Empowered Patient Podcast

Nima Ahmadi, CEO of The Wound Company, highlights the need for qualified and certified wound care experts to work with patients on a continuous basis. This kind of relationship allows the care provider to proactively manage the wound to ensure efficient healing as quickly as possible.  Personalized plans are created using AI and data analysis, considering the patient's risk factors and specific details about the wound and their general health condition.  Nima explains, "We think about being in a continuous relationship with everybody who has a wound, ensuring its healing. Then, we continue to be proactive as we manage patients who are at risk of new wounds or repeat wounds so that we're doing everything we can preventatively to prevent that from happening. This is completely different than how we've approached wound care for the last few decades." "We have certified experts, and our vision is that in ten years, every single American with a wound will have a certified wound care expert from The Wound Company assigned to their care. The expert is quarterbacking their wound care and ensuring they will heal as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. As part of that vision of assigning that coordination, we're also doing virtual and in-person, in some cases, wound care so that it's a one-stop shop experience for the patient to help them heal effectively and efficiently. And we have a tremendous amount of technology and other assets to help our clinicians do that multichannel wound care." #WoundCare #OstomyCare #Healthcare #Telehealth #NursingShortage thewound. co Download the transcript here

Dr. Monique Nugent is a practicing hospitalist and an associate director for the Division of Hospital Medicine at South Shore Hospital in Weymouth, Massachusetts. She's also the author of Prescription for Admission: A Doctor's Guide for Navigating the Hospital, Advocating for Yourself, and Having a Better Hospitalization. Post-COVID, hospitals are dealing with workflow and getting patients in and out of the hospital as soon as possible. One big obstacle is the lack of places patients can go for rehabilitation and skilled nursing care, which is leading to more consideration of the hospital-at-home model. While this is a patient-facing book, there are insights about what healthcare providers need to understand about the patient hospital experience. Monique explains, "Hospital-at-home is not a new concept. It's somewhat of a new concept here in the United States, but hospital-at-home has been successful around the world, and I think there's a lot of really good benefits." "Number one, it cuts down on costs, and that's always a big issue in this country. A day in the hospital comes with costs, not just for the care, there's the cost of the building that goes into your hospitalization. There's the cost of the electricity for that building that is built into your hospitalization. So, it does drive down costs just by moving the care to a different facility, which is your home." "I also think hospital-at-home is a big boon for the comfort of patients. Particularly our elderly patients. When they come into the hospital, often you'll see that people who struggle a little bit with their memory, who have a touch of dementia, or who have significant dementia can get very confused in the hospital. A, they're sick, B, these are new people, C, their routine is thrown off, and so that can worsen confusion and delirium."  #HospitalManagement #HospitalatHome #HospitalMedicine #Hospitalization #HospitalBasedPhysician drmoniquenugent.com Download the transcript here

Ryan McQuaid, Co-Founder of PlushCare, has expanded their collaborative virtual care model to provide whole-person care, including mental health and weight management. Working with partners, PlushCare offers primary care and referrals to specialists, second opinions, and therapists in all 50 states. Their top priority is to provide personalized care in a seamless fashion to all patients, especially those in underserved and rural communities. Ryan elaborates, "Everybody's familiar with virtual care now. And so, given it's become a much more mature market, just like anything, as the market matures, consumers' expectations increase. And so, rewind five years ago, people were okay with maybe not the greatest experience when it came to a virtual visit, but now the bar has been raised substantially. And so, just making sure that patients get a wow experience has been one of our focuses."   "I think another area is being the one-stop shop. I talked about us joining forces with Accolade and 2nd MD to be the one place that people go for their health benefits, connecting with their primary care doctor, their therapist, even a weight management expert. And so, that's an area that we're leaning into substantially to be that one-stop shop. We believe that when you look at other markets and other ecosystems, whether it's Apple's ecosystem or Google's ecosystem, that's a trend you see in other industries in verticals."  @PlushCare #PlushCare #VirtualCare #Telehealth #PreventativeCare #MentalHealth #WeightManagement PlushCare.com Download the transcript here

Eli Ben-Joseph, Co-Founder and CEO of Regard, works with health systems to integrate AI into their medical record systems to help doctors by highlighting issues, aiding in the diagnosis, and writing medical notes after a patient visit. With increasing doctor burnout, an emphasis on more efficient workflow supported by technology is a path to giving providers more time with patients and less time on administrative issues and on their computers.   Eli explains, "We say that it's essentially an AI co-pilot for doctors. The way that works is we have a deep integration with leading medical records, both Epic and Cerner. And when a health system partners with us they will link our software to their system. When a doctor opens up Regard, the moment they click the Regard button, our technology goes into the medical record and fetches the entire medical record data for that patient. All the labs, all the history, all the vitals."  "What we recognized when we started this company is that doctors are spending way more time today than ever before having to make sure they document in a way that they can bill for it, that it doesn't get denied by insurance. They spend a lot of time dealing with prior authorizations or requirements that they have in terms of how they write their notes, and that's where that toil exists in healthcare. So we saw an opportunity to help automate a lot of those tasks, and that's where we step in." "So, a quick story: one of my favorite stories is one of our physicians, long time user, was working on a patient who had a stroke and she opened up Regard. And our technology went through years of data in a matter of seconds and found a note from an outpatient doctor that said that this patient has an atrial fibrillation, which is a fluttering of the heart, which it's very important to know that if you're dealing with a stroke. Because of our technology, she was able to see something that she would not have seen otherwise, that this patient had an AFib. She would've totally missed it because it was years back in piles of data. And because of that, she was able to adjust the care that she gave this patient. And that had a really positive impact on that patient's care as well." #RegardApp #ClinicianBurnout #AI #Workflow #Doctors #Physicians #Hospitals #NoteBloat withregard.com Download the transcript here

Mark McDonough, the CEO of ChromaCode, is leveraging high-definition PCR testing to overcome the limitations of conventional PCR to identify biomarkers of infectious diseases and cancer. While gene sequencing can provide valuable information, it requires more tissue, is expensive, and requires at least a week for analysis. Using HDPCR, ChromaCode has developed a lung cancer assay that looks at nine genes and 15 biomarkers, requiring less tissue, performed at a lower cost, and provides results quickly. This approach, built on a cloud-supported multiplexing platform, provides flexibility to explore other areas in oncology and transplants, looking at multiple targets per sample. Mark explains, "With PCR today, assays look at particular biomarkers on a gene-by-gene basis. So those can be effective in lung cancer, for example, if you know you're just looking for EGFR as a biomarker or if you're looking at KRAS or ALK, a different mutation. But the problem is it's not very comprehensive, and you need a lot of tissue. So, PCR falls short because it's limited in scalability and requires a lot of tissue." "Why this is important for the patient in terms of patient empowerment and lung cancer is when a patient gets their result back from ChromaCode and their provider using ChromaCode technology, they also are more than likely having an immunochemistry test called PD-L1 run. They're trying to determine if there is a targeted therapy, or is it best to put a patient on immunotherapy, or is there a combination of immunotherapy and chemo?" "Having all that answer back in one to two days, as opposed to knowing what you'll get back from immunochemistry in a day and then waiting two weeks for sequencing, can be very problematic. So, we feel like we're meeting that open opportunity where sequencing is too slow and too expensive, requiring too much tissue, and PCR just isn't comprehensive enough and is very much trial and error on a one-by-one basis with our technology." #ChromaCode #HDPCR #Diagnostics #ChromaCodeCloud #Genomics #LungCancer #GeneSequencing chromacode.com Download the transcript here

Priyanka Dutta-Passecker is the CEO and Founder of Healiva, a Swiss start-up focused on innovative treatments for acute and chronic wounds. Healiva begins the process by cleaning the wound using an enzyme invented by Priyanka.  Depending on the severity of the wound, autologous or allogeneic cell therapy is used to make new skin to heal the wound. Priyanka explains, "So, to give a background for when we talk about personalized cell therapies and autologous cell therapy. We take a patient here, and from the patient, we make the patient's skin. That means that we're completely personalizing and making the skin of the patient. And this is given to extremely chronic non-healing wound patients like venous leg ulcer patients or diabetic foot ulcer patients. The skin gets integrated on their ulcer and closes the ulcer. That's one of our autologous cell therapy products called Epidex." "We do keep the primary cells when we take the hair follicle. As you may know, hair follicles are epithelial cells that we expand, and we keep the cells. And when they come back, we can make the full skin, the epidermis differentiation, within two weeks. But generally, it takes four weeks. And it's given to the patient once it's ready within four to five days." "So, just to elaborate on what we mean by allogeneic cell therapy. So quite different from the autologous one, in allogenic cell therapy, we are taking healthy skin cells from you and me. We expand the skin cells, and we give the skin cells to the patient. What happens is that it releases growth factors which help in the healing. And there is no rejection because, of course, the cells do not stay on the wounds of the patient." #Healiva #WoundCare #PatientCare #SwissStartups #CellTherapy #ChronicWounds #RegenerativeMedicine #Diabetes #Healthtech healiva.com Download the transcript here

Steve Kent is Chief Product Officer at Know Labs, which has developed a new sensor that uses noninvasive radiofrequency spectroscopy to measure molecules in the body.  Their first target is to non-invasively measure glucose to help those with diabetes manage their conditions more effectively. As a sensor and diagnostics company, Know Labs is working to understand how its sensor and technology can be integrated with best-in-class insulin delivery systems to provide a portable, reliable, and affordable solution for a growing global audience. Steve explains, "It's a big breakthrough as far as what you're able to measure by being able to penetrate deeper into the human body. Also, we can send up to 400,000 different frequencies through one sensor, whereas, with LEDs, as the example I gave earlier, you can only send something like three to five per LED. Then, you have to physically change out the entire sensor. With ours, that programmatic control allows us an unprecedented amount of new data through the sensor field." "The sensor has a very sophisticated control unit in it. It's programmable. Today, we can connect it to laptops. It can be connected through a cable. It can be connected through WiFi or Bluetooth to any other companion device. Right now, it's very powerful in that we can have full programmable control over how the device works in the world and understand the scenarios that allow it to perform the best. The short answer is yes, it can connect to an iPhone or an Android, and then I think there are still questions we're looking to solve on the best possible patient experience. I could envision the data being shown on your phone. The device itself may also be able to provide you with a reading directly. There are still some questions to answer there as far as what is the best experience for our future customers." @TheKnowLabs #KnowLabs #Diabetes #GlucoseMonitoring #MedicalDevices #DiabetesManagement #NoninvasiveGlucoseMonitoring KnowLabs.co Download the transcript here

Dr. Tony Willoughby is the CEO of Stellus Rx, which has created a model of collaboration for the physician, patient, and pharmacist to provide a more robust system to encourage medication adherence and lifestyle changes. While clinicians may prescribe a treatment plan, pharmacists are in a position to work with patients to address their specific concerns and monitor the patient for drug interactions and possible de-prescribing strategies. Tony explains, "What our model does is it comes alongside the physician. In that moment of the last 90 seconds of the appointment. We actually have that physician connect that patient to a pharmacist that's embedded virtually in that clinic to expand the capacity of the physician. To pick up that conversation and give space to understand what the patient's belief systems are, what their questions are, how to coordinate or optimize the medication to fit the patient's belief system and the product design of their health plan or their pharmacy benefit plan." "Anytime you increase volume, you increase complexity. Whether that's the volume of different medication types or volume of dosing, you have more complexity in that moment. And so, our targeted population is your multi-chronic condition patients. We work primarily with primary care physicians, so think about the disease states that stay aligned with their primary care physicians the longest and what disease states are dominant within the US healthcare system. So we take care of a lot of diabetic patients, multi-chronic diabetic patients, COPD, hypertension, mental health, all the things that walk in and out of a primary care practice that has a type of complexity that goes along with that patient's regimen." #StellusRx #Pharmacy #Pharmacist #PatientCare #MedicationAdherence #ValueBasedCare #IntegratedPharmacyCare stellusrx.com Download the transcript here

Dave Hering, Chief Executive Officer and Director at Invivyd, draws on his experience with vaccines working at Pfizer and research on monoclonal antibodies to engineer targeted monoclonal antibodies to treat diseases like cancer and prevent diseases like COVID-19. Providing antibodies, particularly to immunocompromised people, overcomes the limitations of vaccines and reduces the risk of severe outcomes from diseases. Dave elaborates, "Antibodies are made by humans. They're made in response to an antigen, a virus being introduced into the body. Frequently, the starting point for these antibodies is to take blood and serum from people infected from a disease and look for these antibodies. And so that's the starting way. We call that mining antibodies. You can get them from survivors of different diseases and then use them to generate and create antibodies that look like that."   "And so Invivyd does the same thing. We start with those. But with our technology and a partnership with a company called Adimab, we've perfected this engineering that does this affinity maturation. You can do this in yeast cells. And do it and replicate it thousands and thousands of times with minor tweaks, and see how it will perform against those viruses. And so, by running those types of experiments, you're doing more precision—making modifications and finding antibodies that now aren't just the ones that your body produces but have been optimized to neutralize the virus." #Invivyd #COVID #COVID19 #mAbs #VVD222 #Antibodies #MonoclonalAntibodies invivyd.com Download the transcript

Luká Yancopoulos is CEO of Grapevine Technologies, a COVID-inspired company determined to increase resilience in the supply chain for healthcare supplies. Disrupting the current network of manufacturers, importers, and distributors, Grapevine is connecting suppliers directly to end users. They aim to build a more resilient network of suppliers, eliminate waste and unnecessary costs for medical providers, and reduce patient charges.      Luká explains, "Not a lot has changed in the healthcare space regarding logistics and supply chain in my lifetime. So, getting things to change and getting things to budge is definitely difficult in nature. But our primary business innovation is that we seamlessly connect a data-driven network of primary suppliers directly to healthcare practices." "When I say that Grapevine is connecting this data-driven network of primary suppliers, we're using the data made publicly available by the United States government to find actual importers or manufacturers of the medical supplies and find the companies that sell to McKesson, Henry Schein, Cardinal Health, and Medline. And we basically onboard those primary suppliers, those importers, upstream of the middleman, McKesson, and these big dinosaur distributors. And we connect those importers directly to end users." "There's a lot that incurs additional costs between the importer and the end user when they purchase from McKesson. They have to move it to McKesson's warehouse. They then pay the McKesson labor staff. They pay the account manager. And by bypassing the middleman, you bypass with him his inefficiencies, his markups. And at Grapevine, we can offer the same products that these healthcare practices already buy at an average of 62% lower prices, which is a significant saving that can be carried forward to patients and reduce the financial burden of healthcare costs."  #GrapevineTechnologies #SupplyChain #MedicalSupplies #MedicalDevices #Healthcare #CostReduction #SupplyShortages go-grapevine.com Download the transcript here