Buyer to Builder — The Invisible Layer of Patient Monitoring

A small sensor sits on a tripod across the room — no wearable, no camera, nothing taped to a chest — and it’s reading a heartbeat through the air. What does it take for a tool like that to survive contact with a real hospital?

In this episode of Signal & Symptoms, Dr. Junaid Kalia hosts — with co-hosts Dr. Harvey Castro and Ed Marx — a conversation with Nayan Patel, SVP of Transformation & Digital Health at Neteera and a career hospital CIO who spent decades buying health technology before he crossed over to building it. Neteera’s premise is radical subtraction: a deck-of-cards-sized, FDA-cleared radar sensor that continuously tracks heart rate, respiratory rate and movement with nothing worn and nothing to charge. The panel works through how the radar actually reads the body (ECG mapped to a ballistocardiograph), why “clinical grade” is not an Apple Watch, the ED-waiting-room-chair use case that started with a hard question, the retrospective study that flagged deterioration roughly five days out, and the one demand every CIO makes: don’t make me another dashboard