Empowered Patient Podcast

Russ Thomas, the CEO of Availity, and Oron Afek, CEO and Co-Founder of Vim, join me in discussing the benefits of breaking down information silos of the payers and care providers and bringing real-time data to the point of care.  By integrating actionable patient information at the right point of time, providers are better informed to improve patient outcomes. Russ explains, "Availity, for the last 21 years now, has been in the business of developing connectivity and relationships between health plans and providers. I know we're going to talk a lot today about the really cool program we've embarked upon with Oron and the Vim team. But at our core, we sit in the center of the relationship between health plans and providers and communicate all types of health information between these critical constituents." Oron elaborates, "One of the goals for the Availity-Vim partnership is to really drive behavioral change based on real-time decision-making. It is to intercept at the point of care, at the point of intent, intercept decision-making points that can influence things like downstream costs or administrative costs, like submitting prior authorization, or other components in the entire trajectory, and influence them.  This is instead of doing some retrospect analysis for engagement that is usually more expensive, because when you don't catch a person at the point of intent, then you most often end up paying a lot more to engage them, in retrospect." @Availity @GetVim #PointofCare #PriorAuthorization #AI #ComputerVision Availity.com GetVim.com Download the transcript here  

Avihai Sodri is the Co-Founder and CEO of Antidote Health, which takes a digital HMO approach to bring 24/7 healthcare to a broad audience.  Their target patients include both insured people and those who are uninsured, anyone who requires a one-time service or care for a chronic condition. Avihai says, "So, in a very significant sense, we're not reinventing the wheel. So we're talking about processes and best practices in providing healthcare in a very traditional way, I would say. But we're injecting a lot of technology with our decision support systems and the way that our bot collects information from the patient, and we are adding more digital processes more on the administrative side of things. So, if you take all this together, with the alignment of interest, then we can create a real disruption. And without changing dramatically, the way that healthcare is being provided, but the fact that we are using telehealth to provide the healthcare." @AntidoteAI #AntidoteHealth #AI #DigitalHealth #Telemedicine #HMO #HealthcareProviders antidotehealth.ai Download the transcript here  

Michael Boerner is the Founder and CEO of Engage Technologies Group, which uses short-form videos to educate and motivate patients. It might be for someone with a diagnosed disease or a surgical process where it's a need for pre-operative or post-operative information.  Their mobile intelligence platform is designed to deliver content to patients at the moment when it makes the most sense on their preferred screen. Michael explains, "So when we transform lives by delivering wisdom, it's in the format of short-form video. What we find is people love video, they just don't want it to be long. So, we found that the best way to be able to educate someone is with kind of the three biggest consumer behavioral shifts." "But short-form video, what's tough about brief videos, about 90 seconds, is you can't really talk about anything super complex in 90 seconds, but you can if you put the videos together in what we call an arc or an arc of engagement, a sequence of video content. That allows someone to be able to tap next and go to the next key kind of chapter in that educational journey." #DigitalHealth #MobileHealth #PatientEducation #PatientEngagment #PatientRelationships #ShortFormVideo engagetg.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Sameer Berry is the Chief Medical Officer of Oshi Health, and he shines a light on the challenges patients face from gastrointestinal conditions and the lack of effective treatments available from doctors for GI-related symptoms. While the reimbursement and payment model discourages a team approach to treating these patients, Oshi Health is taking a multidisciplinary integrated healthcare approach with a focus on the enteric nervous system.  Sameer explains, "Where this comes from is the understanding that anatomically, there's actually an entirely separate nervous system that exists in the GI tract, and it's called the enteric nervous system. So, these are nerve cells, the same types of nerve cells that are in your spinal cord, in your brain, those nerve cells are in your gut. And just like the nerves in your brain respond to environmental stressors that might cause you to feel anxious, depressed, sad, happy, these nerves that are in your gut can respond to environmental stressors. But instead of causing you to feel anxious or depressed, they can cause GI symptoms." "I don't see the use of drugs diminishing. I see us refining the molecular targets for the future of pharmacology and functional GI conditions. Where those drugs target, I think, will start to incorporate our understanding of the enteric nervous system and the interplay of the enteric nervous system with both the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system." @OshiHealth #GITwitter #MedTwitter #GI #IBS #GutHealth #MindGut #EntericNervousSystem OshiHealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jacob Hascalovici is the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Clearing which is in the business of transforming chronic pain care.  While some chronic pain has no cure, there are many strategies that can be used to manage the symptoms and improve the quality of life of a patient. One of the key goals of Clearing is to leverage the use of technology to help remove obstacles in the chronic pain care environment. Jacob explains, "When we think about individual treatments in isolation, we call that unimodal care. I'd say that on an individual basis, the effectiveness of a treatment is limited. I rarely see patients with chronic pain who have a 100% response to a single therapy. But when we employ multimodal therapies where we have home exercise or physical therapy, plus a topical, plus an oral, plus an injection, that's when we start to see a very effective treatment strategy and plan." "Pain is a very personal experience. It's highly subjective, it's deeply personal, and there is a multitude of factors that can affect our perception of pain. In order for us to manage something that is so personal and so subjective, we really need to consider all of the biological factors, the psychological factors, and the social factors that affect an individual to design a treatment plan that's best for them. We call this the biopsychosocial model for chronic pain care, and that is at the foundation of what we do at Clearing. Highly personalized therapies that focus on the mind, the body, and the social wellbeing of an individual who's suffering from pain." #ChronicPain #PainTreatment #PainCare #Opioids #NonOpioidTreatment #NociplasticPain #DigitalHealth clearing.com Download the transcript here

Sam Lee, interim Co-CEO and President, and Jim Martin, interim Co-CEO and CFO of Cocrystal Pharma. They're a clinical stage biotech company using their proprietary drug development platform to create novel antiviral therapeutics to treat seasonal influenza and pandemic viral infections like COVID-19. Jim explains, "There are vaccines, and then there are therapeutics. We are a therapeutic company. We don't produce vaccines. Vaccines are more preventative. What we do is, once you get the illness, we stop the illness through our compounds. So as a therapeutic, you do need that one-two punch of both vaccines and therapeutics. And in the case of influenza, we have every year people getting vaccines, which are good. But the therapeutics that are necessary are far and few between." Sam elaborates, "So our compounds, the compound IDs of CC-42344, we're currently doing phase one study in Australia, this compound has an outstanding drug-resistant profile. We have not been able to isolate the drug-resistance strains from in vitro test-tube experiments. So we believe this compound is really designed for the pandemic as well as a seasonal treatment, particularly targeting for influenza A infection. And also, because of the excellent drug resistance profile, we believe this would be a real breakthrough influenza treatment for pandemic as well as seasonal infection." @CocrystalPharma #Flu #Influenza #Pandemic #SeasonalFlu #COVID #Vaccines #COVIDTreatments #FluTreatments cocrystalpharma.com Download the transcript here

Brian Culley is the CEO of Lineage Cell Therapeutics which is developing cell therapy for Dry AMD, a common condition and one of the leading causes of blindness, and to restore the functional capacity of hearing and the spine. Brian explains, "Conceptually, what we're doing is manufacturing the type of cell that has been lost due to aging or disease or trauma, and in doing so, in transplanting those cells, we're looking to restore function. This is what we saw in the setting of the eye, and this is what we're looking to replicate in the setting of the ear." "Lineage has a fundamental technology that allows us to manufacture these specific cell types. That technology is capable of manufacturing not just auditory neurons and retinal cells, as we talked about today, but we also can manufacture the cells of your spinal cord. We have treated 25 people who suffered a traumatic spinal cord injury, and we are working to replace those cells so that they can regain function, operate their own wheelchair, dress, and feed themselves." "Everything gets converted, and so we're able to come up with these largely pure populations of specific cell types. We can do it at a meaningful scale. Meaningful meaning you can actually get into a clinical trial and test to see if they work. The hallmark of our technology is being able to manufacture these cells in a way that the FDA expects. Rather than an academic science experiment, we're really trying to think about these as products that are going to reach patients and be used by surgeons and physicians." @ceo_culley @lineagecell #LineageCellTherapeutics #Biotech #CellTherapy #CellTransplant #RegenerativeMedicine #ReplaceandRestore lineagecell.com Download the transcript here

Alon Ben-Noon is the Co-Founder and CEO of NeuroSense Therapeutics, which is working on ALS therapy and other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. They are working on a disease-modifying drug PrimeC and have identified a large set of biomarkers that are related to ALS progression and the mechanisms of PrimeC. Alon explains, "Our lead candidate is called PrimeC. It's a novel formulation that consists of two FDA-approved drugs not related to ALS. We found that when these drugs are combined together in unique doses, they had the quality to treat ALS and tackle ALS in several forms. This formulation aims to maximize the synergism that we found to have between these compounds and as I mentioned, to tackle multiple targets in order to eventually create a clinical benefit for the patients." "We are advancing with identifying biomarkers and progressing there very nicely. We identified a large set of biomarkers that relates both to the disease progression and to the mechanisms of PrimeC. We work on neuron-derived exosomes, and when we first characterize the set of biomarkers that are relevant for us, we also explored how PrimeC, our lead candidate, can create a change in these biomarkers." @NeuroSenseT #NeuroSense #Neurodegenerative #PrimeC #Biotech #RareDiseases #CNS #ALS #Alzheirmers #AD #Parkinsons #PD #Biomarkers NeuroSense-TX.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Maryann Lauletta is the Chief Medical Officer of Dina,  re-imagining healthcare with a home-first model using technology and community-based solutions.  Their 50-state network provides access to different providers of medical and home setting solutions to aid care coordinators in creating a safe home environment. Maryann elaborates, "We have to realize that the home is not a controlled setting, as you experience in a hospital setting or a skilled nursing facility. There are a lot of things that pop up that you need to be prepared for. Patients may not have adequate equipment at home, and they may not have adequate access to food, heating, and cooling. There could be pest infestations. They need access to transportation. You need to figure out how to coordinate with sometimes four or five or more different providers and be able to share information about that patient in real-time and on the go. I think that's something we don't always talk about or realize." "In the hospital, you're not worrying or necessarily even thinking about home modification needs, again, pest control, meal delivery, because you have that all under one roof. It's really been our goal to take into account all of the different needs that patients may encounter in the home and load those types of providers in our network so that we're basically prepared for any service that patients may need to be activated in a short amount of time." @Dinacare_inc #aginginplace #CareatHome #CareCoordination #CMS #Healthcare #Homecare #PopulationHealth #Providers #RaH #SDoH #SkilledNursing #ValueBasedCare #WorkforceShortage #HealthTechnology #Medtech Dinacare.com Download the transcript here

Enam Noor is the Founder and CEO of Insightin Health,  empowering health plans to drive action through connected data. Working with health insurance companies with a focus on direct-to-consumer health plan products, Insightin is creating a data ecosystem that allows access by providers, payers, and patients. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, that data can be used to design treatment plans using their Next Best Action strategy. Enam explains, "We try to create real-time insight around that information to drive healthier behavior, improve the member engagement, the population health part of preventative care management. In the senior population, when it comes to Medicare, there are a lot of chronic conditions. Preventative care management plays a big role in staying healthy. In general, what our clients expect out of our involvement is building that lifetime member value and are really extracting the best way to be healthier. Then eventually, it's a win-win for everybody." "Our platform has three main areas in terms of technology. The very first portion is the data connector, where in a very simple way, very quickly, both structured and unstructured data can be digested by our platform. We have machine learning AIs and natural language processing. We can take any sort of data. In healthcare, there's a lot of unstructured data, data that happens in phone conversations or notes field on the EHR." @InsightinHealth #NextBestAction #HealthIT #AI #ML #MedicareAdvantage #CAPHS insightinhealth.com Download the transcript here