A Conversation with Eko’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Steven Steinhubl

When we asked Dr. Steven Steinhubl to walk us through his career, he said it would take a while. “How much time do you have for this?” he chuckled. “This could be a movie in and of itself.”

He's only half joking.

Steinhubl started college as a chemical engineering major, briefly considered medicine but talked himself out of it, and then took a job unrelated to either field.

It was a volunteer ambulance crew he joined, mostly because a friend was doing it, that changed his mind. “I really fell in love with it,” he said of his two years learning to be an EMT, which ultimately led him back to medical school.

But even then, cardiology wasn't the plan. Steinhubl grew up in Missouri and assumed he'd become a small-town pediatrician. During his pediatric rotation, he took care of a 7-year-old boy with lymphoma going through chemotherapy, and he knew then that the emotional toll of pediatrics would be too difficult. “I have tremendous respect for pediatricians,” he said, “especially those who do oncology.”

A mentor at the right moment

Cardiology eventually found him, though, partly through his engineering brain — “it's pumps and pipes, and I felt like I understood it,” he said — and partly through good timing.

After his residency at an Air Force base, he was transferred to Anchorage, Alaska, where he and his wife raised their young family.

The hospital on the base had no subspecialists, so he briefly became the de facto oncologist, and again confirmed that treating patients with cancer was not meant to be his path. Around that same time, a local cardiologist started coming by the base to lend a hand — someone Steinhubl immediately admired. 

“He treated patients the way I hoped I could treat patients. He thought about the science of cardiology the way I hoped I could, and so he inspired me to pursue it.”

That cardiologist is still a close friend today. (Poetically, the two happened to have dinner together the same night as this interview.) 

After the Air Force, Steinhubl went on to a cardiology fellowship where he'd meet his future mentor, the chief of cardiology at a globally renowned clinic, who nudged him toward a career built on research.

“I was always fascinated by all the things we don't understand in healthcare that are the diagnostic dilemmas — the things that don't make sense,” Steinhubl said. His mentor inspired Steinhubl to pursue a path that involved clinical research and asking important questions while also caring for patients.

After the Air Force, now working as an interventional cardiologist, he became acquainted with the realities of the U.S. healthcare system — piquing his curiosity on what technology could do to improve it. That inquisitiveness eventually led him to rejoin his mentor at the first academic research center dedicated to digital health technologies. Since then, Steinhubl’s research has focused on using those technologies to improve research and how technology can fit better into patient care. 

Alaska, Indiana, and a bed-and-breakfast kitchen

These days, Steinhubl's time is split across the country. In addition to his work at Eko, he's a professor of biomedical engineering at a university in Indiana where he also sees patients at a nearby clinic. 

He also travels back to Anchorage every summer for clinical work at an organization that treats Alaska Native people — a population he describes as “having the most interesting lives of anybody in the United States,” he says, living in remote villages and surviving on skills that have been passed on for generations.

And then there's his most important job, he says with a laugh, as the breakfast cook at his wife's Alaskan bed-and-breakfast. (Though that job is ending soon, as they recently sold the business.)

“She decided working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week for 4 months out of the year for a decade was enough to scratch her itch for running a bed and breakfast.”

How he ended up at Eko

Steinhubl's history with Eko goes back further than his title does — to around 2014, when he first connected with a few people in the health tech and life sciences spaces who would later go on to work with the company. He had real respect for how they operated and how well they understood the work they were doing, so when both of them ended up at Eko, he paid attention.

What eventually pulled him in was a combination of two things: he thought the underlying technology was genuinely promising, and he already trusted the people building it. "If there wasn't a technology I felt was worthwhile, I wouldn't have been interested," he said. "But knowing the people leading the company were good, and meant what they said, made it a much easier decision." That was enough to bring him on as an advisor, a role that eventually grew into Chief Medical Officer.

When he first performed an exam with an Eko stethoscope, listening itself took some getting used to after 20-plus years with an analog scope. It only took a couple of patients, though, before something shifted.

“I could hear heart sounds more distinctly. I could hear murmurs — what I would normally have called more subtle murmurs — that really stood out.”

He describes it as two reactions landing at once: the clinician in him thinking this was simply a better stethoscope, and the researcher in him realizing the remarkable potential of digitized heart and lung sounds and artificial intelligence.

Why change is the hard part

Steinhubl doesn't sugarcoat how hard it is to get clinicians to actually adopt something new, even when they know it's better. He tells the story of a colleague — a cardiologist with nearly 30 years of experience — who tried an early digital stethoscope for less than one day before going right back to his analog scope, simply because everything sounded unfamiliar.

“It's really hard for a clinician to change what they're used to,” he said. “We're very good at telling ourselves that what we've been doing for the last several decades is good enough.”

It's exactly the kind of hesitation he believes Eko's newest stethoscope, the CORE 300™, is built to break through. Rather than asking clinicians to commit to digital listening on day one, it lets them move between analog and digital instantly, so they can build trust in the new technology at their own pace.

For Steinhubl, that flexibility isn't a compromise; it's the on-ramp — a way for clinicians who've trusted their ears for decades to warm up to something new without giving up the tool they already rely on, all while quietly getting the benefit of the AI running underneath it.

What's actually broken in cardiac care

Ask Steinhubl what frustrates him most about cardiac care today, and he doesn't point to diagnosis or treatment in the cardiology clinic —he thinks the field is generally good once a condition is identified. The real problem, in his view, starts earlier, in exam rooms where primary care visits have been squeezed into ever-shorter windows.

A proper cardiac exam, as he was trained, takes at least 5 to 10 minutes when done well. In practice, he says, patients rarely even undress for one anymore, because there isn't enough appointment time to spare for someone to change into a gown.

“Identifying cardiovascular problems requires spending time talking to your patient, really digging into symptoms, really spending time examining them. But a large part of appointments is spent documenting and data entry, so something has to give.”

That's the gap he sees Eko stethoscopes and AI stepping into: not replacing the exam, but helping recover some of the time that’s been taken away by administrative burden.

What he’s building toward now

For all his focus on AI and data, Steinhubl is emphatic that the instrument itself isn't going anywhere. “There's a magic about a stethoscope, both for the provider and for patients,” he said, pointing out that nearly every photograph of a doctor includes one around the neck. The research backs up the instinct — patients who aren't examined with a stethoscope report feeling they received a less thorough exam and trusting their clinician less, even when nothing else about the visit changes.

He's also fascinated by what the exam itself represents. Putting a stethoscope on someone's chest is, by any normal social standard, an invasion of personal space — and he thinks the instrument is exactly what makes that closeness feel earned instead of intrusive. “There's an actual study where they showed people photos of similar-looking individuals, and the one item that made people trust someone was whether they had a stethoscope around their neck,” he said.

That's part of why he believes the exam, and the human relationship behind it, will outlast any shift toward automation. Care may eventually involve a lot more interaction with autonomous AI tools, he says, but there will always be a need for a trusted human relationship.

The point of it all

Steinhubl measures his career in two very different units. There's the one he's used for over 20 years: a single patient, a 15-minute appointment, walking out feeling a little better than they walked in. And then there's the one he's still getting used to: the number of people a single, well-built piece of technology might reach without him ever meeting them.

“I feel like the luckiest person around, that I get paid to do a job that's about helping other people feel better. During an exam, I can help one person. But the work we do at Eko can potentially affect hundreds of thousands of lives.”

He carries a story from early in his career that drives the work he does at Eko. A patient managing insulin-dependent diabetes once pushed back when Steinhubl pressed him about checking his glucose more often. "Doc, I don't like being reminded I'm sick," the patient told him. "Every time I do a finger stick, I'm reminded I'm sick."

That line has stayed with him through years of watching wearables and digital tools promise to put more health data into people's hands. His takeaway wasn't that the data is unwelcome — it's that the best health technology should fit quietly into someone's life rather than announce itself.

It's the same standard he holds Eko's own work to now: build something that gives providers and patients more clarity about their health, and let it earn their trust.