Empowered Patient Podcast

Randy Boldyga is the CEO, President, and Founder of RXNT, which provides electronic medical records, electronic prescribing, and practice management products. One primary focus is improving patient charts using AI tools to enable providers to communicate with patients more efficiently and effectively. Using predictive analytics and virtual health assistants, this approach can improve patient outcomes by making healthcare more personalized and proactive.  Randy explains, "There are things like enhanced diagnostics, in which AI can analyze medical images such as X-rays and MRIs with high accuracy, and personalized medicine, where AI can process and interpret genetic information, helping to tailor treatments to individual patients. There are predictive analytics, operational efficiencies such as AI, and streamlining administrative tasks for their office, such as scheduling, billing, and managing patient records." "There’s virtual health assistance where AI-powered chatbots and individual assistance can help with appointment scheduling and offer medication reminders, improving patient engagement and adherence. There’s robotic surgery, drug discovery and development, remote monitoring, enhanced patient records, and training and education. So those are all areas where AI has the potential to make healthcare more personalized, efficient, and proactive, leading to better patient outcomes in a more streamlined system." #RXNT #PatientCharts #MedAI #PersonalizedMedicine #AI #MedTech RXNT.com Download the transcript here

Joseph Mossel, CEO and Co-Founder of Ibex Medical Analytics is developing AI-based cancer diagnostic technology to help pathologists work faster and more accurately with tissue samples. This technology is being widely adopted as an artificial pathologist that can perform tasks more efficiently and aid the pathologist in reducing error rates, which is ever more important with the shortage of pathologists and increasing demand. Partnering with pharma companies, this technology has the potential to develop algorithms that can help determine the effectiveness of specific cancer drugs, expanding the application of AI beyond improving diagnostic accuracy. Joseph explains, "Pathology labs know how to receive a biopsy and a tissue sample and then convert it into a slide. Then, it is diagnosed by the pathologist. Our technology, not only does it help the pathologist to do their work faster, but it also is embedded within the lab workflow. You can think of the lab as the kind of a factory here, and we help all of that to be more efficient and faster. In some cases, we can actually cut down the time to diagnosis by even a few days." "Many studies that we’ve run with pathologists found that using our AI is better than just the AI and better than pathologists not using the AI. And you’ll ask soon better by how much. That depends on the specific pathologists and the lab. But we’ve seen good labs with an error rate of around 2% to 3%. And by error, I mean really missing a cancer diagnosis, so diagnosing a cancerous case as benign. And then the absolute worst we’ve ever seen was a lab where 20% of the cases were misdiagnosed, which was a bit shocking. With a pathologist using our algorithm, the advantage of the two working together is that the algorithm and the pathologist tend to make different mistakes. Working together, we get to a level where there’s maybe a handful of mistakes in every 10,000 cases." #IbexMedicalAnalytics #CancerDiagnostics #Cancer #DigitalPathology #Pathology #AI #AIinPathology #PatientOutcomes  ibex-ai.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Chris Heery is Chief Medical Officer at Arcellx, a company focusing on developing anito-cel, a significant advancement in CAR-T cell therapy, to treat relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma (rrMM). Multiple myeloma is a rare type of blood cancer that affects plasma cells in the bone marrow and has few treatment options. Arcellx is showing promising data from clinical trials with patients with rrMM who have failed prior therapies and have received Fast Track, Orphan Drug, and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy Designations from the FDA for anito-cel. Chris explains, "The company was founded based on an idea that you could take a novel protein structure and modify it to be able to bind to targets on the surface of cancer cells. And over many years of work, the founders were able to demonstrate that that was possible. Over the last three or four years, Arcellx has focused more on taking what were some of those early ideas and turning them into a product that can help patients. For these last three or four years, most of our focus has been around the lead asset that we call anito-cel that treats multiple myeloma and trying to get that product through the approval process to be able to be a commercial product that can be used for patients both in the United States and the rest of the world." "When a patient is diagnosed with multiple myeloma, in general, most patients are older. The median age of diagnosis of multiple myeloma is around 70 years old, and those plasma cells can cause damage to the normal bone marrow by crowding out the normal bone marrow."  "They can also make a lot of the protein that a normal plasma cell would make. By making a lot of that protein, those proteins can cause deposition and damage into other tissues. So, patients can arrive at the clinic with a variety of different symptoms that have to do with either decreased bone marrow activity, decreased number of normal cell populations in their blood, or damage to things like their kidneys or other end organs that you need for normal human function." #Arcellx #CellTherapy #CARTTherapy #RRMM #MultipleMyeloma #BloodCancer #Cancer #RareDisease arcellx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Mohammed Elamir, lead physician at Aviv Clinics, offers diagnostics and treatments for brain injuries such as PTSD, stroke, and traumatic brain injury and to address cognitive decline. After comprehensive physical and mental assessment, including brain scans, patients receive hyperbaric oxygen therapy and other therapies like psychotherapy and neurocognitive training. Individualized plans are designed to get to the root causes of neurological and cognitive issues and stimulate the growth of new cells and blood flow, even for patients with long-standing conditions.   Dr. Mo explains, "Our pre-assessment testing is a lot more rigorous than your kind of annual physical. We do three to five days of testing that can involve medical evaluations with the medical doctors and advanced blood work for different biomarkers for injury or inflammation. Two very specific brain scans that I think separate our assessment from most, and one is an MRI with DTI analysis. That is a microstructure analysis of the brain. So we can look at the nerve tracks running through the brain, how well-connected, and how dense they are."   "If somebody’s approved for the treatment, they would undergo up to a 12-week treatment regimen involving hyperbaric oxygen therapy. And we can go into the details of that oxygen therapy, but in addition to that, they’ll have other appointments, whether it’s PT, psychological counseling, or neurocognitive training. And by the end of the 12 weeks, they should be feeling better, but objectively, we want to see why. We repeat the entire pre-treatment assessment at the end so we can have an objective comparison."  #AvivClinics #HBOT #HyperbaricMedicine #PTSD #Stoke #Aging Aviv-Clinics.com Download the transcript here

Tomer Shussman, the Co-Founder and CEO of OneStep, is at the forefront of motion intelligence and gait analysis. OneStep provides a smartphone app that monitors movement and provides real-time data about gait patterns and changes over time. The system can predict and prevent conditions like falls, provide information about overall health, and reveal early warning signs for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other aging-related diseases. Integrating OneStep's gait analysis data with Epic electronic health records allows healthcare providers to streamline documentation and leverage gait data to provide immediate actionable feedback to patients. Tomer explains, "When we started OneStep, we started with physical therapy and rehabilitation, particularly after knee replacements, hip replacements, and injuries of all kinds. But since then, we now have customers and partners who work with us on fall prevention, essentially identifying and quantifying the risk of falling through gait analysis. Our partners work with us on using gait as a biofeedback tool for dosing the level of chemotherapy." "We recently launched a cognitive decline score that measures and quantifies the cognitive impact on gait in cases like Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, and dementia by looking at the differences between conscious and unconscious gait. And this is just scratching the surface. These are all things that are already commercialized. We have so much more in the pipeline that we’re currently researching." "What we’ve been able to add to it is that we have customers and partners conducting a Timed Up and Go Test through OneStep. What we’ve been able to add to it from a clinical perspective is parameters like the base width - is the patient walking on a very wide base or a very narrow base, the step length, and the step length asymmetry." #OneStep #GaitAnalysis #FallPrevention #Gait #RTM #RemoteTherapeuticMonitoring #SeniorLivingFacilities OneStep.co Download the transcript here

Dr. Sherif Idriss is the CEO of Elastin Biosciences, a company focused on targeting aging-related diseases by restoring elastin, a key protein in the extracellular matrix that provides elasticity and resilience to organs and tissues. They are developing small molecule therapies for diseases linked to elastin deficiency, including Williams syndrome and abdominal aortic aneurysm. As elastin degrades over time due to aging, it leads to loss of tissue structural integrity and function, contributing to numerous age-related diseases.   Sherif explains, "One of the hallmarks of aging is the loss of the extracellular matrix, which is composed of several proteins. Collagen is quite famous, but also elastin is the other major protein that is responsible for the elasticity of the different organs. For example, in our skin, the loss of elastin is associated with us looking older and having all the aging signs and wrinkles on the skin. If you imagine that there are other organs inside that we don’t visually see, then you have also the blood vessels, the lungs, a lot of the connective tissue. The extracellular matrix proteins and elastin itself are also aging in the same way and have their own form of damage one way or another. All of this contributes to aging and aging-related diseases as well." "Another kind of disease is the category of rare diseases. In this case, we aim to target Williams syndrome, a rare disease characterized by a genetic partial deletion of around 26 genes. One of these genes is elastin itself, so some genetic material is still there, but there is not enough. We would like to try to push the elastin production up in Williams syndrome, and this would help rectify a lot of the disease issues, particularly when it comes to the cardiovascular system because Williams syndrome patients have quite a lot of issues with the cardiovascular system from birth and all through life." #ElastinBiosciences #Aging #AgingRelatedDiseases #Elastin #WilliamsSyndrome  elastin-biosciences.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Harven DeShield is the CEO and Co-Founder of Vivacelle Bio, which is developing a nanoparticle-based treatment called VBI-S to address the underlying causes of septic shock. The treatment works by efficiently redistributing nitric oxide to help regulate blood pressure and improve organ function, reducing the need for traditional vasopressor treatments. Vivacelle is also developing a product to help address hemorrhagic shock and minimize reperfusion injury. Harven explains, "There are seven aspects to septic shock - actually eight. So, first, you have an infection. You have to have an infection, whether it is a bacterial, virus, or fungus. And then, eventually, they give you fluids—your blood pressure drops. And so, they try to correct that by giving you fluids. And when the fluids fail, then you transition from sepsis to septic shock." "Then, you are also dealing with the fact that they put you on vasopressors once you get into septic shock. When they put you on vasopressors, that creates another whole realm of problems, which I can get into later. But, essentially, they have some serious toxicity effects, including reducing cardiac output. It causes cardiac arrhythmia and blood clots and can even lead somebody to go into hemorrhagic shock. So, you have the infection problems, you have the relative and absolute hypovolemia problem." "Our product, for example, works within, and I’m using phase 2a - we see results in as little as 90 minutes, in terms of, at least, correcting the blood pressure. And it really can be very severe, and time is of the essence. There used to be something they called the "golden hour”.  This means you have an hour, depending on how low your blood pressure is. Now, some people call it the "platinum ten minutes". #VivacelleBio #SepticShock #Sepsis #Hypovolemia #UrgentCareTreatment vivicellebio.com Download the transcript here

Sandra Johnson, the Senior Vice President of Client Services at CliniComp, discusses the evolving landscape of electronic health records (EHRs) and the need for interoperability and customization to meet clinicians' needs. She emphasizes the importance of putting clinicians first and involving them in the software development process from the beginning to create a configurable and user-friendly system. There are multiple ways to use AI and automation to improve EHRs, including predictive analytics, automating routine tasks, and providing decision support for clinicians. Sandra explains, "We are a 40-year-old company, so we’ve evolved a lot over the years to meet the growing needs of the healthcare industry. We originally started as a modular EMR system focused on the perinatal and critical care setting. We’ve continued to evolve over the years to offer inpatient solutions and now a full-service EHR solution suite. We continue to scale and grow to meet the evolving needs of the healthcare community and are happy to be able to provide a solution that is customized and driven by the clinicians’ viewpoint." "Well, there are always new trends that are arising. The latest buzz is around AI, and so it’s a very complex environment with high acuity needs in the hospital setting. EHRs need to evolve to ensure that they’re continuing to offer the solutions and services needed as that landscape continues to change. So, systems that are data-driven can provide that automation to provide time savings and operational efficiencies. It’s not an easy task. It’s a very complex environment, but a strong infrastructure and architecture that can scale to meet these needs is critical." #Clinicomp #EHRSolutions #HealthcareInnovation #FutureHIT #IntegratedEHR #ElectronicHealthRecords #EHR #EMR clinicomp.com Download the transcript here

Kathy Gunn, VP of commercial and clinical operations at Wellsense, discusses the pressure mapping system Wellsense developed to prevent pressure injuries caused by support surfaces, offloading devices, and medical equipment. The pressure mapping technology works by installing an overlay into existing support surfaces, which sends real-time pressure readings and locations to an iPad-like device at the end of the bed. This visual feedback helps healthcare providers make better clinical decisions and customize care for each patient. Without this system, driven by standard procedures, the prevention of pressure injuries is inconsistent, and there is no way to assess the effectiveness of their actions or identify failing equipment. Kathy explains, "A whole slew of factors impact a patient’s exposure to pressure. Not only do we bring in our pressure mapping system to provide visual feedback and historical reports for root cause analysis, but we also bring in clinical specialists. We bring in these clinical specialists who are all former nurses, and we integrate them into each of our partner facilities so that they can provide ongoing education, support, and resources. We found that the collaboration and partnership we have leads to the greatest success, and we see reductions in pressure injuries anywhere from 50% to 100% with this method." "The pressure mapping system provides visual feedback that will give healthcare providers the information they need to make better clinical decisions. Whether it’s choosing an offloading device, a pillow, a wedge, or a fluidized positioner, the nursing staff at the bedside is going to know whether they’ve chosen the right type, the right quantity, and whether they’re placing it appropriately. They will know better how to adjust the head of the bed or the foot of the bed articulation. Furthermore, they’re going to be able to assess the functionality of their support surfaces - whether it’s nearing or it’s at the end of its life, whether it’s malfunctioning, or even if it’s appropriate for the size of the patient. These are all factors that are going to impact the patient’s exposure to pressure, and pressure is what is going to eventually lead to skin breakdown." #Wellsense #PressureInjuries #PressureMapping #PressureUlcers #PressurePrevention #WoundCare #HAPI #HospitalAcquiredPressureInjury wellsensevu.com Download the transcript here

Jean Sachs, CEO of Living Beyond Breast Cancer, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to addressing disparities in cancer treatment and providing resources and support for individuals diagnosed with breast cancer. LBBC is part of the No One Missed breast cancer campaign, which aims to raise awareness about the importance of biomarker testing for metastatic breast cancer to help identify specific mutations in the tumor and develop a personalized treatment plan. Jean explains, "We are so proud at Living Beyond Breast Cancer to be part of this campaign, founded and launched by LUNGevity Foundation in 2021. So, they are an organization that focuses on lung cancer. They wanted to get the word out about the importance of biomarker testing, particularly to those with non-small cell lung cancer, which is the non-smoking kind of lung cancer. They pulled together 25 organizations, created a website, ran a big campaign for a few years, and then realized that this kind of education campaign would be so beneficial to other types of cancers. So, we were very honored to be selected as the organization that would take the lead for the breast cancer community." "Well, there are so many biomarker tests, and yes, they are more accurate, but this is important for anyone diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer. This is breast cancer that is beyond the breast. It’s in a vital organ, usually liver, lung, bone, or brain - it’s now considered an incurable disease. They have to ask their doctor if they have had a biomarker test or when they will have it because it can lead to finding specific mutations in the cancer tumor that might lead to a new treatment that they wouldn’t be eligible for unless they knew they had the mutation." #NoOneMissed #LBBC #PersonalizedMedicine #Biomarker #BiomarkerTesting #MBC #MetastaticBreastCancer #BreastCancer #BreastCancerResources #CancerAwareness lbbc.org Download the transcript here