The Operator File
Scott Klein
The biomedical engineer who learned to sell, then learned to lead - now making the heartbeat easier to hear.
Klein, on the record.
The biomedical engineer who learned to sell, then learned to lead - now making the heartbeat easier to hear.
Most medical breakthroughs fail for an unglamorous reason: nobody wants to wear them. The adhesive itches. The patch peels in the shower. The patient takes it off on day three, and the arrhythmia the doctor was hunting for arrives on day nine, unrecorded.
Scott Klein has spent a career on the other side of that problem. As CEO of HelpWear, a Toronto medical-device company, he leads the team behind HeartWatch - an ambulatory ECG monitor built for the long haul. It sits on the bicep. It uses dry, non-adhesive metallic electrodes instead of the sticky gel pads that wear out a patient's patience. The pitch is almost suspiciously simple: a device people will actually keep on collects data the old ones never got to see.
Klein is not the wide-eyed inventor in this story. HelpWear was famously dreamed up by two Toronto teenagers who wondered whether an Apple-Watch-style gadget could catch the cardiac events that hospitals miss. Klein is the grown-up in the room - the operator brought in to turn a high-school idea and a 3D-printed prototype into something a cardiologist can trust and a regulator can clear.
I build medtech businesses around novel technologies by securing market access.
There is a quiet thesis running underneath everything HelpWear builds, and Klein states it plainly: in cardiology, the device you forget you are wearing is the device that works. A monitor that records ten days of clean signal beats a more precise one a patient abandons after seventy-two hours. Detection is a function of duration, and duration is a function of comfort.
HeartWatch is the company's answer. It is pitched as a medical-grade ambulatory ECG monitor designed specifically for extended wear, aimed at the patients where the stakes are highest - people recovering from a stroke with no clear cause, or those who faint without explanation and need their heart watched long enough to catch the culprit. For them, the difference between a few days of data and a few weeks can be the difference between a diagnosis and a shrug.
The engineering trick is the dry electrode. Conventional ambulatory monitors lean on adhesive patches that irritate skin and limit how long anyone tolerates them. HeartWatch swaps the glue for metallic sensors held against the upper arm - the precision of a clinical instrument wearing the manners of a consumer gadget. It is the kind of unsexy, deeply practical bet that a biomedical engineer with a marketer's instincts would make.
That dual fluency is Klein's real signature. He can read a sensor spec sheet and a sales channel with equal ease, which in medtech is rarer than it sounds. Plenty of founders can describe how a device works. Far fewer can explain how it gets reimbursed, prescribed, stocked, and trusted - the long, dull plumbing between a clever prototype and a product a hospital will actually buy.
Before the startup, there were two decades of corporate medtech - the kind of apprenticeship that teaches you how big companies launch products, and exactly where they get slow.
Strip away the org charts and the medical jargon and you find a fairly grounded picture: a guy in the Twin Cities who serves on a club's board of governors and spends weekends coaching kids' soccer, baseball and basketball. There is a tidy symmetry there. Coaching is patience disciplined into a craft - small corrections, repeated, until a team that could not pass the ball suddenly can. Scaling a medical device is the same temperament wearing a suit.
It is worth sitting with the geography for a second, too. Klein runs a Toronto company from Minnesota. He is the American veteran steering a Canadian startup that was born from a teenager's worry about a parent's health. The story has founders, and they are not him - and he seems entirely comfortable with that. His job is not to have had the idea. It is to make the idea survive contact with the real world.
That is the through-line of the whole career: pacemakers, cardiac surgery, heart failure, hearing, and now an arm-worn ECG. Different organs, different decades, one stubborn question. How do you take a clever piece of technology and make it something a human being will actually live with - long enough for it to do its job?
Anyone can build a device. The trick is building one people will actually keep on.