Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Ryan Lee, Chairman of the Department of Radiology at the Einstein Healthcare Network, now part of Jefferson health, and Dr. Peter Seidensticker, the VP of Medical Affairs and Clinical Development at Bayer Radiology join me to talk about how Bayer's Calantic Digital Solutions is empowering radiologists. Applying AI to the workflow allows the radiologist to improve efficiency, reduce fatigue, and focus on the most important suspicious markers. Ryan explains, "You specifically asked about the role of the radiologist. I think traditionally, people think of a radiologist as somebody who looks at images and then generates a report. But these days, the American College of Radiology – ACR-- has something called imaging 3.0. What that really means is that we, as radiologists are much more than just a report. We're involved from the beginning of ordering of the study, all the way to the communication of the results. Not just the actual interpretation of the image themselves. So I think there is a much more holistic role for radiologists than maybe the general public really knows." Peter elaborates, "The Bayer angle is more to extract the important findings out of an image and make sure that the radiologist sees those in a pronounced way or in a marked way, making it easier for him to find them in an image. So it goes in a similar direction, but I think the key focus here is to mark findings that are tough to find in this jungle of workload and images that radiologists see every day." #Radiology #Radiologist #AI #BayerRadiology #BayerCalantic #MedicalImaging #MedTech #WorkflowPrioritization calantic.com Download the transcript here

Len Liptak is the Co-Founder and CEO of ProSomnus Sleep Technologies, which is providing new options for patients suffering from the chronic disease obstructive sleep apnea. This condition means that the airways are blocked while people are sleeping. The most common treatment is a CPAP device that pushes air through the blockage and down the throat to ensure the sleeper has access to oxygen. ProSomnus has designed a personalized noninvasive oral device that holds the jaw forward to create a precision jaw position and stabilization to aid in better breathing and improved sleep quality. Len explains, "It's serious but funny, but one of the most common ways it's diagnosed is what we call the elbow test. This is where someone's bed partner notices that their bed partner is having this pause in breathing at night, and they literally elbow the bed partner and say, "Hey, wake up. You're not breathing." At first, it can be cute, but then it becomes serious." "Oral devices for treating such sleep apnea have been on the market for a while. But the challenge is that those traditional oral appliances arbitrarily posture the jaw forward. They're not quite precision in their nature. The precision is really important because the function of an oral device is to protrude the jaw in a position that opens the airway and then stabilize the jaw in that position throughout the night." "It's our precision technology that allows us to do that because the airway is only 10 millimeters in diameter. So if the jaw is postured too far forward, it could be counterproductive. If the jaw is not postured far enough forward, it can be counterproductive and not generate efficacy. So it's really important to precisely position the jaw based on the treatment plan and the prescription that the provider draws up for the patient so that we get maximum efficacy." #ProSomnus #SleepApnea #ObstructiveSleepApnea #OSA #CPAP #DentalSleepMedicine #JawRepositioning #SleepMedicine ProSomnus.com Download the transcript here

Inessa Lurye is the Senior Director of Consumer Product at Hinge Health, a digital musculoskeletal clinic with accessible digital physical therapy and whole-body care. Recently, Hinge has launched a Women's Pelvic Health program to personalize treatments for pelvic floor disorder and to expand access to pelvic floor physical therapy for underserved communities. Inessa explains, "We span that entire continuum, and we offer individuals access to a personalized care team, which is in-house physical therapists and Board-certified coaches, and a digital product that includes exercise therapy and education to help free people from pain." "We have personalized the experience to women and those with vaginal anatomy. One in four women has a pelvic floor disorder, and pelvic health is musculoskeletal health, but for so long, we haven't treated it as such. And so what we've done is, knowing that our clinic is a digital clinic that serves the whole person, we have personalized the experience for pelvic floor disorders." "So instead of saying this is the way it is, this is so common, let's just make it normal. What we've done at Hinge Health is we've created a program that integrates pelvic healthcare into our digital clinic. It is a program that is created for women by women, and it allows women, those with vaginal anatomy, to enter the offering, to tell us what their needs are, and to get a customized experience for pelvic disorders in a holistic way." @HingeHealth #WomensHealth #FemTech #PelvicHealth #PelvicFloor #PelvicFloorTherapy #DigitalHealth hingehealth.com Download the transcript here

Jonathan Baktari MD is the Founder and CEO of e7 Health which specializes in seven areas of healthcare. The common theme is that adult vaccinations can have a significant impact on reducing vaccine-preventable deaths in these areas. Leveraging digital technology, e7 is reducing friction in the healthcare system and allowing patients to draw on a repository of their vaccine records to quickly get appropriate, quality care. Jonathan explains, "A lot of times, for example, we see people who aren't sure if they had all their childhood vaccines. What we can offer people is to see if they have immunity to chicken pox varicella or if they have immunity to MMR or hepatitis B. And so, instead of just randomly getting the vaccines or not getting the vaccine, finding the people's status is helpful in making a determination of what they need. So we've offered that." "We also offer STD testing. And the reason we do is that we offer several STD vaccines. And so if we're going to offer the vaccine, we're going to offer testing around it and other services. We just thought giving the vaccine without an understanding of whether someone necessarily needed the vaccine or didn't need the vaccine would be helpful." "What we do is just remove all barriers. We write our own technology, our own software. So literally, you can, on your phone, get an appointment for that day and be seen that day. Whatever we do with you will be in your portal by the time you hit the parking lot. And that's our goal, that's what we try to do. And so, I think what we have noticed is if you reduce friction for the person, they're going to respond differently. A lot of people, say oh, I got to see my doctor, but there is a seven-week wait usually. And so I think those become barriers." @e7_health #Vaccinations #AdultVaccinations #COVID #COVIDTesting #HealthTech #PrecisionMedicine e7health.com Download the transcript here

Ram Sahasranam is the Co-Founder and President of Fold Health and building primary care delivery systems that focus on the experience of the physician and the patient. Fold has designed an operating system that works for primary care providers and their patients and folds all of the existing healthcare elements around these two individuals and their care delivery concerns. Sitting on top of existing electronic health record systems, Fold integrates legacy systems to bring real innovation to an environment originally built as a billing solution. Ram explains, "What we saw during the pandemic was the lack of primary care being at the center of care where America is concerned. If you look at how we designed our system, primary care was supposed to be the hub around which the spokes of healthcare were supposed to function." "But unfortunately, primary care was being looked at as traffic cops for specialty care. So we want to solve for that because about 80% of all care can actually be delivered at the primary care level. But the tools do not exist because the tools were built in a very different era. So, we've taken a complete full-stack approach so that where the providers and patients are concerned, the experience becomes the most critical aspect. Where automation is concerned, contextual intelligence becomes the most critical aspect to ensure that qualitative care delivery is happening across the continuum for the provider and the patient." @FoldHealth #FoldHealth #Telehealth #HealthTech #Healthcare #PrimaryCare #DPC #DirectPrimaryCare #CRM fold.health Download the transcript here

Jill Pellegrino is the VP of Recruitment and RWE at CVS Health Clinical Trial Services. Real-world evidence uses data collected in a real-world setting and can supplement data collected in the controlled setting of a clinical trial. It could be used to measure safety outcomes, the efficacy of treatments, or behaviors that impact the quality of life. Jill explains, "Most parties that are relying on real-world data are pulling it from claims or medical records. And this data is often de-identified, but it can be patchy because it needs to be pulled from multiple sources. At CVS, we have access to clinical data that's more cohesive because it spans across our different businesses and brings in data from payer, pharmacy, and provider in one set." "But we don't just rely on clinical data when we're thinking about real-world evidence. We invite our customer community to participate directly in research opportunities, which allows us to gather insights directly from the patients. That patient voice is really helpful in illuminating variables that may be impacting their healthcare decisions as well as the disease burden impact on their daily lives." @CVSHealth #RWE #RealWorldEvidence #RWD #RealWorldData #ClinicalTrial CVSHealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Mukul Mehra is the Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder of IllumiCare and firmly believes that cost transparency should be given to physicians so that hard clinical decisions can put the cost of treatment into perspective. By providing real-time data, IllumiCare is influencing clinician behavior to reduce waste, lower costs and improve decisions about appropriate treatments. Mukul explains, "So IllumiCare is essentially bringing in all of these constructs of different points in a patient's care journey in the inpatient setting, giving a cost definition to what that treatment is costing, and getting down to a real true cost. Then understanding that at different points in a treatment plan, that certainly there may not be proper adjudication. But if we don't start off with cost transparency, then we're not going to really get to define the cost of waste." "When you aggregate data and make it retrospect, it tends to have very little influence or impact on physician practice patterns. And in the end, IllumiCare is a behavioral change company. And we want to change behavior by reducing costs, but we want to reduce costs when you can decelerate good therapy when you now only need a pretty good drug because that's good enough. And so the nuances of all of that are only going to occur when you give this information at the point-of-care, contextually, in real-time. And that's occurring over the electronic medical record for many of us in that data assimilation and review mode." "It's most directly designed to influence physician/clinician behavior. It's EMR agnostic. It grabs EMR data. It works in harmony with any electronic medical record. And it has really three ways to influence providers. One, it's point-of-care. Two, it can detect what a provider's wasteful tendencies are. Of course, the provider is the ultimate adjudicator. It detects the context of the patient and the provider's prior behaviors and what's going on with the current patient. And it can nudge, preemptively, a suggestion, sort of a digital, hey, tap on the shoulder, but it doesn't stop or interrupt the physician's workflow." #IllumiCare #healthit #ehr #emr #hospitalpayers #payers #hospitals #patientcosts #patientprotection #costtransparency #lengthofstay #stewardship #patientcare #healthcaresystems IllumiCare.com Download the transcript here

Matty Culbreth-Notaro is the Chief Operations Officer at ObvioHealth and developing a new model for virtual decentralized clinical trials. Accelerated by the pandemic, there is widespread global acceptance of DCT. This digital solution and mobile app are an efficient approach to identifying and recruiting trial participants and significantly increasing trial completion rates. Matty elaborates, "When I joined ObvioHealth, I had been in the industry for almost 30 years, I didn't know that it would actually work as well as it has. And now, being with Obvio for five years, I've seen the huge impact it's made, the technology has made to our patients, to our industry in general. And it's just been a great way for us to marry the tech and the service and leverage all the technological innovations that we have to tackle those inefficiencies in our industry." "Our technology has built-in intelligence that it's able to say, well, you qualify, or you don't qualify, at least from the pre-screening questionnaire. And then, we send them, if they do qualify, a link to the app to download onto their smartphone. From there, we onboard them. We'll do the consenting process right on the phone. We'll ask them all the screening questionnaires right there. And then they're assigned to a virtual site team that's going to help them along the way. They're using their own smartphones to complete all of the study-related visits or study-related procedures." "Now, not every trial can be done 100% in a decentralized way. Some trials have to be done with still a brick-and-mortar site involved in the process. And for that, that's called a hybrid model. We support that as well, so the participant can go to the office for some visits, but they don't have to go to the office for all the visits like they used to. And in many cases, none of this has to be done at the office anymore. It can be done remotely." #ClinicalTrials #ObvioHealth #DecentralizedTrials #VirtualTrials #DCT #PatientEngagement #PatientCentricity #HybridClinicalTrials #DecentralizedClinicalTrials #DCTs #PatientAdherence #PatientCompliance #ClinicalResearch #RareDiseases obviohealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Paul Sherman is the Chief Medical Officer of the Community Health Plan of Washington, the only nonprofit managed care organization for Medicaid in Washington state. They have also expanded into offering Medicare Advantage plans and providing a public/private low-cost insurance option for low-income people who do not qualify for Medicaid. Paul is enthusiastic about the new benefits that have been added to provide alternative approaches to healthcare that are less invasive and have better options than opioids for pain management. Paul explains, "Treatments that we're offering with this new benefit are a package of chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage therapy. So those traditional plans have offered services on a medical necessity or another basis. Still, we're trying to offer them in a much more patient-centered way where it's much easier for them to access it, to access the treatments that are important to them." "We're starting with those three benefits, but as we work with our members across the state and listen to their needs, we're talking to various populations about what other alternative therapies we should consider offering. We're talking to Native American tribes and our Mexican communities to really understand if there are other treatments that are important to them that we should think about adding to this benefit." @MyCHPW #CommunityHealthPlanofWashington #AlternativeTherapies #Medicaid #Medicare #Acupuncture #Chiropractic #MassageTherapy #PatientCentered chpw.org Download the transcript here

Dr. Alison Darcy is the President and Founder of Woebot Health, an engaging method of delivering self-guided cognitive behavioral therapy on a mobile device. Using only text, Woebot allows the user to interact with a fully automated system with no human intervention but using smart technology that is infinitely patient and never sleeps. Alison explains, "That also makes it really flexible and flexibly delivered through the health system because it's kind of complimentary to traditional therapy. It can also be and has been used as a very easy on-ramp into the experience of working on one's mental health. It's also been used by people who have already been through therapy and looking for a refresher. It's also been used as a way to just engage with solid mental health-promoting ideas and skills prior to any diagnosable issue." "What's interesting, actually, from our data, we see that the longest conversations people have with Woebot occur between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. I think that's so interesting because these are the moments when there's nobody really around to talk to. And, of course, 80% of all the conversations Woebot has occur outside of traditional clinical hours. So they're happening between 5:00 PM and 8:00 or 9:00 AM the next day. That is a key advantage that a digital solution has." @HiWoebot #Woebot #DigitalTherapeutics #DigitalHealth #PrescriptionDigitalTherapeutics #MentalHealth #AITechnology woebothealth.com Download the transcript here