Empowered Patient Podcast

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

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