The Slovak team around Powerful Medical wants to change how ECG records are read and used in practice. Their PMcardio platform promises faster and more accurate diagnostics that can save critical time. Behind the project is a co-founder who started with software in his teenage years and later joined forces with his brother—a medical student.
From idea to medicine
The founder started programming at fourteen, founded his first company at eighteen, and after the initial attempts came more successful projects and capital. In 2017, Powerful Medical was established with the aim of finding a problem with global impact. Together with his brother, who was studying medicine in Vienna, they spent years working with available data (for example, academic datasets) until in 2019 the conditions were ripe for serious artificial intelligence in healthcare.
Cardiology caught their interest because heart disease is among the most common causes of premature death. The decision was accelerated by a personal experience: a family case in which an ECG consultation with a specialist led to immediate treatment and pacemaker implantation. At the same time, doctors openly admit that ECGs also come to them via phone and responses often arrive late. Automation and accurate interpretation of ECGs thus proved to be a clear need.
How PMcardio works
PMcardio is a platform for diagnosis, notification, and coordination of care for cardiovascular patients. In Europe it operates as a certified medical device and can evaluate 39 diagnoses from a standard ECG. In many cases it achieves accuracy that surpasses even experienced cardiologists, with models trained on millions of records.
The system can be integrated directly into hospital information systems, which automatically send ECGs for analysis and trigger subsequent steps. The simplest way to use it is a mobile app: a doctor photographs a paper ECG, the app digitizes it and evaluates it. This helps general practitioners, paramedics, and emergency department doctors who may not be ECG specialists. For heart attacks, according to the company, it shortens time to treatment by hours, while guidelines state that the patient should undergo the procedure within 90 minutes.
Into practice and abroad
In Slovakia, pilots are underway in centers with catheterization labs (for example, NÚSCH, CINRE, or AGEL Košice-Šaca) and in several emergency departments. For nationwide deployment, it is key to add clinical evidence and reflect it in national protocols—healthcare is governed by guidelines and changes come after the effect is demonstrated. Another obstacle in outpatient clinics is the lack of a billing code for reimbursement, which dampens the motivation to use new tools.
Globally, according to the company, PMcardio has 67,000 registered doctors and is used in roughly a hundred centers, with the strongest momentum in Belgium, the Netherlands, and in the USA as part of clinical trials. The company focuses on B2B collaboration, especially with private providers, where it is easier to assess economic value. A competitive advantage is rapid deployment: either through deep integration within weeks, or via the app, which works even with a photo of an ECG from any device. The vision is a complete cardiology AI platform—from ECG on a watch to quickly directing the patient to the right specialist.
