David Sakadelis
VP, Group Director / Head of Technology
Heartbeat
The Experiential Technologist
Since 2012, David Sakadelis has served as the hands-on head sorcerer of Heartbeat’s in-house technology department—a dedicated staff of code wizards, future-thinking developers, digital engineers, and analysts who parse 0s and 1s like no one’s business as they have kept the agency at the forefront of digital innovation.
While David’s fingerprints can be found on a multitude of Heartbeat’s flashiest tech-inspired campaigns, his true calling card has been the creation of Heartbeat’s internal innovation team named ETCH—shorthand for Heartbeat “Experiential Technology.” Often acting as David’s personal innovation playground, it’s been a way for him and his team to incubate new ideas through short cycles of business-driven exploration and experimentation. And in the process, he’s inspired some pretty big, imaginative uses of technologies for both the agency and its clients.
Some recent examples of solutions and new offerings that have emerged from the ETCH Lab include “The Waiting Room of the Future,” an advanced, tech-infused vision of a future waiting room experience; CongressVision, an add-on technology that augments congress booth experiences using facial recognition and real-time sentiment analysis to measure booth performance and offer a dynamic digital experience; and Heart-bot, an AI virtual assistant that uses health data, IoT devices, facial recognition, and voice/chat to help guide the patient health journey and connect patients to health services.
But David’s most recent next-gen triumph is Heartbeat’s EHR Connected Patient Service. The revolutionary system utilizes voice and chat technology to collect meaningful patient data in real-time and transmits it seamlessly to the doctor directly into their EHR for use in the next patient visit (or sooner if red flags alert a special care team about a problem that needs immediate attention). The result of these integrated tools is a fully functioning, EHR-empowered, HCP-patient connection that extends the point of care to (quite literally) everywhere and wholly reshapes the ways patients and doctors communicate.
With 20-plus years of IT and marketing experience, David’s career stands out as a beacon of transformative thinking—and he has established himself as one of the industry’s primary champions at incorporating new technology into the healthcare ecosystem.
