Empowered Patient Podcast

Tom Dugan is the President of Integrum, which is transforming the lives of amputees through a unique orthopedic implant that enables them to attach their prosthesis, their prosthetic leg, or any other type of prosthesis, directly to the musculoskeletal system. These bone-anchored prostheses dramatically improve the lives of amputees with the additional benefit of osseoperception, where they can feel the type of surface they are walking on. Tom explains, "What we do is an alternative to the socket. We have a surgical implant, and it's a fixture that is implanted into the canal of the patient's femur. And if you're familiar with dental implants, that's probably a good analogy because the dental implant was founded by a professor in Sweden called Per-Ingvar Brånemark. And Professor Brånemark, back in the '50s, was doing research in rabbits, and he implanted titanium fixtures into the rabbits that had some optical technology so you could see what happens with the bone in terms of healing." "What happened is Professor Per-Ingvar Brånemark, along with some other people including his son, Rickard, who's our CEO -- Rickard's a surgeon and an engineer and a Ph.D.-- took that core technology and adapted it to orthopedic use so they could deal with some of these issues the patients were having with their socket prosthesis. So it's an alternative to using a socket." "With socket prosthesis, the patient is essentially supporting themselves with their soft tissue and muscle, the stump of their leg. With our system, there's now a direct connection between the prosthesis, the prosthetic leg, and the patient's musculoskeletal system. And because of that, the patient will get additional benefits such as things like osseoperception, where they can actually feel the type of surface that they're walking on, whether it'd be grass or carpet, or tile. They can feel where their leg is in space, which is something you really don't get when you're wearing a socket prosthesis." #Integrum #Amputee #AmputeeLife #BoneAnchoredProstheses #OPRAImplantSystem #OrthopedicSurgery #Osseointegration #Prosthetics #Orthopedics #OrthoTrauma #ImplantTechnology #MedTech Integrum.se Download the transcript here

Dr. Tram Tran, the Chief Medical Officer at Glympse Bio, is taking the knowledge about the mechanistic roles protease play in many diseases to develop an injectable biosensor to measure protease activity rather than just a one-time measurement of the amount of protein in the blood. The platform uses machine learning to analyze different protease levels and the protease activity over time to come up with a classifier and differentiate between disease activity and not disease activity. Tram explains, "So, a couple of years ago, though, I think recognizing that having an injectable platform and then having the patient urinate and check the urine for the level of protease activity might be a little bit more complicated than what would be ideal in the clinic for the patient. We actually were able to switch over to a blood-based test, where we are able to measure the patient's disease activity via protease activity via a simple blood test. And so, I think that was really a remarkable change over the past couple of years." "We've been working on a couple of different diseases and better understanding how to measure and understand diseases and protease activity through a simple blood test now. So, I think that's really important. This ex vivo platform development was a key change. We presented data last year on NASH, which is a very common disease, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. And this year, we're talking more about liver cancer or hepatocellular carcinoma." @GlympseBio #Diagnostic #Biosensor #LiverDisease #HCC #HepatocellularCarcinoma #ProteinActivity #Protease GlympseBio.com Download the transcript here

David Vivero is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Amino Health. He brings his experience from Zillow to make Amino a convenient site where employer-based healthcare plan members can find information about their healthcare options, make appointments, and access understandable cost estimations. The Transparency in Coverage Rule says that beginning January 1, 2023, every health insurer in the U.S. has to ensure that their members have access to the price of at least 500 services inside their health plan. That will become all services by January 1, 2024. David explains, "Our clients are the sponsors of these health plans, these employers, the labor unions, and the health plans themselves. And the reason they partner with Amino is that we're provably able to support their members and help them make the right choice at three times the rate than if they didn't have Amino. This is part of the reason that there is this push for greater transparency so that people make better decisions. That's what we do. The savings we create for a member and the reduction in infections and readmissions for a member are very good for their employers, labor unions, states, municipalities, and health plans." "One of the things that makes Amino so unique is that we started as a direct-to-consumer website, akin to what we did at Zillow. And I was not a healthcare maven coming into this. I really benefited from having this tabula rasa completely open-minded about dealing with these fundamental questions of how to help someone navigate healthcare." @AminoHealth #AminoHealth #HealthcarePriceTransparency #TransparencyinCoverage #DigitalHealth #HealthcareNavigation #Healthcare partners.amino.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Shrujal Baxi is a medical oncologist and the Chief Medical Officer at Iterative Health pioneer in precision medicine technologies for gastroenterology. The Iterative SKOUT polyp detection tool provides algorithmic assistance to physicians during a colonoscopy to improve the ability to detect and remove polyps. With colon cancer getting diagnosed at a younger age, it is increasingly important to detect polyps as early as possible. Shrujal explains, "I think there's a lot of science in the space for detection of precancerous tumors throughout the body. In colon cancer currently, it's still very anatomic, which is we look for polyps, we look for abnormalities, dysplasia, we look for things that we can see on the end of the camera that's a colonoscopy. We flag them, and we try to remove them. Now, many of those lesions may never have gone on to become cancer. Part of this is our learning, over time, that there are certain polyps or certain lesions that are more likely to become cancerous, and can we target our interventions and only resect those." "What we found is that in studies, and these are out there, when physicians do colonoscopies in the morning versus when they're done in the afternoon, there's more polyp detection in the morning than in the afternoon. And we can postulate why that might be, but it suggests that pattern recognition requires a level of sort concentration that is still a human-dependent process." "By having AI in the background running alongside the physician's interpretation, if the physician found every one of those polyps on their own, that's great. If the physician happens to have tired eyes by the end of the day, the polyp detection tool is there to make sure that doesn't get missed. It's not meant to replace the physician. It's meant to be there to sort of be an extra set of flags, so to speak." @Iterative_Hlth #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Gastroenterology #Colonoscopy #ColonCancer #PatientCentricity #PrecisionMedicine iterative.health Download the transcript here

Teodora Pavkovic is a youth psychologist and Director of Community Engagement at Linewize, whose mission is to protect every child's digital journey and to keep students safe at school, at home, and everywhere in between as they engage with the online world. The pandemic changed how students learn and socialize. The increased use of online devices, social media, and suspect websites impacted the mental health and well-being of students, and changed the responsibilities of teachers and parents to ensure safe digital behavior.   Teodora explains, "On the one hand, we are a technology company. We provide tech-based solutions in the form of filtering, classroom management, of safety monitoring. And then, more recently, a well-being assessment tool as well. And then the second piece, which is particularly relevant for me and for my work, is that community support and education. So really making sure that the staff and the parents, and the students themselves are educated around all the topics within the online safety and digital wellness realm." "I don't think that we can talk about the youth mental health crisis and children's well-being without also really talking about that online digital component. The two are just inextricably linked at this point." @Linewize #Linewize #MentalHealth #StudentSafety #DigitalWellness #OnlineSafety #Cybersecurity #Students Linewize.com Download the transcript here

Lisbeth Votruba, Chief Clinical Officer at AvaSure, reflects on the challenges for nurses and hospitals in these times of nursing shortages, burnout, and expedited retirements. The AvaSure solutions provide virtual nursing, safety monitoring, and expert virtual nursing to monitor critically ill and high-acuity patients. Experienced nurses and those trained as virtual nurses embrace this solution as a way to care for patients while supporting the efficient use of hospital resources for bedside care. Lisbeth explains, "The first model that I'll talk about is the Telesitter® solution, which supports nurses indirectly. This involves using mobile devices or sometimes fixed cameras with really amazing audio in patient rooms. We are using that to keep patients safe, prevent falls, prevent elopement. This also was used to protect nurses from COVID because patients were ripping off their oxygen masks because they were confused and reminding them to put their masks back on again." "Prior to this revolution in virtual patient monitoring in the hospital setting, the only thing that hospitals could think to do was assign one-to-one what they called "sitters" to confused or at-risk patients. So 5% of the hospital census would have a staff member, not a nurse, a nursing assistant sitting 24/7, watching them and trying to keep them safe physically. The Telesitter® solution allows one remote, trained staff member to monitor 12 to 16 patients, interacting with them, talking to them, and sometimes needing to use alarms to keep them safe. That frees up that bedside staff to be back out helping the rest of the care unit." @AvaSure #VirtualNurse #VirtualCare #NurseLeaders #RegisteredNurse #AcuteCare #Nurses #Telesitter #Hospitals #DigitalHealth AvaSure.com Download the transcript here

Rayne Guest, the Founder and CEO of ArrowClean, raises the alarm about the lack of effectiveness of traditional disinfectants to eliminate superbugs and other contaminants. Some of the most vulnerable people are in hospitals where patients and staff are exposed to germs, many of which are not treatable. ArrowClean is bringing a hypoallergenic, environmentally safe solution to the disinfectant industry. Rayne explains, "We have hand sanitizers that take forever to work. Nobody's using them properly. We have people that are not disinfecting properly. They're not letting disinfectants sit long enough on surfaces to kill bugs. Most disinfectants don't kill superbugs because there are different types of pathogens. And a lot of disinfectants also cause harm to human and environmental health. So, it's kind of like we're stacking the cards against ourselves in a lot of ways." "We have a patented device that creates hundreds of gallons of disinfectant and cleaner in a day. It has that capability. The products that come out of the device are hypoallergenic, and they kill germs really fast. A lot of products and disinfectants are out on the market, and you actually have to keep them wet on the surface for 10 minutes for them to work, for them to kill the germs that they say they kill." #ArrowClean #Superbugs #Disinfectant #Hospitals ArrowClean.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Mark Sumeray is the Chief Medical Officer of Amolyt Pharma, focusing on rare diseases that affect the endocrine system, the hormonal system that regulates essential body functions. Despite the surgeon's best efforts, the parathyroid glands may be damaged or removed when operating on the thyroid gland creating permanent hypoparathyroidism. As a result, the body does not produce sufficient levels of the parathyroid hormone, which regulates the level of calcium in the blood. Current treatment includes large doses of calcium tablets and vitamin D, which does not address disabling symptoms and long-term complications for the kidney, heart, and brain. Mark explains, "If you have a deficiency of a hormone, in this case, the parathyroid hormone, then the most obvious thing to do is to replace the missing hormone by giving the hormone or something very similar to the hormone to the patient. So instead of the glands producing the hormone as they should do in the normal situation, in this case, we give something that acts like parathyroid hormone by injection." "The company has a peptide, which is a type of chemical that is made up of building blocks of amino acids that looks very similar to parathyroid hormone, the missing hormone, but has some important differences to it. It's been specifically synthesized or created by chemists to mimic the action of the natural hormone, and it is given by injection every day to patients. And then, as I mentioned right at the beginning, it's currently in early-stage clinical trials." @AmolytPharma #Hypoparathyroidism #RareEndocrine #TherapeuticPeptides #Endocrine #RareDisease #Acromegaly #Endocrinology amolytpharma.com Download the transcript here  

Rick Hawkins, CEO and Chairman of Lumos Pharma, is developing an oral compound to treat idiopathic pediatric growth hormone deficiency. Currently, the only treatment for this condition is an injection of recombinant growth hormone. The small molecule drug LUM-201 increases the amplitude of the 23-25 peak releases of growth hormone during the day and night and stays within the normal physiology of the endocrine feedback loop. Rick explains, "Although we are a drug that we're starting with pediatric growth hormone deficiency, there are actually 11 different diseases of growth hormone deficiency. PGHD happens to be one of the largest ones, which is why we are starting there. In addition to the fact that the burden of care, kids taking lots of injections for that period of time, having an oral alternative is a huge step up in not just compliance and ease of use, but the overall burden of care improves dramatically." "First of all, this is another one of those examples in the pharmaceutical industry where Big Pharma puts a drug on the shelf, and, once again, it takes maybe one individual or a small group of people to understand that this is the drug that really needs to be taken outside the traditional walls of the pharmaceutical industry. In this case, it was Merck. Merck developed this small molecule as an indication in diseases or the symptoms of aging." "The drug essentially did what it was supposed to do. However, the FDA essentially said you have no regulatory pathway. These are symptoms of aging and really not a disease. So, they put the drug on the shelf." @Lumos_Pharma #GrowthDeficiencies #GrowthHormoneDeficiency #GrowthDisorders #RareEndocrineDiseases #OraGrowtHTrials #RareDiseases Lumos-Pharma.com Download the transcript here

Ophir Tanz is the Founder and CEO of Pearl, a company utilizing AI to revolutionize the dental industry. Their FDA-cleared product can detect nine different dental conditions. The diagnostic assistance device analyzes radiography images in real-time to identify pathology, existing restorations, and natural anatomy. Their Second Opinion tool is designed to be used by the practitioner to design a precise course of treatment that the patient understands. Ophir elaborates, "We think dentistry is particularly ripe for the infusion of AI and particularly what we do, which is a form of AI called computer vision, into the category. So first off, dentists capture more x-rays and radiography than any other form of medicine does on an annual basis. And if you look at the levels of concurrence across different practitioners and how they're detecting pathology, you have a disease like interproximal caries or periapical radiolucency or calculus. These are very, very easy to miss, especially at the early stages. So, if you're able to provide a level of assistance and point out areas of interest chairside in a patient-facing manner, that tends to dramatically increase the quality and precision, and accuracy of the diagnosis." "Computers are able to identify something like 1,000 shades of gray. I think humans are able to identify something like 30 to 50 shades of gray. So it's just much, much more sensitive. And obviously, given that it is a machine, it is entirely consistent and precise in the kind of output that it reveals. We're not going to magically identify anything that is just fundamentally not visible in a radiograph. It's not magic. We are identifying elements that are visible in the radiograph but with a lot of sensitivity." @Hello_Pearl #Dentristry #Dentist #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ComputerVision #DentalCare hellopearl.com Download the transcript here