Empowered Patient Podcast

Chuck Rinker, CEO of PRSONAS, sees the next-generation workforce of digital healthcare components as digital personalities and avatars that will act as patient advocates and improve the communications between patients and clinicians. With an emphasis on building trust and showing empathy, these digital tools help gather accurate information and break down language and cultural barriers. Avatars can be customized for locations like hospital lobbies and purposes like clinical trial recruitment. With a background in game programming, Chuck brings a deep knowledge of how the emotional bond between gamers and avatars can be applied to building more robust patient engagement. Chuck explains, "Since technology has been predominant in the healthcare space, we've always had to teach people how to use technology, and the barrier is communication. So, we've said, well, let's just take a different approach. We're not trying to recreate humans, and we're not trying to replace humans. We're just trying to teach all this technology, this scalable healthcare, this improvement in healthcare technology that we have, and make it so that it can communicate to us as humans. We naturally communicate as humans. We don't naturally communicate as an IT specialist, so we're trying to flip it on its head and work it the other way around." "That was a concept we started way back in 2013. We originally built a few of these as product specialists in the pharmaceutical drug launch space. I think Genentech and Pfizer were probably the first ones to use it. It was meant to support the healthcare professionals. Okay, what's all the information you have, from prescribing information to all the complexities of a mechanism of disease and all that you have to relay over and over and over during a multiphase pharmaceutical launch? So, we built these repeatable humans to be those domain experts." "We've learned along the way that it was a great, wonderful piece but that the patients themselves are the ones who are getting "lost in the mix." So, our units are trained to speak whatever language is used by the patient population you're targeting. They can be culturally diverse. We do Sign Language - American Sign Language and British Sign Language. So it's really about creating that advocate, breaking down that communication barrier so that every patient feels represented and welcomed and has their own patient advocate to help them through that healthcare journey."  #PRSONAS #Avatars #DigitalPersonalities #DigitalHealth #AI #PatientAdvocate #PatientEngagement #ClinicalTrials  PRSONAS.com Download the transcript here   

Cody Shandraw, President and Co-Founder of Healing Realty Trust, aims to provide robust mental and behavioral health treatment facilities. The lack of infrastructure has been a significant hurdle for expanding the commercialization of drugs that require longer in-office visits and space to accommodate the needs of patients undergoing treatments. The emerging field of psychedelics for treating neurological conditions like PTSD requires clinicians to understand the physical requirements for treatment facilities to provide privacy and comfort during the extended time necessary for many of these treatments.  Cody explains, "In 2020, it was a really interesting stat that I was made aware of at one of the conferences down here in Miami. It was around a drug called Spravato, which is an intranasal ketamine drug. And they were very excited about the launch. It was in development for quite some time, and unfortunately, it didn't commercialize, I think, to their expectations. I asked one of the drug reps down here in Florida why he thought that was, and he said it was a really simple answer: the lack of infrastructure." "It's a unique drug, and we've only seen this a couple of times. Maybe proton therapy or dialysis centers where when a new therapy is approved, you need that infrastructure to go along with that therapy. And that is what Spravato was. You actually had to be in a clinic for two hours after administration for Spravato. So it was a very unique thing. And a lot of the legacy behavioral mental health providers that would be the target market for that drug, they didn't want to disrupt normal patient inflows into their clinic. So it took a couple of years. When that drug was launched, there were less than a hundred clinics in the United States offering that. Today, there are 2,700 of those clinics, and now Spravato is a blockbuster drug." #HealingRealtyTrust #CommercialRealEstate #BehavioralHealth #EmergingTherapies #PsychedelicAssistedTherapy #PatientAccess #HealthcareInfrastructure #ImprovingBehavioralHealth HealingRT.com Download the transcript here

Fengru Lin, Co-Founder and CEO of TurtleTree, is applying precision fermentation technology to produce high-value ingredients for food and beverages without the need for animals. This biotech company's first goal is to expand the production of lactoferrin, a protein found in small quantities in milk that has been shown to promote gut health and immunity. Finding a scalable way to produce lactoferrin will lead to adding this iron-binding element to plant-based milks and energy drinks.   Fengru explains, "A couple of years ago, I was learning how to make cheese as a hobby. It was quite a fanatic period of time. I went up to Vermont from Singapore for a couple of weeks to learn how to make cheese and I wanted to replicate this whole process back in Singapore. But in Singapore, we have no access to cows, we have no access to raw, fresh milk. So, I had to go down to Indonesia and Thailand to look for milk. In this journey, I was exposed to a lot of challenges around the dairy industry, things like contract farming, things like antibiotics, and hormones being pumped into the cows. As a result, the milk quality always suffers, the mozzarella couldn't stretch, it's not enough calcium, not enough nutrients in the milk. So, I gave up that whole idea and was still working for Google."   "So, we bootstrapped initially, brought in some scientists, did a lot of research, and filed our first patent. The technology requires getting memory cells and culturing the cells to express full-function milk, all 2,000 different ingredients in milk. We had our early success and quickly brought this technology to some of the biggest dairy companies in the world, folks like Fonterra and Abbott, and told them, "Hey, we can make milk. What do you think?" "Very quickly they came back with feedback saying, "Well, great that you can make milk, but milk is $2 a gallon. I don't think you can get to the price point anytime soon. You should really be focused on high-value ingredients that are found in milk." So they gave us a list of half a dozen proteins and ingredients that we should look at, and at the top of the list is lactoferrin because of all these great benefits and the high price point it is today. You guys should be focused on the high-value ingredients that are low in supply across the market so you can address this accessibility problem and not try to reproduce a commodity like milk. So that's how we started and where we are today. We just got our FDA Self GRAS status in November last year, so we've started to commercialize this lactoferrin." #TurtleTree #FunctionalFood #Lactoferrin #Protein #PrecisionFermentation #Milk #SustainableFoodProduction #Nutrition turtletree.com Download the transcript here

Christian Lillis, Co-Founder and CEO of the Peggy Lillis Foundation is a patient advocate in the fight against C. diff infection. Clostridium difficile is an opportunistic infection of the gut that often occurs after taking antibiotics and can lead to life-threatening complications. Christian shares his personal story of losing his mother to C. diff and highlights the progress made in raising awareness and the development of new treatments for the infection. The Peggy Lillis Foundation emphasizes the importance of patient voices in shaping infectious disease policies and research and the need for community support to fight C. diff and other preventable infectious diseases. Christian explains, "Last time we did our most recent C. diff awareness month campaign in November, it was our most successful one yet. We reached around 23 million people through a mix of earned, print, video, and podcast media and a strong social media campaign. We also had it bolstered by media partnerships with Contagion Live and Pharmacy Times. As part of our programming for the month, we held a virtual town hall, and about 200 people attended. More than half of them were C. diff patients, survivors, and family members." "Other progress was at the end of 2022, and then in early 2023, two new therapies. Technically, they are classified as preventative by the FDA, but they are basically microbiome restoration therapies. As I said earlier, when you take antibiotics, there can be other causes. Still, when your gut microbiome, gut bacteria, and viruses get out of whack or depleted, you become very vulnerable to C. diff. And a reason why people struggle to get over C. diff is because their gut microbiome remains degraded. So these new two therapies, one is done by enema, one is given by capsule over several days, it's a really huge change for people who are battling recurrent C. diff."  #CDiff #PeggyLillisFoundation #ClostridiumDifficile #CDifficile #PatientAdvocacy #CdiffAwarenessMonth cdiff.org Download the transcript here

Paul Hickey, President and CEO of ReShape Lifesciences, discusses the company's role in the weight loss industry. The ReShape Lap-Band® and the new ReShape Lap-Band® 2.0 FLEX are tested surgical options for weight loss and weight management and are now being joined in the market by GLP-1 agonists such as Wegovy and Ozempic. While these options are effective for different individuals, Paul emphasizes the importance of a comprehensive approach that includes diet and lifestyle changes. As a society, we have normalized obesity, and more education is needed to inform those with obesity about these effective solutions.  Paul explains, "The weight loss drugs people have been hearing about are the first step for weight loss, along with working with your physician and their team. And then as you move down, the more aggressive treatment, the ReShape products, and in particular the Lap-Band®, which has been around for over 20 years, is the first surgical step performed by a laparoscopic surgeon that goes in and helps to provide for a way to get back on the weight loss path for individuals. And then, beyond that, you have other procedures that are more aggressive that people also have to consider as they continue their journey." "We see physicians today using the GLP-1s as combination therapy for someone who has a Lap-Band® or a gastric sleeve or a gastric bypass who may have had any one of those procedures, including a Lap-Band® for five or ten years and started to plateau or reverse on their weight loss. Those GLP-1s can be administered and prescribed for those who want to get back on the path to weight loss." "There are a lot of differences in the type of obesity that someone has. There are a lot of differences in what treatments work better or worse for individuals. I think the side effect, part of the answer to the question is with the GLP-1s, there's going to be probably more studies to come out to show what side effects the GLP-1s have on different population sets. It is certainly being studied today, and the data out there now is part of the data used to get the drugs approved." #ReShapeLifesciences #LapBandLife #ReShapeLapBand #LapBand #LapBandFLEX #WeightLoss #GLP1 reshapelifesciences.com Download the transcript here

Matt Hollingsworth, Co-Founder of Carta Healthcare, has identified the need to change how hospitals complete clinical registries, which require information from clinical notes. Currently, nurses manually fill out the forms primarily based on their understanding of the notes from the doctors. Using AI to read through notes, extract relevant information, and enter the data into the clinical registry form saves nurses 95% of their time, improves accuracy, and highlights actionable data. This approach allows the abstractors to spend more time on complex cases and uncover overlooked medical conditions. Matt explains, "What we do is collect data for these things called clinical registries, which are required quality submissions that hospitals have to do. And we bring AI to the table so that we can make it a not-so-manual process. Historically, the way these forms have been completed has been with just nurse time. Also, I don't think there's a word in the English language to quite correctly describe form in this particular scenario. Just to give a concrete example, if a PCI, so a stent installation via cath is performed, it takes a nurse about an hour and a half to fill out the documentation required to do the submission to the registry. It takes a really long time." "The problem is that most of it is in the notes. So one of the questions in a registry was the patient hypertensive upon admission. And the way you figure that out is you look, in most cases, in the H&P note and read through it. It'll say somewhere in there that there's either a history of hypertension or they took a blood pressure, and now they have it, etc. And so, the nurse, to paint a picture about what this looks like here, what the nurse is doing is they have the EHR open on one screen, a form to fill out on the other, and they're reading through notes, reaching conclusions, and then filling out the form. So, most of the data needed for this whole process is in the clinical notes, not in some structured form." "Yes, so this is how we define quality in the whole shift to value-based care. A necessary component is that you measure quality in it. And this is just how the sausage is made for doing that. The way you measure something is you collect data for it. These registries are there to collect data, and in many cases, they are procedure-based. Sometimes, it's condition-based, like there's a COVID registry or what have you. Sometimes, it's a location-based thing like this patient was admitted to this unit like a CVICU or an acute care floor."  #CartaHealth #GenAI #HealthSystems #2024MedicalPredictions #HealthTech #MedTech Carta.Healthcare Download the transcript here

Dr. Doron Behar, Co-Founder and CEO of Igentify, has a vision for the future of genetic counseling, where patients get the support they need to interpret and understand genetic screening results before the tests as well as after. With a shortage of genetic counselors, the solution, in part, lies in using technology to reduce waiting times and improve the interpretation of results while allowing the counselors to handle more patients effectively. The Igentify platform aims to support end-to-end services to provide precision medicine solutions to patients to meet specific needs and identify what test results might indicate about future health.   Doron explains, "We need to first speak about the genomic revolution and the crucial role of genetic counseling in it. So, as we know, we are all currently going through the genomic revolution, which means that we are anticipating that each of us will have genomic information, the full content of the genome, inside the medical record. The genetic counselors are the ones who are responsible for interpreting for us and explaining to us what our genome is telling us about our future health." "And particularly, the genome can identify potential risks that we might want to know about, whether it is related to reproductive health, cancer risk, or the use of drug pharmacogenomics. We can see literature saying that even recently, there were more than 5 million genetic tests sold in 2021. Less than 6,000 genetic counselors can present the information to the patients, and they are in North America. And if we compare to the world, there are only 7,500 genetic counselors globally." "The force model will allow us to use the digital genetic assistant and send information back to the patients, creating an end-to-end solution. Very importantly, we are using advanced and sophisticated multimedia content to approach the patients either in the pre- or in the post-test scenarios. These multimedia components allow speaking with the patients about their own situation. So maintaining a very high level of personalization, even speaking different languages to the patients, is particularly important, for example, to make sure that patients understand." #Igentify #GeneticCounseling #GeneticScreening #GeneticTesting #GeneticMedicine #DigitalHealth #PrecisionMedicine igentify.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Steven Chen, a breast surgeon and Chief Medical Officer at ImpediMed, discusses the early detection and treatment of lymphedema, a type of swelling that often occurs after breast cancer treatments.  Visual observation and measurements using a tape measure are the current, inaccurate methods of determining early warning signs. The ImpediMed SOZO device measures subtle changes in time for simple interventions such as wearing compression sleeves, now covered by Medicare, which can reverse the damage. Unaddressed, this condition can lead to severe functional problems.   Steven explains, "The whole goal of ImpediMed is to help people find this when it's in stage zero or stage one when it can be reversed. It's a very simple set of treatments when you catch it early, primarily wearing a sleeve, a compression sleeve, and/or a compression glove. And with that, you can reverse almost all the stage zeros and probably somewhere between 80% to 90% of stage ones. And so you can see that if you can catch it early, this will go away with a fairly simple set of treatments." "As you get into stage two and stage three, you're now talking about much more aggressive treatments - things like massage, pumps, and nighttime pumps to try to get the swelling down. And usually, that just provides temporary relief. It almost never goes all the way back to the way it was. Now, there are plastic surgeons and microsurgeons who have started doing things like transplanting lymph nodes to try to get more drainage. And that could be helpful as well. But again, it's rare once you get to stage two or three to see getting back to how you were before surgery." "In stage one, you can start to have measurement differences a little bit if you use a tape measure regularly. But as you might imagine, using a tape measure regularly takes time, but it's also somewhat hard to do. If you've ever tried to measure yourself with just a fabric tape measure, you do it two or three times in a row, and you might get two or three different measurements. So, trying to measure someone every three to six months and do it with precisely the same amount of tension is fairly difficult. But I think the real primary thing is people don't realize that this happens, and if it does happen, they can turn it around. So, patients don't complain to their doctors because they don't realize it's a consequence of their treatment."  #ImpediMed #Lymphedema #LymphedemaAwarenessMonth #LymphedemaPrevention #BreastCancerCare #BreastCancer #Survivorship ImpediMed.com Download the transcript here

Amy Brown, CEO of Authenticx, uses conversational intelligence to analyze conversations between humans and between humans and chatbots to gain insights that can drive improvements in patient experience, operational efficiency, and faster resolution of problems in the healthcare environment. Using AI and trained professionals, the Authenticx solution helps pharmaceutical companies improve drug launches, personalize customer interactions and respond more effectively to patient needs. In clinical situations, the machine learning models help identify and address obstacles impeding more effective patient/provider/payer relationships. Amy explains, "At Authenticx, we really target bidirectional conversations. We can take in all types of unstructured data that exist: notes, social, etc. That said, we find the most insightful and contextually rich types of data sources are the ones that represent a back-and-forth between customer and company. And in our world, we're working with very large healthcare companies, like pharmaceutical manufacturers, health insurance companies, health and hospital systems."  "They're typically having conversations with patients or caregivers, any type of healthcare consumer, they're also having conversations with other stakeholders in the healthcare system, like insurance companies talking to providers' offices, or doctors' offices talking to pharmaceutical manufacturers. We find that the research and study of that back-and-forth bidirectional communication, and doing that at scale, is incredibly insightful to the business." "We ingest the call recordings or the chat interaction files into our platform, and we apply AI to listen for the things that matter most to healthcare companies. We've spent five years curating our own proprietary training data, where we have listeners, human listeners, who have listened to hundreds of thousands of conversations. We intentionally hired social workers, healthcare workers, nurses, people who have worked inside the healthcare system, because we found that interpreting the communication they're listening to is so crucially important to making high-quality AI."  #Authenticx #ListeningWithAI #ConversationalIntelligence #PatientExperience #AIinHealthcare Authenticx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Marc Conant, Chief Medical Officer at Addimmune, has been working on HIV/AIDS for over 40 years and highlights the progress that has been made in developing effective HIV drugs. The mission at Addimmune is to develop a functional cure for HIV by modifying the patient's cells to enhance the immune system's ability to control the virus. This autologous cell therapy approach has been used successfully in treating leukemia and lymphoma and shows promise in suppressing HIV.   Marc explains, "I started caring for AIDS patients in 1981, and it wasn't until AGT came along in 1988, '87, '88, that we even had anything that would work. Up until that time, everyone who contracted the disease died. HIV kills about 94% of people who are infected. What we saw early on with AGT was a drug that suppressed the virus, and then we found the next drug that suppressed the virus, and then the next one, and now we have close to 40 different drugs that can suppress the virus." "Now, there's been even a step beyond that. You all probably see on your television every night injections that can be given once every two months, and sure enough, that works and works great, so instead of taking a pill every day, you only need to see a doctor six times a year. Every two months, you go in for two injections, and you're good for two months. And compliance is better. Patients remember to take their drug because it's given to them in an injection." "All of that, though, still requires putting in a drug. We're hoping to take the patient's cells, modify them, put them back in the patient, and have a one-and-done treatment for the rest of his life with these modified cells, which helps the patient's immune system control the virus. The virus will be suppressed. The patient will not need to take more medication. The patient will not have side effects. The patient doesn't have to remember to take his drugs, and we've got a functional cure that will control the disease." #Addimmune #HIV #AIDS #HIVAIDS #CARTCell #CellTherapy #FunctionalCure #HIVTreatment #AutologousCellTherapy  Addimmune.com Download the transcript here