Empowered Patient Podcast

Mehdi Maghsoodnia is the CEO of 1health and is determined to bring advanced diagnostic medical tests to a broader audience to enable more patients to benefit from precision medicine advancements. Too often, patients are put on costly drugs that are not effective. Using data from advanced testing allows clinicians to diagnose conditions more accurately and to determine the best treatment approach. Mehdi elaborates, "Where we focus is really more on how do we make these advanced diagnostic tests cheaper and faster, so we can introduce more accurate, clean data into that care pathway. You want to know very quickly, very accurately, all that you need to know about the specifics of the patient, the specifics of their genetics, and the specifics of the potential tumor type, interaction with drugs, and so on and so forth. Those are the types of information we are trying to deliver into the care decision pathway very quickly." "That data set is building up very rapidly because we've been sequencing patients, and we've been tracking the impact of the drug on those patients. Now, those databases are coming to the clinical market. They're not there today everywhere, so unfortunately, you might get the best pharmacogenomic results in some of the advanced institutions in urban areas, like San Francisco and New York, but you don't get it everywhere." "Part of our push on the pharmacogenomic side is to make sure that it's available and accessible by everybody. Health equity is a big issue right now. We are making sure that the test is not only affordable, but it's easy to order, and it's easy to include in the healthcare pathway for every patient at every point in the care system." @ihealthio #1health #PrecisionMedicine #AdvancedDiagnostics #DiagnosticTesting #CancerDetection #Pharmacogenomic 1health.io Download the transcript here

Anatoly Postilnik, VP of Global Healthcare Consulting at First Line Software, is building software solutions and bringing data management, data analytics, and systems analysis to healthcare organizations. Original EHR systems were implemented to replicate paper flow and siloed data collection. As they move from paper-based to digital data, these organizations need to integrate diverse databases to manage the supply of resources and demand for patient care. Payers and providers also face changes in procedures and behavior to drive down costs and improve efficiency. Anatoly explains, "Clinician burnout is a really big topic. No matter what you start talking about, you end up talking about clinician burnout. Essentially yes, the demand and supply predictability factors into optimizing their workflow, simplifying their workflow, and eventually reducing provider burnout. But it also helps the organization to be more effective, so this is positive from multiple ends of not just people having better lives as practitioners. But providers practice better when they're in better institutions." "We know one organization that has 250,000 types of reports, not just reports, 250,000 types of reports. Close to 500 network shares are being populated by these reports on a daily basis. The organization has a team of people who generate these reports on a daily basis, and the turnaround for generating this report is sometimes six months. Now, how many of these reports are duplicates, and how many of these reports are conflicting? And every time somebody generates a report, maybe there already is a report." #FirstLineSoftware #HealthRecords #HealthData #DataIntegration #DataAnalytics #DIsasterResourceManagement #ClinicianBurnout #DataGovernance #EHR firstlinesoftware.com Download the transcript here

Lawrence Margolis is the CEO of PersonalRX, which is changing the model for how pharmacies provide prescriptions and over-the-counter drugs and advice about usage. With a personal care coordinator, PersonalRX provides each patient with a personalized experience that ensures prompt delivery of drugs, reminders to take those medications, and alerts to possible negative drug interactions. Lawrence explains, "We send out a 30-day supply. We send that 30-day supply out ahead of time so that we never want anybody to worry 'where's my medicine?' If they do, then we failed our job, frankly. So we get it there a few days before they're going to need it." "When we package medication, we package them in individual dose packs. Everybody gets packs in a roll that are marked breakfast, lunch, dinner, or time of day, 8:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 5:00 PM, bedtime. So when somebody is looking at their pack, if they see that breakfast is still there at noon, they clearly did not take their medication. So it keeps them on track a whole lot more. It's like those pill boxes that everybody has where it's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, or various times of the day." "The difference with adherence is that you have to make sure people are packing them correctly. Most people don't. They typically make a mistake. I believe if you look behind anybody's dresser, you're going to see some pills behind their dresser or on the floor that they missed. I think adherence is an important factor and an advantage to having a medication dose pack. Reminding them to take them and that it's time to take their breakfast medication is a help. But in terms of adherence, knowing that you took the medication or seeing that you skipped it is a very important aspect." #PersonalRX #AgingInPlace #Seniors #MedicationAdherence #Healthcare #PrescriptionDrugs #Pharmacies #Pharmacists #MedicationDosePack #DigitalPharmacy personalrx.com Download the transcript here

Chris Brickler, CEO and Co-Founder of MyndVR, is looking at VR to disrupt senior living care to promote wellness and engagement. MyndVR has designed lightweight immersive glasses to create a virtual reality experience for seniors, reimagining the traditional VR gaming experience. The MyndVR care tablet drives the glasses and connects to the MyndVR network allowing the senior and caregiver to access one of the largest private catalogs of senior-friendly immersive experiences. In addition to entertainment, the experience has been shown to significantly help achieve a patient's physical, occupational, and speech therapy goals. Chris elaborates, "We've essentially reimagined virtual reality away from all of the hype around the gaming movement, and really leveraging the tools of virtual reality and gamifying different types of therapies as well. So we're going to be disrupting the way therapy is done with seniors, and that's very exciting." "One example is that he was perfectly healthy from a cognitive point of view. She was suffering late-stage Alzheimer's. She didn't remember what his name was or what she had for breakfast that day." "She was attentive enough to have a conversation with me. I asked them, "Where would you like to travel?" He said Paris was where they had their honeymoon and subsequent family vacations. I asked her, "Would you like to go to Paris with this VR headset?" And you hand it to her, and it is very comfortable and calming, and she feels it and then puts it on." "I took her right to the Eiffel Tower, and literally within 15 seconds, she was completely present. She was talking about her family vacations, and she was talking about the people in her family. She was talking about her husband, her husband's name." @Mynd_Health #DigitalHealth #DigitalTheraputics #SeniorLiving #SeniorCare #Aging #AgingAdults #CognitiveHealth #VR #VirtualRealtiy #VirtualRealtiyTherapy #MentalHealth, #CognitiveManagment #ImmersiveTherapy #VRhealth #VRtherapy #VRwellness, #VRforSeniors MyndVR.com Download the transcript here

Charlie Noel is the Executive Director at Northwestern Health Sciences University's Institute for Integrative Care, which is working to transform healthcare from a disease-focused model to a holistic approach. The Institute provides practical tools to help healthcare organizations move to an integrative care model while encouraging multidisciplinary groups and community engagement to provide care for the whole person. Charlie explains, "The traditional hierarchy structure of mainstream healthcare limits the input from some professionals. So that means we should also be bringing in some of these other disciplines and also building an environment where we embrace emerging mainstream and complementary healthcare to eliminate the silos in care delivery and enhance outcomes." "The Institute is collaboratively working with organizations and communities to build systems where all people benefit from integrative care. We want to meet people, organizations, and systems where they're at and then be able to develop plans to help them move towards integrative care and look at it through this whole-person lens. And the way that we've broken it down is into three different domains." "But even more important is how do we now reimagine healthcare curriculum to where we can also incorporate these different pieces? We have some integrative care competencies that we are interweaving through the curriculum so that whenever people graduate, they have a better understanding of what integrated care is." @NWHealthU #IntegrativeCare #HealthcareLeaders #CIH #SDoH #HolisticCare #CommunityEngagement #WholePersonCare nwhealth.edu Download the transcript here

Dr. Calum Yacoubian, the Director of NLP Healthcare Strategy for IQVIA, is applying clinical natural language processing to take complex, unstructured healthcare data and turn it into structured and searchable information. In a value-based care environment, clinical NLP can augment manual work by nurses, clinical coders, and clinicians to identify relevant, often unstructured information at the right time for specific patients, and payers to undergo chart review for risk adjustment. Calum explains, "Within healthcare, data and information are hugely fragmented. There was a HIMSS report in 2020 that said the average healthcare system in the U.S. has 15 disparate EMR systems it is pulling data from. Going back to your first question, the 360-degree view of a patient is about using as much data as available to understand patients and the populations they exist in. If it's difficult to access and make the most of the data. That's the first and probably one of the biggest barriers that we have in healthcare, this disparate data that exists in the ecosystem, and the multiple different formats that it exists in." "In the healthcare setting, huge amounts of clinical information is in text form, either dictated and transcribed or typed directly by clinicians into the free text boxes. These have become the kind of dumping ground for much clinically relevant information in a clinical setting. When we think of that data, clinical NLP, which is specifically my focus, we are able to look into that data to understand the nuance of that information and to pull out information and data in a structured format in a way the provider or the nurse or the physician or one of the other allied health professionals intended when they were interviewing the patient and documenting it in the medical record." @IQVIA_global #IQVIA #ClinicalNLP #NLP #NaturalLanguageProcessing #RiskAssessment #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #ML #MachineLearning #Healthcare #HealthcareData #ValueBasedCare #PrecisionMedicine #PopulationHealth #SDoH #RareDiseases IQVIA.com Download the transcript here

Angela Fox is Head of Analytics at Bright.md which is an asynchronous telehealth solution bringing an audio-only virtual visit option to providers for them to treat patients with common low-acuity conditions. Staffing challenges, clinician burnout and increasing demand from an aging population are driving the acceptance of creative solutions to provide cost-effective, timely healthcare for patients. Angela explains, "Through a patient's health system portal, they can get online and take a clinical interview. Then they answer several clinical questions about what care they're looking for, what care they're seeking that day. Then that's sent to a provider at their health system in an easy-to-review chart note. So the provider can review the chart note, make a diagnosis, and a treatment plan. This all happens completely within the electronic medical record." "One of the key elements that we also include in our reporting is provider variation. And that kind of information about how productive providers are, which providers are treating more quickly, which providers need a little more time, can really help spark conversations within a health system and help them think about how to deploy their staff in the best possible way, how to be most efficient, how to make sure the quality is top notch." @Brightmd_Health #AsynchronousCare #Telehealth #DataAnalytics #ProviderBurnout Bright.md Download the transcript here

Matthew Hedberg is the VP General Manager of Professional Services at Semcasting a data-as-a-service company working with health insurers, agents, CCOs, PPOs, hospital networks, and pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers. Carrying a SOC 2 Type II certification, Semcasting is helping clients determine how to use the information they have and enhance that data to incorporate it into a digital program for patient outreach and education of targeted audiences. Matthew explains, "There are significant timelines as well. Even if we are scoped to receive data for a particular project from a particular brand, it may take weeks or months to get the necessary additional approvals to receive certain levels of patient or member information for a particular project. This is just as an additional layer of safety and concern to make sure that patient data is protected and isn't circulating around amongst any players who aren't required to see it." "One of the more specific tactical tools we developed back in 2018 was the idea of utilizing IP addresses as an advertising efficiency to reach patients, utilizing publication by Wi-Fi within the particular physician offices. What we realized, especially when we're looking at recruiting for clinical trials, is that this decision is necessarily incredibly complex to understand, even if a patient is wonderfully adept at researching their own healthcare condition. So, what we decided to attempt in there was how can we provide a certain message about the availability of a particular treatment to a patient but also allow them to do so in a window where they may be able to have a conversation with the physician about all of the complexities that may surround this particular decision." @Semcasting #DigitalAds #ClinicalTrialRecruitment #TargetingPatients #PharmaceuticalAds #RareDiseases semcasting.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Tadd Lazarus is the Chief Medical Officer at Pictor, working on innovative diagnostic tests to provide answers to complicated clinical questions concerning the status of a patient's level of antibodies. From one specimen, their test can determine if the antibodies have been produced as a result of vaccinations or boosters and if the patient had the disease being tested for.  Their mission is to help patients determine if they have effective antibody levels and are able to have the kind of response that will be protected them over time. Tadd explains, "We develop innovative diagnostic solutions to enable more informed clinical decisions both in human and animal health. Specifically, we have a highly multiplexed platform that really changes the way antibodies are detected. As we know from COVID, antibodies are proteins that our body manufactures in response to infectious agents, except we detect them differently. We detect antibodies in an incredibly focused and what we call highly multiplexed manner, so that we have an incredibly sensitive and specific test. But moreover, it's able to detect multiple antibodies that the body produces for multiple infectious agents at one time. That's a very big change." "One of the reasons why it is important to determine if vaccinations and boosters are effective is that there are antibodies that can be administered to patients intravenously if those patients are determined not to have a clinically significant antibody response to vaccinations/boosters and/or infection. And those formulations are getting tweaked now for more predominant strains, so making sure that they're covered. So there's something that we can do about that for the immunosuppressed, the elderly, and the immunocompromised, who are not showing a healthy and protective antibody response." @PictorLtd #pictor #PictArray #IVD #Biotech #Innovative #HumanHealth #COVID #Antibodies #AntibodyTest #ImmuneSystem PictorDX.com Download the transcript here

David Harel is the Co-Founder and CEO of CytoReason, providing researchers and drug developers with a complex database and predictive computational disease models to conduct synthetic clinical trials. Their mission is to integrate all the information available on a specific disease in a particular population to support faster and more efficient drug development. David explains, "Computational disease models are the core technology that we've developed, and it is a method to incorporate all the available information, specifically omics and molecular data, that is available in one disease, in one place, in a way that is useful. But people who have been involved in the molecular data space for a while know that the integration of multiple data types and multiple data sets is very difficult, and it needs to be done in a certain context. The context in which we are incorporating the data is allowing the users to run those synthetic trials on their own or using our teams." "One of the features that we have is the ability to run synthetic basket trials. So, take one drug, assuming the drug you want to evaluate, and run it across multiple indications in these dozens of indications. To conduct that with human subjects is prohibitive for cost and ethical reasons. And the same way, when we are conducting synthetic umbrella trials, where we're taking a specific patient population, and we are evaluating the efficacy of many different compounds in a specific patient population. Again, this would be very difficult to conduct in a clinical setting with human subjects. These are things that synthetic in silico trials allow you to do that clinical endeavors would not." @CytoReason #DiseaseModels #ComputationalDiseaseModels #SyntheticClinicalTrials #ClinicalTrials #ComputationalBiology #DrugDevelopment #DrugDiscovery #AI #RareDiseases CytoReason.com Download the transcript here