In 2009, I was at home with my family. The aroma of home-cooked food filled the air, my two sons were laughing at the dinner table, and my wife was telling me about her day. Then my phone rang.
A man had arrived at the emergency room in critical condition.
I rushed to the hospital, where fluorescent lights revealed a team working frantically to revive him. His wife stood in the hallway, clutching their young daughter’s hand. The little girl’s worried eyes locked on mine. Three hours had already passed since his heart attack began. His odds of survival were less than 5%. That evening, as I delivered the hardest news of my career to a young family, one thought echoed relentlessly in my mind:
Why couldn’t he have come sooner?
Heart disease is the world’s number one killer, claiming more than 20 million lives every year. In India alone, over 3 million families lose a loved one annually to heart attacks and strokes.
We know that the “golden hour” — the first 60 minutes — is critical. If patients are diagnosed and treated within that window, lives can be saved. But in reality, most patients around the world reach proper treatment only after an average of six hours. By then, hope is slipping away.
The heartbreaking truth is this: if we could diagnose heart attacks earlier, we could save half of those lives. Half. Imagine the impact.
In India, where more than a billion people live, there are only a few thousand cardiologists. That’s one specialist for every 250,000 people — and almost all of them are concentrated in major cities. For a villager in rural India, the nearest cardiologist may be hours away. By the time they reach care, it’s often too late. We can’t solve this problem by training more specialists alone. It took me 10 years to become a cardiologist. We need a way to bring expertise to the patient, wherever they are.
That realisation led Zainul and I to start Tricog in 2014, with a bold mission: to screen 100 million patients for heart disease and identify the 2 million most at risk of death.
Our solution was simple but powerful: a small mobile communicator that connects any ECG machine to the cloud. A patient’s heart data is uploaded instantly to our AI system, which flags critical conditions within seconds. A specialist then confirms the diagnosis and sends it back to the clinic — all in under six minutes.
For a patient, those six minutes can mean the difference between life and death. Let me share one story closer to home. In a small town in northern Karnataka, a 52-year-old farmer walked into a clinic complaining of chest discomfort. The clinic staff weren’t sure what was wrong. They connected his ECG machine to Tricog’s device. Within minutes, the AI flagged a severe heart attack, and our team guided the doctors to rush him to the nearest hospital capable of performing an emergency angioplasty. That quick diagnosis saved his life. Just days later, he was back on his farm with his family.
Stories like this are why Tricog exists. They remind us that technology, when applied with purpose, can bend the odds in favour of families who would otherwise lose everything.
What began as a single idea has grown into one of the largest cardiac AI networks in the world. Today, Tricog powers more than 12,500 clinics and hospitals across India and 13 other countries. So far, we’ve touched the lives of over 28 million patients and identified nearly a million critical cases that needed urgent care. Each number represents a life saved, a family kept whole, a story rewritten.
Medicine is built on trust. Technology alone isn’t enough; doctors and patients need to believe in it. Building that trust takes time. But once it’s earned, it becomes a bridge — one that connects world-class expertise to the most remote villages and towns.
For me, Tricog is about more than algorithms or devices. It’s about fairness. About ensuring that no family loses a loved one simply because the right care was too far away.
Back in 2009, standing in that ER, I knew things could have been different if that patient had only reached care sooner. Today, I know we can create that difference — not just for one family, but for millions.
At Tricog, our mission is simple: Every heartbeat deserves a chance.
And until that chance is universal, our work isn’t done.
The Cardiologist’s Notebook 