Allen Cooper, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of ReadyList, highlights the challenges environmental services (EVS) leaders face in hospitals: controlling healthcare-associated infections, managing facility maintenance, and meeting patient expectations. Ensuring efficient room turnover for patient rooms and operating rooms is critical to maintaining workflow and avoiding delays. Real-time tracking, task management, and data-driven insights help EVS managers and staff eliminate outdated, inefficient methods and improve patient outcomes and safety in hospital operations. Allen explains, "When you look at it from a patient's perspective, I think meeting and exceeding patients’ expectations of getting great quality care is probably at the forefront of everyone's mind. There's a lot of competition out there between hospitals and health systems. I think, looking from a patient's point of view, making sure that the patients are delighted is number one. A close number 2, if not number 1, is making sure that the hospitals themselves are controlling and reducing their healthcare-associated infections. I think that's been such a hot topic in the last 10-plus years, making sure that the patients are safe and taken care of, and when they leave, they're in a better spot than before they came." "We have four core modules of ReadyList. One is called ReadyList Room Care, which empowers the EVS cleaners to understand what's expected of them to turn over a room in a given day or hour. And it details out what's expected in a given room. Each unit in the hospital typically has different requirements and ensures that the equipment is what is actually supposed to be in place and that cleaning is done appropriately and done repeatedly the same way every single time. So the tool provides almost like a script for the cleaners so they understand exactly what their expectations are. On the flip side, for the supervisors, it also allows them to understand exactly what is going on, which rooms are cleaned or being cleaned, and who's doing what." #ReadyList #HospitalOperations #EVSManagement #EVSLeader #EnvironmentalService #EVS #HospitalFloorcare #FacilityOperation #Healthcare #HospitalSafety #HospitalInfectionPrevention ReadyList.com Download the transcript here

Sheila Phicil, Founder and CEO of Phicil-itate Change, works with innovators in healthcare to apply new technologies to solutions that incorporate the patients' voice. One goal is to reduce resistance to change, which often stems from the desire to avoid adding more complexity, by listening to patients, physicians, and community organizations. Data analytics and awareness of social determinants of health can provide insights to develop effective and sustainable solutions. Still, the data must be collected and analyzed in a way that preserves the context and individual experience. Shelia explains, "Well, the simplest way I can put it is helping the helpers and in this case, it's helping people who want to bring forward good innovation in healthcare. To do it well by focusing the work around the patient's lived experience through understanding their stories and their health data. So what I'm aiming to do is to, one, put out great frameworks and strategies around how to do this well and efficiently and effectively. We are building a platform utilizing blockchain and AI to automate some of this work in collecting patient stories and data and generating insights into how to design health tech solutions that meet their needs." "So all forms of social innovation, where we're trying to solve human problems, should always start with the people who have lived the experience of the problem and understand through their lens what their perspective is. What I often tell people, especially in the healthcare space, is that someone who has a lived experience of having diabetes or lost a loved one to cancer or is dealing with a rare disease, they become the expert. They become the expert in what that looks like for them, how that affects their life, and what they can tolerate in terms of coping or treatment and other things." #SocialDeterminantsofHealth #SDOH #MedTech #DataAnalytics Phicil-itateChange.com Download the transcript here

Lisa Ricciardi, CEO, and Dr. Tony Caggiano, Chief Medical Officer at Cognition Therapeutics, are developing effective treatments for neurological disorders, particularly Alzheimer's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB). While DLB is related to Parkinson's, sharing symptoms include hallucinations, sleep disorders, and cognitive dysfunction, there are no good diagnostics to identify DLB and effective treatments. Cognition Therapeutics' lead drug candidate, an oral treatment, has shown promise in protecting neurons from the toxic effects of the pathological proteins involved in Alzheimer's and DLB. Lisa explains, "This company started in 2007, so we've had a long number of years to burnish our mission. One of the things we say is we're the beginning of the end of neurologic disorders and the start of hope for an improved future for patients. So Alzheimer's disease, in particular, has been long studied with little success, and in the last few years, we've seen some successes with monoclonal antibodies. There are a number of other approaches in clinical trials, but we have recently generated very positive data in two different trials with an oral once-a-day drug." Tony elaborates, "Lewy body dementia or dementia with Lewy bodies is a disease very much related to Parkinson's disease that's believed to be, in part, caused by pathological levels of a certain protein called alpha synuclein and particularly small oligomers of misfolded alpha synuclein." "And in Alzheimer's disease, this is largely a cognitive memory disorder as it presents. So, those two diseases are very different. Now, the idea of treating them with a single drug is somewhat unique to what we have here at Cognition Therapeutics. So our company started around the idea of developing therapies for Alzheimer's disease, and our lead molecule CT1812 or zervimesine was developed out of a screening assay where we were looking for molecules that could protect neurons or brain cells from the toxicities of this pathological amyloid protein. So, we identified CT1812 and have been developing it."  #CognitionTherapeutics #BrainHealth #DementiaCare #LewyStrong #Livingwithlewy #Alzheimers #EndAlz #Alzheimersdisease #DLBAwareness #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Dementia #DementiaWithLewyBodies  cogrx.com Download the transcript here

Arielle Smith, the President of Life Science at Event Cadence, discusses the changes in the event technology landscape and the expectations of pharmaceutical companies and attendees for a hybrid approach, including participation in person and virtually. There is an increased demand for insight capturing and analytics to measure the return on investment in conferences and the time attendees spend there. The platform includes scheduling, appointment management, and lead generation with tools to encourage networking and interaction to enhance the event experience.   Arielle explains, "Medical conferences are held all over the world, as you know, and there's not always going to be a time where you can physically put boots on the ground and travel for them. So we're seeing a lot more of a hot tier point, a hybrid model approach to it where, let's say, the majority of the team will be in a meeting room face to face with some of their HCPs, but then even that HCP might decide to dial in their counterpart. Or if a pharmaceutical client is not able to participate in person for many different reasons, we're looping them in from a virtual perspective as well. And our platform can help coordinate all of that." "So there's a lot of talk in the industry about insight capturing and gathering and exactly how that can be done but how best to make it actionable. Many great platforms are spinning up recently that are meant for capturing recordings or recording a conversation like the one you and I are having now, but then using AI to transcribe it all. A lot of our accounts are playing with technology like that, and then our platform is being used to set those conversations up."  #EventCadence #MedicalConferences #ConferenceManagement #HybridConferences eventcadence.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Thomas Chen, Founder, CEO, and CSO of NeOnc Technologies, is working on the challenge of delivering drugs across the blood-brain barrier by using an intranasal delivery approach to target brain cancers. This delivery platform leverages the cranial nerve to transport the drugs directly to the brain, bypassing the blood-brain barrier. Genomic analysis of the long-surviving patients in the phase one trial revealed a common genetic mutation, informing the trial design for the next phase. Thomas explains, "So our platform is what we call intranasal delivery. And with the intranasal delivery, we're not trying to cross the blood-brain barrier. We're trying to cross over it. And how we're doing that is doing the delivery of the drug via what we call the C nerves. Now the cranial nerves are, we have 12 cranial nerves in our brain. These cranial nerves have various functions, but the cranial nerves involved with the nasal brain delivery are the first and the fifth cranial nerves. The first cranial nerve is what we call the olfactory nerve. That's the nerve that's responsible for smell. The fifth cranial nerve is called the trigeminal nerve, which involves facial sensation and allows us to chew."   "So what happens is that when we want to deliver the drug to the brain cancer, we have the patient inhale it. When the patient inhales, it goes through the nose, and through the olfactory nerve, it goes to the brain. Usually, that molecule then absorbs in the spinal brain and then circulates to the target, in this case, brain cancer. Now you know how powerful that cranial nerve is from the standpoint of what it does when you smell something, that scent, that odor gets transported from the olfactory nerve to our brain. And that's basically what we're doing. We're taking something external to the brain, allowing the cranial nerve to absorb and transport it to the brain." #NeOnc #BloodBrainBarrier #BBB #BrainCancer #DrugDelivery neonc.com Download the transcript here

Ali Morin, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at symplr, emphasizes the need to focus on the challenges nurses face and AI's potential to reduce administrative burdens and nurse burnout. Significant staffing shortages, scheduling challenges, and increased patient acuity demand better data analytics and technology implementation to allow nurses to spend more time with patients and improve patient care. For successful integration of technology solutions into the nurses' workflow, pilot tests, training of new and experienced nurses, and listening to their concerns and ideas are essential. Ali explains, "We focus on the nursing informatics side -- that middle communicator between technology and the nurses at the bedside. So, I consider myself a translator. I listen to the clinicians and the nurses who are using our software, and we have a number of solutions that are applicable for direct care nurses as well as nurse managers and nurse leaders. I take in the pain points that they're experiencing today and bring them to our developers and our product teams. This allows them to understand the pain points that nurses are experiencing and how we can help solve some of those problems." "However, we're taking it to the next level and putting in some additional machine learning around which nurses are still available to pick up shifts and which nurses are still available who haven't maybe met their core component. Today, how that's done: there are spreadsheets, call lists, and post-it notes all over the place. Who have I called? Who have I checked with? Who hasn't seen this manual kind of back-and-forth? And so our work is really to make that balancing phase of the nursing scheduling simpler, pun intended, 100%, but also simpler so that we can make it so those nurses and nurse managers, the nurses can say, I want to work these kinds of shifts. The nurse managers can say, great, plug them in, and off they go. And then it's less time in that kind of back and forth between them." #symplr #Nurses #HealthTech #HealthcareAI #CompassSurvey  symplr.com Download the transcript here

Maggie Cline, Executive Director at EyeCare4Kids Utah, highlights the importance of providing eye exams and eyeglasses to underserved children, their parents, and those in shelters, refugee camps, and Native American reservations. Early testing and glasses with the correct prescription can significantly impact academic performance, confidence, and social skills. Making wearing glasses cool and offering a wide selection of frames is key to encouraging everyone to wear them proudly. The EyeCare4Kids partners with various organizations to operate brick-and-mortar and mobile clinics in Utah, Nevada, Arizona, Idaho, and Africa with expansion plans. Maggie explains, "I think glasses are cool these days, but the kids have to wear their glasses. So something that we do, and I love that we do this, we don't just give them a selection of five or six glasses. They get hundreds to choose from because we know that if they feel good about what they're wearing, they will wear them. And so I just got a message from a nurse the other day telling me she has been so happy seeing these students proudly wearing their glasses. They absolutely love them, and they show them off. They tell their friends about them." "There are a lot of barriers. There are parents who are working, and in many of the homes just here in the US, both parents are working, so there's just no time. They don't want to take them out of school. I think there's just a lot of different reasons. I think there needs to be more education for parents to be able to notice the signs. Maybe kids have behavioral problems in the classroom that are often misdiagnosed. A kid sitting at the back of the classroom who isn't able to see the PowerPoint or the board is probably just unable to focus because they can't see clearly." "For example, our team was dispensed at an elementary school. There was a first grader who put on his pair of glasses, his first pair of glasses, and he had a significant prescription, and there was a brick wall right next to him. He was just amazed at the brick wall and that it had texture, and he just kept feeling it and talking about it. Then he looked at the school staff and was like, I can see your face. And they were just so amazed at the different details he could see."    #ChildrensVisionCare #PediatricVisionCare #Glasses4Kids #EyeGlasses EyeCare4Kids.org Download the transcript here  

Olivier Visa, President and CEO of Evergen specializes in developing and manufacturing biomaterials for use in regenerative medicine. These customized biomaterial solutions use xenografts, allografts, and emerging technologies inside and outside the body with applications in wound healing, cardiac, dental, breast, neuro, and spine repair. This approach provides surgeons with a broader range of biomaterials to better tailor treatments for individual patients. Olivier explains, "There is a multitude that we can support. There is form and function, and I can give you a couple of examples of biomaterials in regenerative medicine. One is bovine pericardium, which is bovine collagen that we use for the development and manufacturing of cardiac heart valves. Another one would be acellular dermal matrix from human tissue that we use for reconstruction in plastic and, of course, with surgeries such as breast reconstruction after mastectomy." "Think about the body as a whole, and I'll give you a couple of examples where- when you're in cardiac - whether it's a patch or a valve, we're inside the body. When we're in breast reconstruction, we are totally inside the body. When we're in the neuro spine, we're totally inside the body, whether you're repairing or restoring or regenerating peripheral nerves or dura around the brain, you're inside the body. And yes, you are right, wound management is part of it, whether it's diabetic food, ulcer, ulcer or some form of a burn, then I would say you're looking at the skin as an organ and repairing, restoring, and regenerating that skin." #Evergen #TissueEngineering #RegenerativeMedicine #CDMO #Biomaterials #Biotechnology #LifeSciences #MedicalDevices #SportsMedicine #Orthopedics #Surgeons evergenbio.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Rekha Kumar, Chief Medical Officer at Found, is focused on weight care, not just weight management, to provide personalized medical care. GLP-1 medications have changed the landscape of obesity treatment, providing doctors with more effective tools for patients, but they don't work for everyone. With this telehealth approach, patients engage with the platform to determine a tailored treatment plan based on each patient's unique biology, lifestyle, and history. There is also an increased stigma around obesity due to the availability of GLP-1s, reinforcing the need for new medications and approaches based on real-world outcomes.   Rekha explains, "I would say the way GLP-1s have changed this entire field of medicine is that doctors now feel like they have a tool that works that they can offer their patients. Although GLP-1s don't work perfectly in everybody, and there may be people who don't respond well to them for decades or longer than decades, doctors felt like all they could tell patients was to eat less and exercise more. Even when doctors said that, I think they felt like what they were offering wasn't very useful. Now, an actual tool, or a class of medicine, can be very effective for patients."   "I am looped into the conversation on stigma. In some ways, it’s been helpful to that conversation in the sense that people like Oprah have come out and said that now she realizes biology is involved in body weight control and that thin people are wired differently. They don't have as much of a preoccupation with food or noise." "In some ways, it's reduced the stigma by bringing attention to the role of biology and hormones that contribute to our body weight that we don't have control of. Unfortunately, now that there is this tool that's so powerful, some would say that it's made weight stigma worse because if somebody chooses not to take this medicine, they're judged for not wanting to be thin."  #JoinFound #WeightCare #WeightManagment #Obesity #GLP1 joinfound.com Download the transcript here

Tim Tobin, CEO and Founder of Planatome, has a background in the semiconductor industry where precision polishing techniques were developed. Planatome has used that technology to create molecularly smooth scalpel blades that remove all the jagged edges on traditional surgical scalpels. These new nano polished blades significantly reduce scarring and inflammation from incisions and improve healing outcomes for patients, especially those with darker skin tones who are more prone to hypertrophic scarring. The challenge is disrupting an industry that has not changed in over 100 years and that has been driven by reducing the costs, not improving the blade. Tim explains, "So we picked the surgical scalpel because it's still the foundation, the primary incision tool, whether it's a minimally invasive procedure or a procedure with a lot of cutting. So we started with that. We've since applied our technology to many other surgical instruments. We started with the scalpel, which was patented in 1915. There's been no change, no technological change, just change to drag down the cost. So it's just completely commoditized, a scalpel blade somewhere in the 20 to 50 cent range, and nobody thinks about it because everybody just uses a scalpel, and they don't need to be more critical."  "So we started looking, and if you look at a scalpel blade underneath magnification, it looks almost like it's highly serrated and jagged because they're made by taking a piece of stainless steel, and they grind it up to a point, and that's the cutting edge. But they leave it like that." "We took that, and we said, okay, well, what if we polish it and take out all of those jagged serrations, at least a thousand times smoother. Now if you measure the surface, it changes the cutting mechanism from tearing and snagging to a nice clean incision. So some of the challenges in that is when surgeons have been using the same thing pretty much their whole career, when they try something different, that's not always something they want to think about."  #Planatome #MedTech #MedicalDevice #Surgery planatome.com Download the transcript here