Empowered Patient Podcast

Pablo Pantaleoni, Chief Digital Officer of LifeStance Health, aims to improve access to affordable mental health services by providing digital tools to support patients throughout their treatment journey. LifeStance also focuses on supporting clinicians by streamlining administrative tasks, facilitating booking, and providing ongoing care virtually and in person. Pablo sees AI as a co-pilot tool to streamline some processes for patients and providers while emphasizing the key role of clinicians. Pablo explains, "On top of this, we want to ensure you can meet people where they are. This means certain people, especially after COVID, prefer to visit a clinician online, and others prefer to see somebody in person. And you'll be surprised. There's a significant number of people that like to jump from one channel to the other. Our unique hybrid model allows us to meet people where they are so people can choose if they want to see somebody in person or virtually."   "I'm glad you're asking about the clinician experience because clinician and patient experience are equally as important for us. Whenever we design a solution, we co-design with clinicians and patients, but we want to ensure that we're not just throwing new tools at them. We just map their whole workflows, understand the pain points, and prototype solutions with them. Their goal is to focus on treating patients so we can help with all the admin tasks. This is the goal. And co-designing with them, I love to work closely with them when they're very open. They share their feedback. This is working for me, this is not, or this has to be integrated with this tool. And that's our day-to-day." #LifeStanceHealth #MentalHealthMatters #LFST #MentalHealth lifestance.com Download the transcript here

Jay Ackerman is the CEO of Reveleer, a  data and analytics company that works with payers and providers to support them in quality improvement and risk adjustment in a value-based care environment. Using AI, natural language processing, and integration of diverse databases, Reveleer is reducing administrative burdens and supporting providers to make more informed decisions for patient care.   Jay explains, "In the AI world, a lot is being done to drive productivity and efficiency for payers and providers to anticipate how someone's health is shifting and changing. But for us, in the world of AI, what we're focused on and how we're trying to use AI, when we talk about quality improvement and risk adjustments, we ingest massive clinical data on each of these members, on each of these patients, we could capture thousands of pages." "We use AI to quickly digest, organize, and mine that data to understand what has happened over time for that member and what we think could be happening as they go forward. What we're aiming to do, and what we're doing, is mining that data and presenting a very concise set of recommendations to the provider. So when that patient walks into their office, they know what gaps in care they should be paying attention to. Gaps in care that might be tied to quality scores. Gaps in care that might be tied to validating overall risk score. " #Reveleer #ValueBasedCare #QualityImprovement #RiskAdjustment Reveleer.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Colin Banas, Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst, defines the term clinical-grade AI as he distinguishes it from other forms of AI that may not be trained on robust clinical data. He emphasizes the need for accurate and complete data in healthcare records and the challenges of semantic interoperability and biases when working with AI models. Potential applications for clinical-grade AI include identifying insights about population healthcare, spotting clinical research trends, and addressing burnout by automating administrative tasks, allowing clinicians to focus on patient care.   Colin elaborates, "DrFirst, as many folks know, got its start as an e-prescribing company over 23 years ago. From there, it blossomed into a robust set of solutions around what I call the sweet spot for the company, which is intelligent medication management. This is all the way from writing the prescription to making sure the patient takes the prescription. The care team understands prescription lists and the way that the prescriptions may or may not be taken. And, of course, to do any of this with any level of accuracy and safety, you need data and a lot of it. Fortunately, we have two decades of working with this type of data. We have generated core expertise around medication data and all the various things you can do with it going forward." "This is an interesting one, especially since, within the last year, we're at a major inflection point for the AI explosion. AI has been with us for quite some time. Even rudimentary things in the EHRs around clinical decision support can often be considered a form of artificial intelligence. And I want to pause there and say I dislike the term artificial intelligence. I would much rather say something like augmented intelligence or even assistive intelligence." "But the idea behind labeling ourselves as a clinical-grade AI solution stems from what I've seen in the industry and what I've seen in the literature around what I call the five pillars of clinical-grade AI. It is an attempt to distinguish the AI we use in clinical care settings from what we're seeing all over the place right now. If I'm saying it correctly, your ChatGPTs, your Bards, even I think Elon Musk dropped a new one yesterday called GROK. And, of course, you've also seen some of the problems of using that kind of AI in clinical situations. Namely, the AI can hallucinate, the AI may or may not have been trained on robust clinical data, and the AI might not be perfectly reliable, especially if you come to trust the AI without actually checking over it." @DrFirst #DrFirst #ClinicalGradeAI #PriceTransparency #PopulationHealth #PatientSafety #ClinicianBurnout #HealthcareCosts #HealthcareAnalytics #HealthcareTransformation #HealthcareInnovation drfirst.com Download the transcript here

Vivian DeWoskin, Chief Commercial Officer at NeuraLight, focuses on developing solutions for diagnosing, monitoring and treating neurodegenerative diseases using oculometric data. Using computer vision and deep learning techniques, data from measuring eye position and movement can provide biomarkers for early detection and insights into neurological health. This non-invasive technology is being tested in the PALOMA study, a longitudinal study of Parkinson's patients designed to develop one biomarker as a monitoring and assessment tool.  Vivian explains, "The reason that this works or theoretically works is that there's a very well-characterized ocular motor system. We know a lot about the ocular motor system and the relationship between eye movement and different parts of the brain. When we talk about oculometrics, we're not just measuring one thing. We're talking about measuring multiple aspects of eye movement and function. Those different aspects are related to a variety of different neural pathways. So, in the context of neurodegenerative disease, we can see certain characteristic changes in how a patient's eyes move or function as a direct result of the degeneration happening in particular areas of the brain."   "The distinct signal that we can get from these different types of oculometrics, from different brain regions, gives us a really powerful tool to be able to use for a variety of purposes like we just described. For diagnosing patients early, potentially differentiating between very similar conditions or conditions that appear similar in their outward presentation of symptoms but have a different disease pathology in the brain. We're excited about this methodology for being able to offer us a variety of really exciting tools that ultimately will help us develop better therapeutics for patients and help benefit patients in the long run." #NeuraLight #OculometricData #EyeMovement #ParkinsonsDisease #NeurologicalDiseases #DigitalBiomarkers neuralight.ai Download the transcript here  

 Ivana Naeymi-Rad, Chief Operating Officer at Intelligent Medical Objects, works with providers, payers, and life science companies to help them make sense of data. IMO specializes in data quality, cleaning paper-based data, and data interoperability in structured and unstructured formats. Sentiment analysis provides insights into the emotions of providers and patients, while AI and large language models support data entry and improve provider workflow. IMO also focuses on addressing the complexities of data in the context of drug discovery, genomics, and precision medicine.  Ivana explains, "We started with this foundational clinical interface terminology that has been a big part of the building blocks as we've expanded into this data quality platform. The terminology allows us to better understand clinical data in ways you wouldn't be able to understand by looking at it. We've worked with providers, we've worked with health systems to take their data to ingest it, and then we have a team of clinicians and informaticists processing and creating rules and policies around that data." "A lot of the challenges that we solve are around better data entry, number one, at the point of care. Then two, a lot of the broader interoperability-related challenges around disparate data that flow into data warehouses analytics platforms further downstream. We help customers standardize, normalize, really make sense of data, and utilize their data in ways they just wouldn't be able to before because we have that deep clinical understanding." "Unfortunately, a lot of that data is still on paper. The good news is that when it comes to us, it's already digitized. Still, I do know the pain that it takes when we hear about customers and their fax machines and the PDFs and the optical character recognition, trying to get that data in a format that is accessible and able to be cleaned. There is so much opportunity in healthcare to standardize a lot of this process. The cleanliness and the quality issues of the data today are impacting a wide variety of people across the entire data chain." #IntelligentMedicalObjects #DigitalHealth #WomeninHealthIT #HealthTech #HealthcareData imohealth.com Download the transcript here

Vasu Chandrasekaran, VP of real-world data and analytics at Ontada, provides an electronic health record platform, iKnowMed, used by community oncology providers to practice evidence-based and patient-centered medicine better.  They also work closely with the US Oncology Network to improve access to new therapies and clinical trials. Using real-world data to generate real-world evidence allows Ontada, in partnership with biopharma companies, to drive drug discovery and development, conduct more diverse trials, and better understand the effectiveness of treatments. Vasu explains, "Community oncology is where most of the cancer care happens. We enable those physicians in the community to practice evidence-based and patient-centered medicine through our EHR platform. Our clinical decision support system and other workflows built into the EHR platform enable physicians to practice oncology and deliver precise care to patients in the community. That's the first thing I would say. That's one of the offerings." "And secondly, because we are part of McKesson, we have a very close partnership with The US Oncology Network, which is the largest network of community oncology practices. We can work very closely with the physicians in The Network to understand what is working well for them in the technology and what needs to be improved. This close partnership enables us to be agile and make changes to the technology that reflects the standard of care." "Lastly, on the life sciences side, we work with biopharma companies and use real-world data coming from the routine care delivery, the data about the patient’s health status, demographics, diagnoses, testing, treatments, etc. We use that to generate real-world evidence that can be used to help understand the real-world effectiveness of treatments, and that can be used to help accelerate new therapies to patients."  #Ontada #RealWorldData #Oncology #Cancer #CancerCare #DrugDevelopment ontada.com Download the transcript here

Arun Menawat, CEO of Profound Medical, discusses the challenges of treating prostate cancer and how traditional treatments like prostate removal or radiation often result in side effects and complications. While historically, a PSA blood test has been used for diagnosis, an MRI provides a more precise and efficient diagnostic tool. In addition, Profound is using real-time MRI-guided thermal ultrasound to precisely target and kill cancer cells while maintaining vital functions. Arun explains, "MRI is the best way to really diagnose prostate cancer. And because you can see inside, you can see the cellular structure and that is what's important when physicians review. Our primary message is if you're using the MRI to diagnose, why would you not use that MRI also to treat the patient? Because you can see the urethra where urine is flowing. You can see the ejaculatory duct, where it merges with the urethra. You can get a very good idea of where the nerve bundles are." "Our technology is a combination of using real-time MRI, and we use a very safe way of keeping the urethra at body temperature. Still, we use ultrasound to gently heat the tissue just to kill temperature, typically about 55° Centigrade. So think about this: Men will go into the MR, they will be asleep, they won’t feel anything. We insert a catheter right into the center of the prostate. We have water flowing through it, so the urethra that is for urine is always safe. Then we supply some ultrasound through that catheter, and the sound gets absorbed by the prostate tissue, which gently heats. The MRI that we use for imaging, also in real-time, gives us the temperature of the prostate." #ProfoundMedical #ProstateCancer #BPH #Urology #MensHealth #MRI #ScienceandTechnology #Radiology #TULSApro profoundmedical.com Download the transcript here  

Dr. Michael Mbagwu, senior Medical Director at Verana Health, a real-world data company helping to accelerate clinical research using EHR data and other data to unlock insights about clinical practice patterns.  The company is also addressing systematic bias in clinical trials by using real-world data and analyzing demographic information and geographic representation to get an accurate view of the obstacles patients face in getting the most advanced treatments. Michael elaborates, "We have very secure and advanced technologies where we deliberately use clinical and other data scientists to walk through the data, ensure it's really what we want, and give insights. Big data is not big data is not big data, and the ability to unlock insights very much depends on who's the one looking through it. So, at Verana, we do it all together. We have a very multidisciplinary team that is working on all of these data sets, and we have just a great thing going on regarding the insights we're able to provide."   "First and foremost, the data itself isn't always contained in just one place. And by that, I mean yes, loosely, we have an idea of what an EHR is. That's what I, as a doc, will type in. When patients come in, they'll talk about their symptoms or something that's happened to them. We will type that and list it. So that's one part of the electronic medical record. But there are other parts." "There's billing, there can be images, there can be MRIs. In ophthalmology we use different instruments, photographs of the retina and different scans and that sort of thing. Those aren't necessarily in the EHR. They might be something that the computer also accesses, but again, not from just one source. So, understanding what data is available and breaking down all the silos of that so that we can ingest and get a 360° view of patient journeys is something that we work very hard at Verana to do." #VeranaHealth #DigitalHealth #RealWorldData #RWD #LifeSciences #Ophthalmology veranahealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Todd Sachs, Chief Medical Officer at AccessHope, highlights why socioeconomic disparities in cancer mortality have widened. The key is access to screening tests, often limited by the cost and location of the testing facility.  Geography also impacts access to sub-specialists with the most current information available. Todd emphasizes the importance of removing these geographic barriers and increasing collaboration between sub-specialists and community oncologists with access to National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Centers to ensure patients benefit from the latest innovations and evidence-based treatments. Todd explains, "With the amount of information coming out, it's challenging for patients because there's more information for them to have to sort through and sift through and understand to decide what's best for them. That same amount of information is challenging for a community oncologist because I don't know how they keep up with all of the advancements and best practices. They're taking care of 20 to 30 people a day and treating a variety of different types of cancers. I think it's almost unrealistic of us to expect a community oncologist to be that jack-of-all-trades. The knowledge that we're increasing because of the advances is wonderful but also widening the gap."  "What does that mean in everyday use? We've seen that community oncologists may over-utilize a treatment, under-utilize it, or mis-utilize it because they're unaware of new guidelines or treatments. This happens much more in cancer and less likely with diabetes, hypertension, or cholesterol because the amount of information in those particular conditions or diseases is far less than what you're seeing in cancer." "That's why we feel that at AccessHope, that complex should be reviewed by an NCI CCC expert, and that's why AccessHope was born. We were born to be, I would say, in essence, the chassis between the individual and their families to the renowned experts at these centers, regardless of where they live."  #AccessHope #Cancer #CancerCare #SDOH #HealthEquity #NCICCCExperts myaccesshope.org Download the transcript here

Dr. Jim Woody, CEO and Director of 180 Life Sciences, discusses the company's vision for safer pain and inflammation management. Their earlier work on anti-TNF therapy revolutionized the treatment of conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis. Now 180 Life Sciences focuses on additional indications of inflammation, fibrosis, and cognitive dementia for using anti-TNFs. Jim highlights their research on the anti-inflammatory and analgesic properties of cannabinoids and the potential of synthetic cannabinoid analogs for pain management and appetite suppression. Jim elaborates, "Many years ago, I was Chief Scientific Officer at a company called Centocore, and they were one of the first companies developing therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. One of them that we developed was called anti-TNF. It was Infliximab, which was the FDA name that it received. In your body, circulating around, there are hundreds of small proteins. Those that modify the immune system are called cytokines, and most of them are good actors. One of the bad actors is what they call tumor necrosis factor. It was given that name because of some mouse studies in cancer that were done, although they turned out to be incorrect." "My colleagues in the UK, Dr. Marc Feldmann and Dr. Ravinder Maini had data suggesting that rheumatoid arthritis inflammation and pain were driven by TNF. We were the first to treat ten patients with anti-TNF in this program, in the whole world. Now, anti-TNF is the therapy of choice for rheumatoid arthritis, which, of course, is severe inflammation of the joints." "We also found out that TNF was driving these inflammations in Crohn's disease, Psoriasis, and in Ulcerative Colitis. We discovered all of those from Centocore, and now anti-TNF is the largest-selling class of biologics, at almost $40 billion a year. The current favorite is Humira from AbbVie, but J&J, who bought Centocore, still makes a billion dollars a year from Infliximab sales or its brand name Remicade." #180LifeSciences #LifeSciences #CBD #Biotech #Fibrosis #AntiTNF #DupuytrensDisease #PainManagement #Inflammation  180lifesciences.com Download the transcript here