Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Miguel Grillo, Prosthodontic Specialists of San Diego raises awareness about the importance of proper chewing and the role teeth play in overall health. Finding periodontal disease at an early stage means measures can be taken to save teeth. Patients with the late-stage disease and those with cosmetic concerns now have more options for permanent solutions to restore their smiles. Miguel explains, "So prosthodontist is a specialty within dentistry. What we specialize in is the reconstruction of the mouth. So when it gets to the point where others cannot handle a case due to complexity, it could be medical, restorative, or behavioral issues. Then we basically take it from there, and we do large restorations of the mouth with implants, partials, dentures, or crowns or veneers. And we're in the business of making things work better, function well, and giving people their lives back." "I think you can pick up a lot of clues just by looking at somebody's smile and seeing the teeth, how long the teeth are, if they're worn, if they're flat, if they don't have the right curvature, if they're old restorations, decay. You can see a lot from the outside that gives you some insight as to what you might see when you do a full examination. But ultimately, really you need to blend in clinical examination with a radiographic evaluation to come up with a proper diagnosis. But you can actually probably tell more than you think." #Prosthodontics #ReconstructiveSurgeries #OralHealth #DentalImplants #Teeth #MiguelGrilloDMD prosthodonticspecialist.com Download the transcript here

Chuck Sawyer is the Special Assistant to the President at Northwestern Health Sciences University, NWHSU, located in Bloomington, Minnesota. Chuck argues for a different approach to pain management given the opioid epidemic and the overuse of opioid narcotics to treat acute pain and chronic pain. Of particular concern is extending the use of chiropractic treatments and acupuncture for Medicaid and Medicare patients. Chuck explains, "And fast forward to the present day, we now have ten programs, with our chiropractic program continuing to be the largest. But we've added acupuncture at both the master's and doctoral levels, and we have a program in therapeutic massage. More recently, programs in other allied health careers including medical assisting, medical laboratory science, radiologic technology, and radiation therapy. We have a post-bachelors pre-health program for students with bachelor's degrees who are seeking enrollment in medical schools and dental schools, and two online programs just launched in integrative health and wellness and functional nutrition." "Then you get to the age of 65, and all of a sudden, now your coverage, and even though your access to care is still good in the Medicare program, your coverage is very limited. So aging into Medicare is a problem. And so it's time really for Medicare to catch up with what's happening on the commercial side, and particularly now with the heightened emphasis on non-pharmacologic options for treating pain. It's time for Medicare to broaden its coverage so that patients don't have to pay out of pocket for services that are covered in the Medicare program when provided by healthcare professionals, other than chiropractic doctors and acupuncturists." #NWHSU #TreatingPain #IntegrativeHealth #AlternativeMedicine #Acupuncture #ChiropracticDoctors #PainManagement #Opioids #NonDrugTreatment #NonPharmacologic #Medicaid #Medicare nwhealth.edu Download the transcript here

Dr. Jon Morrow, Senior VP of Medical Affairs and Informatics, and Daniel Blumenthal, Vice President of Strategy at MDClone, shed light on the meaning of synthetic data for drug discovery and patient care. Using both original data and statistical models of the data, researchers and clinicians can quickly gain insights that can impact patient care, facilitate collaborations and partnerships, and dramatically shorten the time required for product development. Daniel explains, "Actually, the system is able to produce synthetic data on the fly on demand. It reacts to the end user's request for data. So, if I'm an end user and I want to build a population, I want to look at a population of patients with diabetes and understand the medications they were on and lab tests that were drawn about them. To understand their disease trajectory over time. I'm able to define that, and the way our engine works is it actually can take that original population. But without sharing that population, as John articulated at the beginning, without actually sharing that original population. Just learn the statistics of that population and then build this brand new set of synthetic data. That synthetic data, every time it's generated, is compared to the original." Jon elaborates, "So rather than exposing my patient's information or using my patient's information with approval, how about if I ask a system like MDClone ADAMS to generate a synthetic dataset that looks statistically exactly like my population of patients with gestational diabetes? And it's pulling the data from the electronic medical record at my hospital. It's running this process behind the firewall of my hospital, but it's providing me with data on a population that doesn't exist but behaves exactly like my patients at the population level." @MDClone_ #SyntheticData #LifeScience #ResearchData #RareDiseases mdclone.com Download the transcript here

Ardy Arianpour, CEO and Co-Founder of SEQSTER, is breaking down health data silos using their enterprise operating system, which aggregates disparate health data sources, including real-world data, into a single 360-degree view of a patient in real-time. This integrated approach with a Digital Front Door solves many challenges for life sciences, patient engagement, and data interoperability. Ardy elaborates, "We have achieved nationwide coverage of electronic health records from hospitals and medical groups, as well as genomic DNA labs, wearables, remote patient monitoring sensors, pharmacy data, and even social determinants of health data. And we have this very unique customizable white label approach where SEQSTER provides accelerated access to de-identified tokenized real-time data and comprehensive curated data to address critical needs across the healthcare continuum." "For about five years, nobody wanted to work with us. We were just building, building, building, being visionary, as we thought. Then the pandemic hit, and Takeda Pharmaceuticals decided to invest in SEQSTER and do a commercial deal with us. From there, we created the SEQSTER data backbone for Takeda to centralize all this health data. And since we pioneered a longitudinal health record and pharma was the first to take a look at our technology, from there, we are able to strike many partnerships. We just exploded in the last two and a half years, I could say." @SEQSTER #PatientCentric #HealthDataIsMedicine #PatientEngagement #ClinicalTrials #DecentralizedTrials #Interoperability #OutcomesStudies #HEOR #RWD #RWE #SaaS. #SanDiego SEQSTER.com Medium Article: Participant Digital Front Door Download the transcript here

Alex Nepogodiev is a Divisional Vice President of Abbott Vascular Business and shares insights about the need for stents with larger diameters. In the past, physicians would have to take a smaller diameter stent and follow up with another catheter to expand that stent to a larger size and to match the vessel. This procedure added an additional step and risk. Alex explains, "Some of the bigger challenges today are, of course, the variation in anatomy and the complexity of some of those narrowings that we have in our heart. Cardiovascular disease, obviously, impacts a lot of patients, and myself included, and it's important for us not only to maintain good health but also go for appropriate and timely checkups. And when the cardiologist finds a narrowing in our heart, they initiate the procedure by first doing an x-ray or an angiogram before proceeding to insert a stent. And once they do that, they can also use other imaging modalities to look more closely at the vessel." "So XIENCE Skypoint large vessel sizes have been introduced now with the largest size matrix and the new diameters that come in vessel sizes of 4.5 or 5.0 millimeters in diameter. And what they allow us to do is treat patients who may have larger vessels. We're all unique, and some of us are patients who are larger male or we have vessels that are closer to the aorta. So those tend to be larger in diameter as well. And having these larger vessel sizes allows the physicians to, again, optimize and personalize treatments to those particular situations in those patients." @AbbottCardio #Stents #DrugElutingStents #InterventionalCardiologist #Cardiology #CardiovascularDisease cardiovascular.abbott.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Tom Milam is the Chief Medical Officer at Iris Telehealth, which focuses on providing in-person and digital support to community mental health centers, Federally Qualified Health Centers, and rural health clinics that don't have enough access to behavioral health providers. The populations they treat are often underserved and have social determinants of health that are barriers to accessing timely care. Tom elaborates, "We're also working a lot in emergency rooms and hospitals around the country. Seeing patients there with behavioral health issues, again in organizations that don't have enough providers. And that seems to be par for the course around the country for a lot of hospitals and health systems. They need additional providers, and we're happy to provide those through telepsychiatry at Iris." "The positive thing about telepsychiatry really is that it eliminates the geographic barriers that are huge barriers for people getting care. So we can get our excellent providers into areas that have a really hard time recruiting onsite providers. So other than that, one of the things I say is that telepsychiatry is a technology. That's all that it is." @IrisHealth #IrisTelehealth #Telepsychiatry #Telepsychiatrist #Psychiatrist #BehavioralHealth #EmergencyDepartments #RuralHospitals #MedicaidPatients #MedicarePatients #SDoH iristelehealth.com Download the transcript here

Scott Gray is the President and CEO of Clincierge and is focused on streamlining clinical trial recruitment, retention, and completion and improving the results of trials to speed time to approval. Clincierge is most concerned about the challenges presented by travel needs and logistics for patients, caregivers, and family members. Scott explains, "Our mission is to lead the global clinical trial performance improvement market. So a lot of my experience has been in leadership development with my pharma customers and performance improvement. And as we created Clincierge over the last seven years, we felt that what we could do in the space, being non-medical in our approach, that we could help with the patient experience and thereby influence the overall outcome to the improvement of clinical trials." "We positioned it in the space of clinical trials and helping those who want to conduct clinical trials, especially sponsors, to better understand what patients are asking for or to better understand the challenges that patients face when they want to participate in a clinical trial. As an example, 62% of patients and 59% of the caregivers said that travel stopped them from participating in a clinical trial. And 42% of patients and 47% of caregivers said financial issues stop them from participating." "Well, with patients having a better experience, there's a lot of building of trust. Because some other reasons that patients drop out are not only the financial and travel burdens, but they may feel underappreciated. They have work pressures, losing work, losing wages from not being at work." @Clincierge #ClinicalTrials #ClinicalResearch #ClinicalTrialRecruitment #PatientExperience #RareDiseases #Pharma #Biotech Clincierge.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Thomas Young is the Founder and Chief Medical Officer of nView Health, a behavioral health technology company providing tools for physicians and researchers to help diagnose psychiatric disorders accurately and efficiently determine treatment options. In addition, the nView Health tools allow tracking and following outcomes to determine if the right drugs have been prescribed and if the cognitive behavioral therapy intervention is working. Thomas elaborates, "Mental health is a large category. I think what people have to understand is, kind of the old rule when I was teaching in medicine, is that 50% of the people that come into a doctor's office for some sort of physical ailment also have a mental health disorder. One in five Americans has depression at some point in their life, and that's a significant number of people. Anxiety is climbing in children. Eating disorders are shooting up at hockey stick rates." "What nView Health does, we believe strongly that the system requires the ability to create an initial ability for people to be screened at every level including children. Providers of all types, primary care providers, nurse practitioners, pediatricians, and others, can give a simple screening test. I can ask a few questions, and I can get some information that helps me understand this patient's behavioral health status." "Secondary to that is the ability to then arm the primary care community with the right tools to be able to make the right diagnostic decisions. Our tools don't make diagnoses. Our tools help and assist a provider in collecting the right data so that they can make an appropriate decision. Because what we know is that early diagnosis leads to early treatment, which leads to better outcomes." @nViewHealth #BehavioralHealth #MentalHealth #ValueBasedCare #DigitalWorkFlows #ActionableData #HealthyMindsStartHere nviewhealth.com Download the transcript here

Shuo Qiao is the Co-Founder and CTO of Moving Analytics, a digital health company focusing on cardiovascular health and providing alternatives to traditional cardiac services. While many devices measure blood pressure and monitor activity, using them can be time-consuming and provide inaccurate readings. Shou points to clinical evidence that home-based cardiac rehabilitation with remote sensing support is as safe and effective as in-person care. The challenge is getting providers and payers to understand how this approach can significantly benefit them as well as patients. Shuo explains, "What we are using currently is from one of our device providers. They provide a heart monitor and weighing scale that basically just does the measurements. They will automatically transfer the data through 3G network to our server. I would say there's zero set-up for the patient. They just get the device, and they just measure their blood pressure and weight. That's it. When it's done, data automatically uploads. No set-up whatsoever. Those are the things that we usually use." "On top of that, we also have a smart activity tracker that you put on the wrist. It can help you monitor your daily tasks, how much you exercise, along with your heart rate, and things like that. It's super helpful as well." @MovingAnalytics #Telehealth #DigitalHealth #VirtualCare #CardiacRehabilitation #CardiacRehab #ActivityTracker movinganalytics.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Anthony Japour is the Chief Executive Officer and President at iTolerance, an early-stage privately-held regenerative medicine company. Currently, if a patient receives a pancreatic islet transplant to treat type 1 diabetes, there is a need for lifelong immune suppression. The technology that iTolerance is developing leverages the protein Fas Ligand to enable implantation without the need to be immune suppressed to suppress the body from rejecting the foreign tissue. Anthony explains, "Our treatment does allow for local immune tolerance, so around the area of the cells, organoid, or tissue. It allows it to be accepted without the body rejecting it by inducing what's called local immune tolerance. This does not affect the systemic immune system, only the local immune system. And it has not been done in humans yet. It's been tested both in rodent model rats as well as in monkeys. And in both models, we can cure type 1 diabetes." "The technology of our product came from Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, as well as the University of Louisville in Kentucky. And the researcher that was there is now at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. This is Dr. Andrés García at Georgia Tech, who is a world-renowned expert in biomaterials. He's been developing the micro gel treatment for a period of time and is a very well-respected researcher. Also, Dr. Haval Shirwan, who is an immunologist, has been working with the FasL protein for roughly 20 or 25 years." @iTolerance_Inc #RegenerativeMedicine #Transplants #PancreaticIsletTransplant #Diabetes #Type1Diabetes  #ImmuneSuppressiveDrugs #ImmuneTolerance #Apoptosis #FasL #FasLigand iTolerance.com Download the transcript here