Empowered Patient Podcast

Chris Sullens, CEO of CentralReach, offers a range of technology solutions to support providers, therapists, educators, and parents working with individuals with autism and intellectual and developmental disabilities. The goal is to streamline administrative tasks, replacing paper-based procedures with digital tools and allowing professionals to spend more in-person time with clients. The digital CR Care Coordinator helps train parents to reinforce the work of the therapists, which leads to better outcomes for the child and the behavior technician. Chris explains, "At CentralReach, our focus is providing technology and associated services to providers, therapists, special educators, and others who are working with primarily the autistic community and those with broader intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDDs). That technology spans everything from patient-provider management systems, practice management systems, data collection on the clinical side, curriculum content assessments, as well as a host of technologies that we provide to schools and organizations that are teaching students in special education." "We still see a lot of entire practices, frankly, that are managing schedules and managing their business, collecting data, and doing assessments that are paper-based today. There's a big shift to digitizing all aspects of a provider's business. We now have a digital assessments product, where historically, we sold books for the ABLLS and AFLS. We still sell books for those who want to use them, but the digital platform provides a lot more reporting, analytics, and trending and streamlines a lot of the process. And so, we're seeing good adoption of that." "From my standpoint, the most valuable role technology can play is supporting the behavior analyst and supporting the behavior technician. Allow them to do their job more effectively, to reduce some of the tasks that they need to do that tend to be more back office or reporting oriented, so that they can spend more time providing care to those they're working with." #CentralReach #ABA #BCBAs #Autism #IDD #DigitalHealth centralreach.com Download the transcript here

Brian Strem, President and CEO of Kiora Pharmaceuticals, is developing a small molecule drug to treat orphan retinal diseases. Their drug KIO-301 restores vision in patients with inherited retinal disease. By giving retinal ganglion cells the ability to sense light, signals can be sent to the brain to effectively see using cells that are not normally light-sensitive. These molecular photoswitches can change shape based on the presence or absence of light and allow a patient to see the direction and movement of light. Brian explains, "It is dependent on the specific mutation. So, we know that there are certain gene mutations that a child will literally be born with immediate signs and symptoms of that disease. Whether that is immediately being blind, so being born blind, versus some of the other ones where you don't tend to get the onset of disease symptoms until the second, or third decade of life when you have difficulty seeing in the dark. Then all of a sudden, that progresses to losing peripheral vision and eventually central vision. So, it is pretty specific to the mutation as to the onset, the timing of onset, and the progression rate." "KIO-301 is based around what chemists would call an Azobenzene. Azobenzenes are notorious for changing their shape based on different external stimuli. And in the case of our molecule, that stimulus is light within the visible spectrum. So, getting more towards, well, what does that mean, and how could we leverage that interesting chemistry? Patients who have these IRDs and specifically, we've now just wrapped up a phase 1 trial, which I can get into in a minute, for a disease called retinitis pigmentosa. In patients with RP, we know that their photoreceptors, or their rods and cones, die. That's part of that mutation that these patients are born with." "Yet there are other cells within the retina that still are the ones that connect to the brain, and those are called the retinal ganglion cells. We know that those cells stay alive for a long time, although they undergo some changes and modifications. And what our molecule can do, KIO-301, is it goes specifically into those retinal ganglion cells that do not have living photoreceptors upstream anymore because they're dead. And what the molecule does is it gives that retinal ganglion cell the ability to sense light and to signal the brain that light is present. And then, when you take the light away, it's able to basically stop that signaling. So, in the sense that it's turning a cell that's not normally light sensitive into a light switch." #KioraPharmaceuticals #VisionAwarenessMonth #InheritedRetinalDisease #RareDisease #OrphanRetinalDiseases kiorapharma.com Download the transcript here

Mark Litton, President and CEO of Athira Pharma, discusses advancements in treating neurodegenerative diseases, highlighting the challenges in treating these diseases. Athira's approach uses the body's natural repair mechanism to enhance the repair and protection of nerve cells. Their lead molecule, fosgonimeton, enhances the hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) and crosses the blood-brain barrier to effectively target neurodegeneration. Mark explains, "At Athira, we're taking a completely novel approach where we're using the body's natural repair mechanism to help repair. We have spent many years designing molecules that enhance this mechanism. This is what we call the HGF/MET biology. This is a biology that has been known for over 30 years. It was originally discovered coming from the liver. What we know about it is that it's important in repairing, protecting, healing, and developing nerve cells." "What we found in a lot of neurodegenerative diseases is that this repair mechanism is impaired, or it slows down as we get older. One of the keys is you've got a molecule, and it's HGF, and then it binds its receptor, the MET receptor. When it binds that receptor, that's when the cell gets activated and starts repairing. There are numerous factors that happen along the way. There are two places one could enhance the receptor. We've decided to enhance the HGF, the protein itself, to help it bind to its receptor." #Athira #Alzheimers #Parkinsons #Dementia #ALS #AD #PD #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #Neurodegeneration #NeuronalHealth #Caregivers #PatientCommunity athira.com Download the transcript here

Jim Murphy, CEO of Greenphire, discusses the company's role in addressing the financial lifecycle of clinical trials. Greenphire works with sponsors, CROs, and research sites to automate and simplify payment processes, provide patient services, and remove burdens for patients and site personnel. The aim is to improve patient retention and accelerate clinical development by streamlining processes from traditional manual methods to digital solutions that address budgeting, grant payments, and patient reimbursements. Jim explains, "There are so many solutions that address data collection points in clinical trials. We're not one of those. We're a company focused on solving more of the business problems of clinical research. For example, we provide workflows that automate and simplify the payment processes from sponsors or CROs to investigative research sites. We provide patient convenience services that enable and support participants to maintain their journey on a clinical trial, giving them reimbursements, travel support, logistics, and even reminders of certain things they need to do." "When Greenphire got its start, sites were paying with cash and checks, and there was a cash box at a typical research site. Somebody would have to get the key and open it up and hold the patient there for another half hour. It consumed a huge amount of time for the study team. It's something that they can do in 28 seconds now." #Greenphire #ClinicalTrials #PatientEngagement #ClinicalResearch greenphire.com Download the transcript here

Julia Regan, CEO and Co-Founder of RxLightning discussed the company's platform for streamlining the process of accessing specialty medications. The traditional process of getting the necessary consent and shipment of these drugs involves a significant amount of paperwork and delays in delivery. RxLightning aims to digitize and automate this process by removing the need for physical paper by using digital tools to connect all parties to ensure fast and affordable access to care. By eliminating paper-based processes, they have achieved a completion rate of 85% of applications within 24 hours. Julia explains, "Specialty medications are always an interesting topic because, over the last 15 years, the definition of a specialty med has evolved with the new medications and molecules coming to market. So when we define specialty meds, we're talking about the high-cost medications that could treat rare diseases. Still, they also treat things like oncology, dermatology issues, GI, RA, and even allergy immunology. So, it varies across the spectrum, but these traditionally are thousands of dollars a month. Because of the cost and complexity of the medications, when providers make a diagnostic decision and determine treatment, there's just a ton of paperwork to get a patient on therapy." "So one is access paperwork, everything from insurance coverage and cost to restrictions that the payer may have to affordability because of the cost as well. That could be everything from free drug grant programs to manufacturer programs. So RxLightning is dedicated to taking all those processes that traditionally are done on paper and are slow and making a digital experience to remove the paperwork and then connect the different parties across that patient journey to ensure expedited, fast access, and affordable access to care." "Yes, it's very much physical paper. We look at the specialty market for over 1,200 medications. And some of these medications could have hundreds of different types of paperwork to process and touch. So, it's complex for the provider and the patient. And when you talk about some disease states, it's not just one therapy that a patient's on. It's a combination of therapies to treat the disease to try to get a positive outcome. So, it's very overwhelming for many people involved in the process." #RxLightning #MedAccess #SpecialityPharmacy #SpecialityMedications #RareDisease #Startup #HealthTech #PatientAccess rxlightning.com Download the transcript here

Mike Pattwell, principal business advisor at Edifecs and Chair of the WEDI payment models work group, emphasizes the pandemic's impact on moving away from the fee-for-service model towards a value-based care model. Improving the administration of healthcare requires automation, new workflow solutions, and better data exchange to improve patient health. He mentions three organizations, including CMMI, WEDI, and CAQH, working towards creating interoperability and seamless communication between payers and providers. Mike explains, "We've been around for 26 years, and we've been developing solutions to help our clients, mostly payers and providers, and health systems, to operationalize and automate workflows to improve the administration side of healthcare so that they can focus on doing what they do well, which is taking care of members and patients." "Starting at the top, it would be The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMS) and the innovation center called CMMI. They're paving the future of healthcare for both payers and providers. They're supported by many other organizations. I'll briefly discuss three that I'm directly involved with and I believe are helping to develop and evolve healthcare. I call these three organizations "silent superheroes." They are the invisible organizations doing the hard work of creating interoperability and seamless automation between payers and providers. For decades, they've been enabling the future of healthcare." #Edifecs #HealthInnovation #DIgitalTransformation #DigitalHealth #SDOH #Equity #HealthcareIT edifecs.com Download the transcript here

Tim Moran, President and CEO of Avertix, discusses the company's mission to revolutionize how heart attack survivors are cared for and supported. Targeting patients who have had one prior heart attack or instance of a prior acute coronary syndrome, this first-of-its-kind technology is implanted in patients to monitor for the onset of another heart attack. The device notifies the patient in real-time so they can seek care and minimize the effects of the attack. Work is underway for providing cloud connectivity to the device, allowing data to be shared with physicians and family members. Tim explains, "So in our study, patients that had The Guardian product implanted, we were able to reduce their time to care from the onset of symptoms by almost eight times. So we got the time down on average to 1.6 hours from the onset of symptoms where they arrived at an emergency room and then ultimately could have therapeutic intervention like a stent put in, which ultimately would reperfuse them and get blood flowing again. So, it's a significant reduction in time to care." "The other thing that was interesting is we found during our study that our device can detect silent heart attacks. So, patients that don't have any symptoms at all, and in those instances during the study, we detected 42 silent events. The patient had no symptoms. Our Guardian device, what will do when it detects a heart attack, it's going to vibrate in the patient's chest. Then, it will also give them a secondary and tertiary warning on a small handheld device that'll give them an audio-visual alert." "So, we're building a brand-new category in cardiology right now. We're speaking to our clinicians, cardiologists, and electrophysiologists on a daily basis about our new technology. And if you look at our FDA label, it's been approved for any patient that has had one prior heart attack or any instance of a prior acute coronary syndrome. So that's a very, very large patient population." "From there, physicians can decide within the patient population they're treating. A patient with a prior heart attack may have other comorbidities such as diabetes, high blood pressure, or a smoker, which puts them at even an elevated risk for a second event. And these are the patients that we're targeting with The Guardian." #Avertix #HeartAttack #TheGuardian #HeartAttackSurvivors #Implantable #Cardiologists #Electrophysiologists avertix.com Download the transcript here

Jason Bock, Co-Founder and CEO of CTMC, and Dr. Chris Flowers, Division Head of Cancer Medicine and Chair of Lymphoma and Myeloma at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, are collaborating to accelerate the development of cancer cell therapies and manufacturing innovative cell therapies for cancer patients. CTMC is a joint venture between MD Anderson Cancer Center and National Resilience created to address the challenges of delivering autologous cell therapies at a scalable level. Jason and Chris highlight the value of face-to-face interaction in solving the complex logistics of getting a drug from the research into the clinic. Jason explains, "We created CTMC to address the challenges of delivering autologous cell therapies to treat cancer patients. This modality is unique in that the starting material for each batch of product comes from the patient. And so, the actual manufacturing supply chain starts with the patient. We bring that into the manufacturing facility, engineer the cells, expand them, and then reinfuse those to the same patient. The clinic and manufacturing site relationship is much more connected than any other therapeutic modality. MD Anderson, being a leader in cancer cell therapy and seeing that cell therapy would be transformative for cancer treatment, we created this venture to address better the challenge of the connectedness between cell therapy, clinical trials, and manufacturing sites." Chris elaborates, "Our group at MD Anderson had a very similar concept and idea that started a little bit later, about five years after that and looking at the same target. Throughout the last three years, our group has collaborated with CTMC and has taken the concept of that target and moved it from animal models and cell models where we were testing to see whether this was a good target and effective of killing lymphoma cells. We took this to animal models, where we tested and showed that it was effective. Then, collaborating with CTMC to go through the entire FDA regulatory process to get an IND approval to develop the manufacturing process. So, not just a targeted cell therapy that was effective in the lab, but a targeted cell therapy that could be effective and be administered to patients. That whole scale-up and manufacturing process was a collaboration that happen with CTMC." #CTMC #MDAnderson #CellTherapy #ClinicalTrials #EndCancer #BiopharmaceuticalManufacturing ctmc.com mdanderson.org Download the transcript here

Jay Srinivasan, CEO of Truvian Health, is on a mission to disrupt the blood testing model by making routine testing readily available and affordable with a platform that provides appropriate information for patients and physicians. The current blood testing process involves multiple tubes of blood being drawn, transportation of the blood to a lab, and waiting days for results. Truvian aims to streamline the process by placing its platform in retail clinics and physician offices where a single tube of blood can be processed on-site with results available in minutes. Jay explains, "Our goal is to have our platform exist wherever you go. So, it could be in a retail or a corporate clinic, it could be in your physician's office labs, it could be in retail pharmacies, it could be in an arena, it could be in a mall, in a school, in a university setting, anywhere you go." "This platform can take one tube of blood, not multiple tubes of blood because it has integrated multiple technologies that allow us to process a single tube of blood, all the results required for an annual blood test. This blood tube does not travel anywhere because the instrument is exactly where the draw would occur, and those results are available not in days but in minutes." "The reason this is important is that today in the world, 40% of all blood orders are not being adhered to by patients like you and me because it's friction-laden even to schedule it or to get to a blood draw site to have your blood drawn. Because of that, people don't have annual and other blood draws done when they're asked to do so. More than 50% of the population in the United States is in this category. It's true even the rest of the world is walking around with some chronic condition that could have been detected early." #TruvianHealth #BloodTesting #TruWellness #Technology #MedTech #Diagnostics #Healthcare truvianhealth.com Download the transcript here

Omri Shor, Co-Founder and CEO of Medisafe is driven to help patients manage their medications. Omri emphasizes that medication adherence is influenced by various factors, including access to healthcare providers, ability to refill prescriptions, side effects, and cost. Medisafe tools support patients by providing reminders, tracking medication intake, and managing drug-to-drug interactions. Partners include drug manufacturers and pharma companies that want to support patients to improve outcomes. Omri explains, "People think medication management is one problem, but it is not. There are so many drivers and challenges behind it, and it is very personalized to the individual on one end. It's also aligned with the specific condition and the specific drug. There is no clear answer to who's more prone." "In many cases, what we want to see is actually connected to outcomes. So, if the patient takes a medication to get to a specific outcome, they can track those outcomes in Medisafe. There are roughly 70 or 80 trackers for blood pressure, glucose levels, SpO2, sleep, moods, etc. We will then use those trackers and allow patients to share that information with HCPs healthcare professionals, whether their pharmacist, nurse, or physician, so they can share this information with the right individuals to continue supporting them." "We have recently concluded a study that looked at healthcare utilization. We saw patients with MS and epilepsy after starting to use Medisafe. We did a pre-post analysis and found that patients with epilepsy experienced a 36% reduction in ER visits. For patients with MS, we observed a 63% reduction in ER visits. The monetary implications were roughly between $4,500 and $6,000 in cost reduction per patient annually. So, better process management yields better outcomes, which was wonderful for us to observe at Medisafe." #Medisafe #MedicationAdherence #HealthLiteracy #DigitalHealth #MedicationManagement #DigitalCompanion medisafe.com Download the transcript here