Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Vishwa Srivastava, APAC CEO of SSI, SS Innovations International, is a leader in telesurgery, using robotic surgery to extend surgical services in underserved areas. The SSI Mantra surgical robot is used for laparoscopic surgery and offers an affordable alternative to prevailing robotic solutions without compromising quality. Telesurgery has potential in remote operations and is also revolutionizing surgical training by providing real-time expert proctoring. Vishwa explains, "My father was one of the early global pioneers in robotic cardiac surgery, and he had actually helped Intuitive Surgical back in their early days get their FDA approval. And what he recognized very quickly was that through these minimally invasive robotic cardiac surgical procedures, 20% of his patients went home the next day, 50% in two days or less, and the average length of stay was 3.2 days. So, he became convinced after they twisted his arm to launch robotic cardiac surgical programs. And Dr. Fred Moll at the time was the chairman and founder of Intuitive Surgical, and he wanted to start on the heart because it was the most complex procedure to do a beating heart, totally endoscopic, bypass surgery. And he felt that if you could do that, then everything else would be simple." "The way that we look at remote robotic surgery, or what we call telesurgery, currently, we are the only company in India that has received formal regulatory approval from the CDSCO for both teleproctoring and telesurgery. The way that we look at teleproctoring and telesurgery, it's not like one rockstar surgeon sitting in one location operating omnipresent in a hundred different locations." "With teleproctoring and telesurgery, the way that we look at it is in addition to operating and extending expertise in the remote areas of the country, we look at teleproctoring and telesurgery the same way that doctors are trained in residency where you always have an attending in the room, the junior surgeon will be operating, and the goal of the proctor or the attending surgeon is to guide the junior surgeon to maturity." #SSInnovations #RoboticSurgery #Telesurgery #CardiacProcedures #HeartSurgery #Teleproctoring #RemoteSurgery SSInnovations.com Download the transcript here

Vikram Ahuja, Co-Founder and CEO, and Joe Promoppatam, Co-Founder and CTO of OsseoLabs, are utilizing 3D printing and AI to advance reconstructive surgery by enabling the creation of personalized, precision-fit implants and surgical instruments. Traditional surgery has relied on standardized implants made of titanium and involves lengthy operations. The OsseoLabs approach reduces surgical planning and operating time, improving patient outcomes by achieving a better fit and enhanced bone integration through the use of advanced implant materials. AI is used to automate and accelerate the design process for these custom devices, enabling a scalable and cost-effective approach to create complex, regulated medical devices. Vikram explains, "We want to use our engineering know-how, especially in 3D printing, to improve the quality of the outcome of the surgeries and also help the students to be able to offer a better solution at a speed, and also the outcome that is a little bit more precise. And that's what we have been working on for quite a long time. We want to use the knowledge of 3D printing, biomechanics, and also AI to help, especially in complex surgical cases. So both the patients and the surgeons are better off with the outcome. And the main gap that we are seeing here is not only in the Asian countries where we operate, but also in the US. And the use of 3D presented implants, even though it has been around for quite some time in the US, we still see a lot of gaps that can be improved in what materials are being used, and how the implants are designed. We help the surgeons and also the hospitals throughout this process." Joe elaborates, "Yes, for such a device, they all look the same way, but the patients look different. So we see this gap between the available instrumentation and the actual treatment that the surgeons want to conduct. And we want to break that barrier by being able to decide which instrument is required individually, and I mean that in the day, we could not do that. The price can be competitive because all the manufacturing technology is used to support production. But we have to depend on how they matured in the past few years. We are able to adopt the technology, which allows us to decide and print the instrument for specific care and specific surgery. I think the speed and cost become much more practical, and all we need to look into is the 3D printer. But eventually, when you come into something like customization, you talk about the speed. In terms of speed, it's not just the speed of how we make things, but it's about the speed of how we decide things. That's where we see the gap that we can fill using AI to split up the bedside process." #OsseoLabs #ReconstructiveSurgery #3DPrinting #PersonalizedImplants #MedAI OsseoLabs.com Download the transcript here

Trân Lê, Co-Founder and CEO of Grove AI, was founded to automate the manual and inefficient workflows in clinical trial recruitment, patient engagement, and support. The company's AI agent, Grace, is trained on specific trial protocols and approved scripts to respond to patient questions about pre-screening, logistics, and scheduling appointments. This platform aims to increase speed and quality of participant recruitment, improve representation, and expand accessibility to clinical trials by offering support in over 19 languages and providing access to information on demand. Trân explains, "The birth of Grove really came from my co-founder, Sohit, and his experience working in the hospital. We were working at Stanford, and there we were, computer scientists building a lot of internal tools for clinical trials, clinical research, as well as for the greater healthcare patient services. And that, combined with my experience trying to enroll in a clinical trial, really set us off to think deeply about how we can automate a lot of the manual workflows that exist today for patients and for providers, as well as for pharma in taking new drugs to market. Specifically, within that, we identified patient engagement and support, and prescreening to be an important part of ensuring that patients know where they're going and what to do when they're participating in these trials. And so we decided to really step out into the industry and change this process and make it an easier and more accessible experience for patients." "I would say that having worked inside a hospital and seeing all of this lead generation or getting people educated about the trial is an important aspect, and it's being done by a lot of the recruitment vendors as well as in-house teams out there. In addition to that, a bottleneck that previously has always been there now is possible to automate with agentic AI is actually doing the work of taking all the interest from different potential patients and helping them prescreen and understand the requirements of the trials, getting them to the right site, booking their transportation, reminding them about the appointments, and scheduling that appointment." "I would say that Grace, as we call her, is a digital staff or an AI agent - both are comparable terms to describe Grace. The difference is that Grace is trained on the trial, the requirements, and the IRB-approved script of that trial. So she really has the knowledge to be able to respond spontaneously in real time to any questions that the participant may have about the trial." #GroveAI #ClinicalTrials #PatientRecruitment #Pharma #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #AI #AgenticAI grovetrials.com Download the transcript here

Jeff Glazier, CEO of General Oncology, is taking a unique approach to treating cancer by using older chemotherapy drugs with broad action but in novel combinations designed to avoid the incidental toxicity. Their primary drug in trials is GO-4 which is focused on shutting down DNA repair in cancer cells to overcome drug resistance. While testing in patients with stage 4 pancreatic cancer, this approach was designed to combat tumor heterogeneity by targeting fundamental processes like proliferation that are common to all cancer cells within a tumor. Jeff explains, "We're actually taking a different approach than a lot of companies are. And I would say there are really two approaches because we have two different things on, we have a clinical trial right now where we're using old chemotherapy drugs in a new way, and when you combine them together, you really get just a different result. We're trying to shut down DNA repair and kill cancer cells. But the other really interesting thing, and I think it's underlying general vision, is chemotherapy drugs long ago had very broad action, and with broad action comes unwanted incidental toxicity. And over the years, it's been huge in the industry, or moving towards specific drugs that target specific things and have less incidental toxicity. The unfortunate side effect is that cancer cells can evolve around a drug if there's too much specificity. So we're taking a pretty novel approach with our business of going after drugs that have broad action, but we found a way, we believe, to do it in a way that doesn't have incidental toxicity." "I certainly feel that you want to have more than one attack. If you only do one, the cancer cells can evolve around it. The drug resistance approach I was referring to was what we call GO-4 in our clinical trial, and we're altering part of the cancer cells' fundamental biology that is involved in DNA repair and shutting it down. But we're doing it in more than one way." #GeneralOncology #PancreaticCancer #CancerAwareness #MetastaticCancer #GO4Therapy #CancerResearch #InnovativeTherapies #DrugDevelopment generaloncology.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Arup Roy-Burman, Founder and Chief Strategy and Medical Officer of Elemeno Health, is addressing the gap between established medical policies and actual frontline practice. The Elemeno microlearning platform provides just-in-time multimedia content, building confidence in high-risk, low-frequency procedures, helping support knowledge retention, and combating clinician burnout. This modern approach to learning caters to clinicians with shorter attention spans and the expectation of receiving information on the device of their choice when they need it. Arup explains, "My background is as an ICU physician, and I have practiced as an ICU director for 20-plus years. And the challenge that we had in our ICUs is how to keep our teams on the same page with constantly changing information? And on top of that, in the context of constantly changing staff, medicine is full of so many different practices, workflows, and procedures, and we expect our staff to know all of them and to be able to execute on each one of them at the time that they need to. But that's really unrealistic. There's no way that people can stay on top of it. All medical knowledge doubles every 73 days." "When we think about today's generational workforce, as we think about just those of us who have kids, we see that attention spans, as you said, are short. People don't want to sit through a whole classroom. They can't remember that. And the way that people want to learn now and the way that they do learn, it's like one of our clients put it, it's like the "TikTokification of education." How do we deliver information on a mobile device? How do we deliver it in short, bite-sized chunks? Multimedia that you can actually consume in context when you need it." #ElemenoHealth #DigitalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #Microlearning #NurseTraining elemenohealth.com Download the transcript here

Kourosh Davarpanah, Co-Founder and CEO of Inato, is using an AI-enabled platform to transform participation in clinical trials. The existing clinical trial system is not seen as representative of the general population, and FDA directives have addressed this lack of diversity. The Inato platform features a marketplace approach that connects trial sponsors with a broader range of hospital sites, as well as an AI tool to assist doctors in identifying patients who are eligible for trials. Kourosh explains, "Our focus at Inato is to expand the number of patients who are able to participate in clinical research. If you think about how things have been done for the past decades, most of the patients who have the opportunity to participate are coming from the larger academic hospitals. And what this means is that typically, 5% of the sites, meaning 5% of the hospitals running research, run about 70% of all the trials globally. So this has an impact not only on the number of patients that can actually participate in trials, but it also has an impact on the type of patients. So, typically, those are going to be white patients, richer patients. And so it has a big impact also on equity and on the diversity--and ethnic diversity especially--of patients participating." "We have two pieces of the platform. The first piece is that we're helping connect the hospitals running the trials with trials that are being run by the sponsors. So the way this works is similar to marketplaces like Airbnb, where you have the sponsor that can share any number of upcoming trials. We enable the sites to discover all the trials on the platform and showcase, based on their profiles, how many trials they have done in the past, what is the makeup of the team and doctors, etc. We're able to allow them to get selected in trials that they otherwise wouldn't be able to get selected for. So this is the first piece of it, really connecting the sites and the trials. And increasingly with AI, we've started supporting sites in actually identifying patients at scale. And this has really been a massive tech shift, where the latest generations of LLMs are able to accurately identify patients eligible for any trial with over 95% accuracy." #Inato #ClinicalTrials #ClinicalRearch #AI #MedAI #DrugDevelopment Inato.com Download the transcript here

Javier Cuello, Founder and CEO of H+Trace highlights the significant and often overlooked problem of errors in the handling of medical samples. Issues like mislabeling, contamination, and improper shipping conditions are responsible for a majority of lab result errors, potentially leading to patient misdiagnoses. The H+Trace solution uses wireless sensors and AI to track samples, generate high-value data, and predict where errors are likely to occur. Working in Latin America and Central America has provided the company with experience in utilizing drones for shipping medical samples and organs to remote and hard-to-reach areas, while maintaining sample integrity. Javier explains, "It all started for me when a very close friend of mine was misdiagnosed with diabetes while she was pregnant. And when I started digging into this problem, what we found out is that most lab tests today are highly reliable. Once the sample reaches the analyzer, the real danger lies in the logistics of collecting, labeling, and transporting samples prior to that. While not every mistake hurts, the patient studies showed that about 2% to 5% of errors are clinically significant, and this means over 9,000 patients every day in the US risk misdiagnosis, late treatment, and unnecessary procedures or even life-threatening consequences, all because of failures in the pre-analytic logistics." "It's a quite new problem because over the past decades, laboratories have invested heavily in laboratory equipment and training, but the logistics of sample handling have seen little innovation. That is why roughly two-thirds of errors still occur in the pre-analytical phase." "But the reality is that most laboratories don't even know under what conditions the transport takes place. Even some of the most important labs simply receive the sample processing and send the results. So we're working with a laboratory that addresses this kind of problem, which started with labor. They have their own logistics. We started in Latin America and Central America, and now we're about to launch in the US because this is a very big problem in the US." #HTrace #Logistics #LabSamples #Sensors #ShippingLabSamples h-trace.com Download the transcript here

Kyna Fong, Co-Founder and CEO of Elation Health, is developing AI tools that prioritize patient care and automate documentation and referrals to help alleviate physician burnout and improve the patient-provider relationship. Kyna emphasizes the critical role of interoperability in effective primary care, enabling primary care physicians to coordinate care. She also noted the recent White House initiative on interoperability, which encouraged the private sector to cooperate in data-sharing initiatives, now that AI can be used to overcome technical issues of data integration and analysis. Kyna explains, "Clinical-first is not new for Elation. It's actually our founding product philosophy. When we first started building Elation, what we observed was that so many tools that were built for physicians to use and their electronic health records were very much oriented around billing needs and, in a lot of ways, followed a billing-first philosophy. And so we created Elation to really focus on clinical first, which means putting patient care first and foremost." "The way that we are approaching AI is as a tool. It's a tool in our toolkit. It's a how and when we think about all the pressures and burdens on physicians, especially primary care physicians, that prevent them from being able to focus on their patients. We take each of those and think about, well, how can AI make this easier? And so there are a variety of areas where we've deployed AI to help our customers. There are the clear, fairly pervasive ones today that start with something like an ambient scribe that helps with documentation, saving multiple hours per day. It's radically transformative." #ElationHealth #AI #MedAI #PrimaryCare #Physicians #EHR #HealthIT #DigitalHealth elationhealth.com Download the transcript here

Hamid Ghanadan, CEO of LINUS, discusses the findings of the company's recent state-of-the-science research, a semiannual survey that tracks sentiment and confidence within the life sciences. Notably, a growing gap in optimism exists between academic and biopharma scientists. As a result, academics are seeking partnerships at a new level due to economic pressures from grant cancellations, the need for multidisciplinary collaboration to solve complex problems, and the desire for a stronger collective voice. AI was identified as the top priority for academia and biopharma, as is the need to improve communication with the public about scientific discoveries and medical advancements. Hamid explains, "We started the state-of-the-science research four years ago, so this is the eighth time that we've done it. And what we're really doing is measuring consumer confidence within the life sciences. So we track sentiment, we track funding, we track barriers and opportunities, as well as purchase intentions. And we do it every six months for the coming six months of the year." "So here you have to take into consideration that we talk to scientists globally in this survey, and we talk to them from a variety of different settings and environments. So while about half of our respondents are from academic institutions around the world, the other half are in a variety of industries, mostly biopharma. And we see here that there's a shift, there's a difference in sentiment and in optimism, in outlook, in interest in science, in the applicability of science, and how these different groups are managing it. As you can imagine, the academics are feeling a lot more pressure." "The consumer sentiment is lower, and there's definitely more fear in that cohort of scientists. Biopharma is actually surprisingly more resilient, more forward-looking. So on the biopharma side, what we're seeing is that there's actually surprising resilience and there's forward-looking intentions. And we see that scientists are actually looking forward to applying new techniques and new technologies that are coming online, and they have more confidence in their ability to make progress for the second half of 2025." #LINUSGroup #Lifesciences #Healthcare #AIHealthcare #Stategy #Scientists #AI #MedAI thelinusgroup.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Kamal Golla, Vice President of Clinical Technologies and Performance at Evolent, highlights the complexities of cancer care and the need for care navigation to address medical, emotional, financial, and logistical challenges. This comprehensive approach leads to improved treatment adherence and patient satisfaction while reducing emergency room visits and hospitalization. The care team serves as an extension of the medical decision-makers, helping to manage care across multiple specialists, advising on overcoming side effects, and reducing logistical hurdles to ease the burden on physicians and caregivers, ultimately improving patient outcomes. Kamal explains, "Cancer care navigation is really about creating a roadmap for patients. It's making sure they're not left alone to piece together appointments, interpret side effects, or figure out how to pay for medications. The role of a navigator here is really to guide them through the whole journey. That includes the medical components that many folks are familiar with, but also the emotional, financial, and logistical components that come with a cancer diagnosis. The evidence is really clear, given that more than half of emergency department visits and nearly a quarter of hospitalizations related to cancer care are actually avoidable, that responding rapidly to these situations is key." "In our navigation program, we are rooted in patient-centric navigation, meaning we ask them what the transportation difficulties are that they might face. Who is your caregiver and their support? What do you do for work? What are your cultural and religious beliefs? All of those play a big part in dealing with the new diagnosis of cancer. We want all of that information to be able to provide a very personalized journey." #Evolent #Oncology #CancerCare #CareNavigation #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalHealth #PersonalizedCare #PatientCenteredCare #Evolent #Careology Evolent.com Download the transcript here