About
What is The Heart Explained?
The Heart Explained is an educational website that explains how our hearts work when they’re healthy and shows what happens when things go wrong. It is intended for patients and non-medically trained users.
The program uses beautifully produced animations and graphics to illustrate complex processes and to explain both normal and abnormal cardiovascular functioning. The animations are accompanied by clear and succinct text that describes the causes, symptoms, and treatment options for a range of common disorders.
The Heart Explained was independently produced and is not affiliated with any organization, commercial or non-commercial.
The content was prepared by John Heseltine and Jane Hunter, who have collaborated on a lot of pretty good medical publishing projects over the years. They were fortunate to be guided and educated every step of the way by George Rodgers, M.D., a practicing cardiologist and the associate chief of cardiology at Dell Medical School in Austin, Texas.
Cardiology consultant
George P. Rodgers, M.D.
Dr. Rodgers is an Associate Professor of Medicine and the Associate Chief of Cardiology for Education at The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School.
He led the development of the cardiovascular curriculum for the new medical school. Dr. Rodgers teaches medical students, residents and cardiology fellows on a regular basis. Beyond medical education, he has a particular interest in prevention the early detection of heart disease, team-based care, and innovative value-based care for the safety-net population.
Dr. Rodgers received his medical education at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas. He completed his fellowship training in cardiology at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He began his cardiology practice in Austin in 1989.
Dr. Rodgers has been very active in the American College of Cardiology over the past 25 years. He has served as the Chair of the Board of Governors, was on the Board of Trustees, and served as Co-chair for the Leadership Council of the Cardiovascular Team. He has also served on a number of other committees and writing groups within the College.
In addition to his role at Dell Medical School, Dr. Rodgers is a practicing cardiologist; he treats patients at Ascension Texas Cardiovascular Center in Austin, TX and at its affiliated nearby hospitals.
He received the Distinguished Fellow of the American College of Cardiology Award in 2017. In 2020, he was awarded Master of the American College of Cardiology.
Writing and editing
Jane Hunter
Jane has worked in medical publishing for more years than she cares to admit. She got her start in New York, with Gower Medical Publishing, and then moved to London for a new role with Gower’s parent company, Times Mirror International Publishers. There, she managed a list of educational CD-ROMs (remember CD-ROMs?).
After a brief foray into post-production with a company called Tele-Cine, where she ran the video encoding suite, she returned to medical publishing and became the managing director of Current Medicine Group, which produced books and websites for the pharmaceutical and medical insurance industries.
Current Medicine Group was eventually swallowed up by Springer Science+Business Media (now Springer Nature). After three interesting and enjoyable years working with Dutch and German bosses, Jane went back to work for the persuasive entrepreneur who had set up and then sold Gower and CMG. She became the managing director of an online medical and bio-sciences review service called Faculty of 1000, and stayed long enough to help launch a new open access, open review, open data journal called F1000Research.
Now living in Austin, Texas, Jane is a publishing consultant whose clients have included the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and the European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery.
In her spare time, Jane works on Texas Backyard Wildlife with her husband, Dan Ballard, and hangs out with the raccoons who live under their deck.
Design, animations, production, development, and everything else
John Heseltine
John began working in publishing as a freelancer on projects for Letts Educational, the BBC, Deutsche Bank, Reuters, UBS and others.
When electronic publishing took off, he moved into CD-ROM design and production for Dorling Kindersley, early adopters of beautifully illustrated “books” on CDs, and then created marketing programs for BSkyB, Sony Ericsson, Imagination, Ford, Proctor & Gamble, and the BBC.
In 1995 he was part of the team that designed and built the prototype of Wireplay, one of the very first multiplayer gaming platforms, for British Telecom.
In 1999 he became director of new media at E-Fact Ltd., the London affiliate of the German advertising company Springer & Jacoby GmbH, and for three years he designed and produced websites for Mercedes-Benz in Germany.
John began working full time on medical projects when he returned to freelancing in 2002. His clients were medical publishing and pharmaceutical companies such Pfizer, Glaxo Smith Kline, Merck, and Current Medicine Group, as well as hospitals like the Texas Heart Institute. The Wellcome Trust commissioned him to produced animations and web designs for the Human Genome Project.
In 2009 he was appointed senior learning designer for the Royal College of Nursing, where he led the design and production team for online learning.
In 2015, in a change of direction, he built a house in the Apennine mountains of Tuscany, in Italy, while continuing freelance work for the Royal College of Nursing, Glaxo Smith Kline, and Springer Healthcare.
In 2022, following an irresistible call to build something not made out of bricks and cement, he started work on an animated educational website about cardiovascular disease, and so The Heart Explained was born.