, watches his cholesterol, and runs and bikes regularly. “I’m appreciative of every day now,” he says. Each May, he and a small group of friends take a trip to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands to celebrate life.
He still has to monitor the blockages in the other two arteries. Now he can recognize what a heart attack feels like — but, of course, he doesn’t want it to come to that.
Matt Pemberton with the GE Healthcare team at the American Heart Association Heart & Stroke Walk in Milwaukee, September 2022.
At work, Matt has a renewed purpose to help people get their heart problems diagnosed and treated quickly. That purpose is shared across the organization. In August 2022, GE HealthCare made a strategic investment in AliveCor, whose KardiaMobile 6L device is approved to help detect atrial fibrillation, a common heart arrhythmia that signals a high risk of a stroke.
Banerjee, the manager who gave Matt the portable ECG device, and his team are exploring ways to send lifesaving information from these handheld instruments directly to doctors and hospitals. They are developing algorithms that improve the ability of smaller devices to detect abnormal heart rhythms. The two companies also have a partnership to integrate data from AliveCor’s KardiaMobile 6L ECG into GE HealthCare’s MUSE Cardiac Management System, which stores and manages information that helps doctors analyze the health of a patient’s heart.
The ultimate goal is to reduce deaths from heart disease — the No. 1 killer in the United States.
“I’m a lucky test scenario that shows what the engineers and experts in our field can do, and the opportunity we have to create an impact with these devices,” Matt says. “We have a big responsibility to help save more lives.”
Disclaimer: KardiaMobile 6L does not detect heart attacks.
