Care Connection

In a village outside of Hyderabad, India, an elderly man waits at home for a checkup. He patiently watches as a medic makes her way along the dirt road toward his house. When she arrives, she reaches into a satchel and removes a stethoscope with a special Y-shaped attachment around the chest piece. While she listens to his heartbeat, this attachment—the CardioSleeve—records an electrocardiogram (ECG), assessing the heart’s health. The ECG is then transmitted to the medic’s mobile device and sent to the patient’s other care providers. The isolated patient is now connected to the care he needs.

The innovative CardioSleeve is the creation of Rijuven, a company headed by Pitt alum Evens Augustin.

“Initially we wanted to create another kind of stethoscope,” explains Augustin, the CEO of Rijuven. “We decided to find a way for doctors to be able to keep their stethoscopes while connecting to a larger network of new technology.”

After many years working as a biomedical engineer, Augustin enrolled in Pitt’s MBA program to help nurture his entrepreneurial spirit and provide him with the education he needed to start his own business. He co-founded Rijuven in 2012 and began developing a range of products to connect patients to better care and open the lines of communication between specialists.

“All of the framework for that type of skill set came from Katz Graduate School of Business,” says Augustin (BUS ’01G). “That particular education is instrumental to what I’m doing right now. I’m continuously using the tools that were provided to me as a student.”

And now, those tools are translating to helping patients and doctors better connect all over the world.

This article appeared in the Winter 2017 edition of Pitt Magazine.