Empowered Patient Podcast

Alina Czekai, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Cohere Health, points out the need to transform the often painful prior authorization process. The traditional approach takes a piecemeal view of requests and provides a yes or no response. The Cohere view looks at the process as a multidimensional challenge that requires understanding the entirety of care and leveraging technology and AI to help guide behavior toward what is most clinically appropriate. Alina explains, "You can think of it as an authorization for a credit card. Ensuring that what is going to be done or what medication or devices are going to be ordered is actually going to be paid for. The process and payments in the healthcare system today have become so complex. It's complex not only for the health plan that's administering payments for care but also for physicians and their staff. Most importantly, it's a confusing and stressful process for patients." "We believe that prior authorization is a process that can be automated, that should be automated and is really an opportunity in the patient journey to ensure all stakeholders are on the same page. We also think that tools like prior authorization can really be leveraged to understand what's next in a patient's care journey." "We have a joke at Cohere. None of us were super excited to get in the prior auth business, but we were super excited to get in the business of totally changing a part of the healthcare system that is so antiquated. Prior authorization, for years, has relied on fax. We're not trying to put the fax machine totally out of business, but we think that we can really automate this important process and make access to care even faster for patients." #CohereHealth #PriorAuthorization #CMS #DigitalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #HealthTech CohereHealth.com Download the transcript here

Jared Crapo, Head of Product and Technology at Kalderos, focuses on drug discounts paid by drug manufacturers to pharmacy benefit managers, commercial or government payers, and healthcare providers. Congress created the 340B Drug Discount Program and the Medicaid Drug Rebate Program to support healthcare for underserved patients. While these programs have dramatically grown, so too have the complexities and confusion about discounts and disagreements about payments. Jared explains, "The 340B program was created by Congress, and it's a subsidy from drug manufacturers to underserved healthcare providers. The Medicaid Drug Rebate Program is a similar program created by Congress that is a source of financial support for state Medicaid agencies, also provided by drug manufacturers. So drug manufacturers give a discount to state Medicaid agencies for drugs prescribed to Medicaid patients." "One way to think about it is there's a lot of information asymmetry, which means some stakeholders have access to a lot more data than other stakeholders. And without a shared common understanding of which discounts are available, which discounts are compliant, and which ones aren't, it's really difficult for these various stakeholders to understand what their obligations are and what they should be doing. That leads to the dysfunction that you've mentioned." "What Kalderos does to reduce this dysfunction is compile and curate data from dozens of different sources, to try and create a common understanding of what actually happened on a particular prescription. This is so that all stakeholders have access to the same information, which then reduces the disagreements about what should actually happen from a discount and a rebate perspective." @KalderosInc #DrugDiscountPrograms #340BDrugDiscountProgram #MedicaidDrugRebateProgram #MDRP kalderos.com Download the transcript here

Jessica Ackerman, the Vice President for Strategic Partnerships and Impact at Responsum Health, is focused on the insights that patients can provide drug companies and other people newly diagnosed or suffering from a chronic condition. Responsum is a digital-based educational community providing accurate scientific information, peer support, access to clinical trials, and a path by which drug companies can get real-world data. Jessica explains, "Every disease focus that we have started has come from a partnership, some vested interest, from either a commercial sponsor or a pharmaceutical company, to build this robust community. Their interest is to gain the patient's voice and get insights, market research data, and real-world data from patients and family members to understand their gaps in care. So we have created a number of communities, like kidney disease CKD. We have glaucoma. We have pulmonary fibrosis, which is considered a rare disease, so we are in the rare disease and orphan disease space as well." "We also have a long COVID community. That's a newer one that was met purely out of need. Patients diagnosed with long COVID undergo a lot of stigma and have trouble finding resources that are credible. We also have a menopause community that has many, many women who are feeling empowered to figure out what's going on for a lot of unmet needs as well. We have a number of communities, and we're always willing and able to build new communities. Part of what we're doing here is building new communities." #Responsum #PatientExperience #PatientEmpowerment #DigitalHealth #PatientEducation #LongCOVID #HealthEquity #ClinicalTrials #HealthLiteracy #RareDisease ResponsumHealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Phil Wagner, Founder and CEO of Sparta Science, is developing a movement health intelligence solution to better understand the overall health of a patient and their risk of injury. They are interweaving movement ability and balance ability to analyze meaningful biomarkers to ensure top performance and safe mobility. From his experience as a sports trainer, Phil warns about making assumptions about performance at any age. Phil explains, "We do a balance assessment to assess that movement health, and it takes about 20 seconds on each side, and that will actually generate about a million data points on our device. This feeds into software that uses machine learning to compare you against yourself but also around others in a similar cohort, whether that's similar ages or sex at birth. So, being able to compare yourself against your own previous baselines and assessments, but also compare yourself for norms against others." "We're working with the military on a TBI biomarker, traumatic brain injury because movement is interwoven into all those different types of conditions. So, the biomarkers that are created are really based on those conditions you're trying to improve, maybe performance for an athlete, or it may be avoiding some sort of setback, like a fall. The biomarkers that are of interest really depend on the population. Still, because balance is such a global application, it really has the opportunity to create biomarkers in several different areas, depending on the population." "On the other side, we've seen hospitals assign fall risk to individuals just based on their age. I spoke with a hospital CEO the other day who found that anybody over 65 gets yellow booties. They're automatically a fall risk when they are checked into the hospital. He encountered a woman walking around in these yellow booties at his hospital, and he told her to get back in her room because she was a fall risk. She ran back to her room. So, this is the idea that we're using age as a primary marker and assuming that we have these movement limitations that may or may not exist." #SpartaScience #MovementHealth #MovementHealthIntelligence #BigData #DigitalHealthTech #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #MachineLearning SpartaScience.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Clark Chang is a cornea and keratoconus, KC, specialist at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia and the Director of Global Medical Affairs at Glaukos. Keratoconus is a disease of the eye where tissue thins and gradually bulges outward into a cone-like shape. While changes in the cornea are small, vision becomes very blurry, and the underlying cause may be overlooked. Glaukos has introduced the iLink procedure, a minimally invasive outpatient procedure to slow or halt the progression of this disease and help patients preserve their vision. Clark explains, "It is associated with age, but it's in the different group of people than most of your audience is thinking. We're very familiar with conditions like age-related macular degeneration. Everybody knows that because it's very impactful to one's vision, and the fear of loss of vision has frequently been rated as one of the top one or two biggest fears in a person's life. Most diseases are age-related in that they can occur with time. This disease more commonly occurs during puberty or in younger patients." "In order to be able to diagnose this condition, especially at an early stage when there is an extremely small amount of change in the alteration in the shape of the cornea, you really need sophisticated diagnostic technology that we usually call topographer or tomographer. Basically, it maps out the shape of the cornea, either just at the front or front and back of your cornea. Being able to, in a more sensitive way, figure out whether or not there's any small amount of area that's becoming misshapen more than what a normal cornea or tissue would look like." #Glaukos #Keratoconus #iLink #CornealCrossinglinking #EyeHealth #KCAwareness #LivingwithKeratoconus #EyeDisease #Cornea glaukos.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Antonin (Tony) de Fougerolles, CEO of Evox Therapeutics, highlights that exosomes, small nanoparticles, are produced by every cell in the body. They contain RNA and proteins that the cell decides to put into the exosome, and they're secreted out into the environment and act as a way that cells communicate with each other. Evox is excited about using exosome therapeutics to load genetic medicines such as RNA interference, small RNA drugs, gene therapy, or genome editing into exosomes and effectively delivering them inside cells. This approach provides a new way to treat rare diseases with an underlying genetic cause. Tony elaborates, "Exosomes were first discovered or noticed in the scientific literature in the '80s and the early '90s, and at first were thought really just to be vesicles that cells excreted full of what people at the time thought was garbage, things the cell didn't need. In more recent times, in the last 10, 15 years, it's become clear that these exosomes can in some cases serve a function in terms of helping, as I say, cells communicate and sense their environment." "It wasn't until one of our co-founders, Professor Matthew Wood, used exosomes as a deliberate vehicle. He had the idea, "Well, cells are constantly producing these exosomes. What they put into them is not at all random, it's very directed, and can we make use of that knowledge to actually proactively engineer drugs into these exosomes and then use the exosome's natural ability to deliver cargos inside cells? Can we use that to actually deliver drugs of our interest?" #EvoxTherapeutics #RareDisease #Exosomes #RareGeneticDiseases #ExtracellularVesicles #RNATherapeutics #Biotech #GeneTherapy #GeneEditing #ProteinTherapeutics #Innovation EvoxTherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Eugene Chan, Chairman and Co-Founder of Abpro, talks about the next generation of antibody therapies that can target more than one target to activate the immune system in the fight against cancer. Abpro is also working on a prophylactic antibody therapy to help prevent immunocompromised patients from getting COVID. Eugene explains, "Abpro has developed the antibodies, in a lot of these cases, to be able to target more than one target. This basically activates the immune system more so that whatever you're targeting is cleared more rapidly from the body. This applies to the cases of cancer that we are focused on, and we've basically developed these antibodies called bispecific antibodies - bi for targeting two different sites. These antibodies essentially have more and greater activity than conventional antibodies." "We developed a program and antibodies that bind to HER2+, which is one of the molecular markers on breast and gastric cancers. This particular therapy brings the immune system, the body's own natural immune system, to these cancer cells in a very active manner, which then allows it to get cleared from the body much sooner than the other mono-specific therapies that are currently out there." "Monoclonal antibodies are the body's own natural defense system for a lot of diseases. The ability to take these and augment and make them better is really the way to go because, ultimately, the body is already accustomed to these types of molecules. So we know to some degree they're safe. When compared to things like chemotherapy or even radiotherapy, these things are going to be much safer because they naturally exist in some way, shape or form in the body when you're fighting a disease or when your body's exposed to a new antigen or some sort of new threat. We're taking this approach and enhancing the body's ability to fight cancer and infection by augmenting the structure of these molecules." #Abpro #Antibodies #MonoclonalAntibodies #Cancer #Tumors #COVID #HER2+ abpro.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Edith Perez, Chief Medical Officer at Bolt Biotherapeutics, describes the innovative approach Bolt is taking to bring together the precision of antibodies against the tumor with the power of the innate and adaptive immune system by activating the immune system at the tumor site. This approach can minimize side effects from systematic activation of the immune system and reinforce long-term anti-tumor efficacy. Edith explains, "The myeloid cells are a wide range of cells in the body, and initially, the myeloid cells can start attacking the tumors right away. But as important, or even more importantly, is that they secrete the cytokines and chemokines to teach the T-cells to essentially develop an immunological memory to be able to fight these foreign bodies for a long time." "First of all, there are the abnormalities of the tumor themselves, and we target those with monoclonal antibodies. Then we actually link that with what we call a non-cleavable and non-cell permeable linker. Again, the idea is to bring the activation of the immune system right at the site of the tumor, which could be dramatic for humans." "So these monoclonal antibodies essentially find the tumor cells because the tumor cells are circulating, they're in the body, so they latch onto these proteins in the membrane and with our compound, with our Boltbody compounds. What we have here is the attachment of the monoclonal antibodies with what we call the linker payload. The payload is really the activation factor of the immune system. We bring that activation of the immune system, tied into the monoclonal antibody, to the site of the tumor. That way, we can be very precise related to where the activity of the compound will occur." @BoltBio #BoltBio #ISAC #Immunotherapy #Oncology #Tumors #ImmuneSystem boltbio.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Romain Micol, CEO, and Dr. Tom VanCott, Chief Scientific Officer, at Combined Therapeutics, are excited about the opportunities to design mRNA vaccines that target specific tissue cells to restrict protein expression and have stronger potency in the fight against infectious disease and cancer. They have designed their vaccine platform to keep the vaccine antigen expression at the injection site, protecting the liver, kidney, and heart. Romain explains, "So mRNA vaccines are highly effective both for infectious diseases and, more recently, to treat cancer. It's an ideal technology that is relatively easy to make and to manufacture. It could be very rapid and can get expression in vivo where protein would be folded properly. We can currently use the mRNA vaccine to deliver multiple materials to prevent infectious diseases and also cure cancer." "The main challenge we see at Combined Therapeutics, both for vaccines for infectious disease and for cancer treatment, is in their biodistribution and potency. Our platform at Combined Therapeutics is a proprietary technology that enables us to focus protein expression in specific tissue cells and prevent off-target expression in selected cell tissue. At the moment, our R&D program covers both oncology and infectious disease." Thomas elaborates, "What we've done here at Combined Therapeutics is we're taking advantage of something called micro RNAs. Now, what are micro RNAs? A lot of people don't know about them, but they're really just small RNA molecules that are naturally present throughout the body. They're actually fairly small molecules. They're about 22 nucleotides in size." "But what's really important is that they're distributed differentially throughout the body. So, if you look at the lungs or the heart or the muscles, you'll see a different array of micro RNAs that are expressed in each one of those tissues, and that is exactly what we take advantage of. What we do in our mRNA is engineer into it what we call these blockers. And what's a blocker? A blocker is really a binding site for the micro RNA." @Combined_tx #CombinedTherapeutics #mRNA #Vaccines #Cancer #Oncology #InfectiousDisease combinedtx.com Download the transcript here

Nick Hedges is the CEO of Raintree Systems, a provider of software-as-a-relationship to help therapy and rehab companies enhance their patient engagement, provide access to an electronic medical record system, and improve revenue cycle management. Using predictive models and a digital approach to billing and reimbursement, Raintree is reducing the friction for patients, providers, and payers. Nick explains, "A lot of people describe software these days as delivered primarily through the internet as software-as-a-service. However, service doesn't really tell you the full story about how we interact with our clients. We see our software as being a partnership. We work very closely with our clients to make sure that it delivers exactly what they need, and we build our product in unison with our clients. That's why we call it software-as-a-relationship." "Healthcare, in general, is quite far behind in terms of the digital patient experience or the digital consumer experience. One of the things that Raintree seeks to do is to be at the forefront of that within healthcare and bring some of the capabilities that you see in other industries like financial services and automotive and so on to the healthcare industry because that's what consumers who are patients want. They want a more digital experience." "The revenue cycle side of things is a really important aspect, both for the therapy provider and the patient. What we try to do is to reduce the friction to the maximum amount for both sides because it's very complicated. It's an arcane system when it comes to how provider reimbursements work. And frankly, neither the patient nor the therapist, wants to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how their healthcare plan matches with the needs that they have for their healthcare. So what we do is automate a lot of that process." @RaintreeSystems #PhysicalTherapy #TherapyRehab #OccupationalTherapy #PediatricTherapy #SpeechTherapy raintreeinc.com Download the transcript here