Empowered Patient Podcast

Natasha Drapeau is the Executive Vice President of BioSig Technologies, pioneers in advanced biomedical signal processing solutions that will unlock the future of bioelectronic medicine, starting with the PURE EP™ System and their work on common and complex cardiac arrhythmia. Approximately more than half of patients diagnosed with this heart rhythm disorder have AFib. The BioSig noninvasive technology works with all the systems generating data to get an entire cardiac picture for diagnosis and performing a cardiac ablation procedure. Natasha explains, "What we're focusing on with our technology is really to prevent that signal distortion. That's happening both through our different hardware architecture and the software algorithms. We focus on delivering a much cleaner, more detailed cardiac picture displayed to the physician in real-time." "But also, we're uncovering a lot of diagnostic data that was simply not there before. We have side-by-side comparisons because we have other technology in support at the same time as PURE EP. I believe we have an opportunity there to give that better, more comprehensive cardiac picture to physicians, and that could lead to a transformation of care." @BioSig_Tech #MedTech #MedicalTechnology #AFib #AtrialFibrillation #AfibAwareness #Electrophysiology #Epeeps #GlobalEP #AF #Ablation #Cardiology #CardioTwitter #HeartHealth #BioelectronicMedicine BioSig.com Download the transcript here

Sylvia Hastanan is the CEO and Founder of Greater Good Health and shines a light on the experience and new skills that nurse practitioners have developed as a result of the demand for virtual care during the pandemic. Sylvia wants to empower and train NPs as primary care providers to provide more access to underserved communities and to promote a stronger partnership between nurse practitioners and physicians to handle the ever-increasing demand for chronic and senior healthcare.  Sylvia explains, "Greater Good Health is building a medical group of nurse practitioners simply with a mission to expand more access to care to people who need it. We believe in supporting nurse practitioners, who we think have been an overlooked and maybe underutilized resource in healthcare, and nurse practitioners specifically as primary care providers." "Well, my background has always been in healthcare and provider services. I worked for organizations across the United States that supported physician groups, primary care physician groups specifically. And I watched as NPs worked alongside physicians. I watched as physicians continued to be burnt out and struggled with caseloads, patient caseloads, and 35 patients in a day and only seeing them for minutes at a time." #GGH #GreaterGoodHealth #NursePractitioner #NP #Healthcare #COVID #Pandemic GreaterGoodHealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Adam Kaplin is the Chief Scientific Officer of MyMD Pharmaceuticals which is developing a drug that gets to the cause of inflammation. Since chronic inflammation is a factor in pathological aging, managing inflammation shows opportunities for slowing aging. Their lead drug MyMD-1 is a TNF-a inhibitor that can cross the blood-brain barrier and treat the brain where other anti-TNF-a treatments do not.    Adam explains, "By delaying aging, what I mean is they not only lived longer, but they didn't lose their function. So, they retained their strength and their cognition. Because if we were only developing a drug that would just allow us all to get older and demented, that wouldn't be good for the economy, good for our personal health, good for anybody. So really, what we're excited about is the prospect of actually slowing the aging process and extending the healthy portion of our lifespans." "So, aging probably is going to end up being the result of two primary processes. One is inflammation, and that is the product of having an immune system which is all set up to fight off infection. And not just fight off infection -- it turns out, inflammation is also a part of how we develop." "The second most important thing I think is that these drugs, the anti-TNF-a treatments like HUMIRA, do not have any benefit for the brain. I mean, they can cause things that look like MS, but they certainly have no benefit for CNS inflammatory conditions. And among those are MS, lupus, but also dementias. Alzheimer's now has been implicated to have inflammation involved. So, crossing over the blood-brain barrier's a big deal. It's orally available. Additionally, all the other TNF-a inhibitors have to be taken by a needle in some way, injection or infusion." @MyMDPharma #Health #Medical #Aging #Lifespan #Sarcopenia #Immunology #Immunesystem #Inflammation #Cytokines #CytokineStorm #TNFa #BloodBrainBarrier MyMD.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jens Bjørheim is the Chief Medical Officer at Ultimovacs which is taking advantage of the environment for R&D in the science around cancer vaccines in the Oslo region of Norway. Ultimovacs is working with peptide vaccines and long peptides. These peptides will drive for a specific subgroup of immune cells called the CD4 cells, or the helper cells, which coordinate the immune attack against infection and cancer. Jens explains, "In some patients, they do not have the sufficient number or repertoire of immune cells that are needed to kill off the whole tumor. And we believe that adding T-cells or immune cells that can recognize specific things in the tumors, like in our case, an enzyme called telomerase, can benefit the patients in the future. So the checkpoint inhibitors on one side, they allow the immune system to kill off the cancer. On the other side, the immune system sometimes needs more help. There need to be more T-cells and more differentiation among the T-cells to really cure people from cancer." "In our vaccine, we have sequences from an enzyme called telomerase. Why do we target telomerase? Well, in all cancers, they need to have a strategy for eternal cell division, and 85% to 90% of all cancers have turned on this enzyme, telomerase, which allows them, at least in theory, to divide forever. So this is an essential enzyme for the tumor cells. They cannot turn off this enzyme because if they do so, they cannot divide anymore, so we are targeting one of the core and essential features of the cancer." @Ultimovacs #Ultimovacs #Telomerase #Immunotherapy #CD4Cells #CancerVaccine #Cancer #CheckpointInhibitor Ultimovacs.com Download the transcript here

Anthony Capone is President of DocGo and brings his background in computational learning theory and artificial intelligence to the world of mobile medical solutions. By creating a robust routing and dispatch system integrated with first responders and up-trained lower-cost healthcare providers, DocGo is able to treat patients in emergency situations as well as provide on-site and at-home comprehensive healthcare. Anthony explains, "Just in the past couple of years, the acceptance in a community for point-of-care tests for COVID really changed the landscape. However, COVID is one thing. The key component is that now people are more receptive to that idea, and there's a lot more investment from them going in. So things where you normally would have to drive to a lab and have to wait a couple of days to get your results, you can now do a point-of-care test right then and there. So if you combine that together with a remote diagnostic system, then what you end up getting is care that might have taken three episodes, three encounters, can be done in one encounter." "Well, one of the biggest ways to reduce that cost of care for them is to keep the patients out of the emergency room. And who can keep them out of the emergency room? Well, it's a rare person who can actually go and have somebody who can respond rapidly to an urgent care visit and prevent that patient from actually going into the emergency room, and we're in that position. So physicians want to work with us, especially those that are on some sort of capitated type risk-based arrangement like an ACO." #DocGo #Ambulnz #DocGoMobileHealth #MobileTesting #MobileHealthcare #HealthcareAI #InnovationInHealthcare #AI #HealthcareTechnology DocGo.com Download the transcript here

Anish Sebastian is the CEO and Co-Founder of Babyscripts, which is focused on improving prenatal and postpartum care for mothers and their newborns.  Using remote monitoring and a robust digital environment, low and high-risk pregnancies are supported with virtual care as well as in-office appointments.  Babyscripts works with care teams, providers, healthcare providers, OBGYNs, nurse midwives, nurses, and the whole care continuum to improve access to and quality of care. Anish explains, "So this was sort of our moment to provide the market with tools that could really help improve access. One of the things that we do is remote patient monitoring for blood pressure for high and low-risk moms. And that is such an important and pivotal thing in prenatal and postpartum care. So providers across the nation, a lot of our practices that we work with said, Hey, Babyscripts, how can we work together to still give good quality care and maintain access, but handle some of the shortages that we knew were going to come." "Highly compliant, fully engaged patient, in the old way of doing things, would show up to an office appointment 12 to 14 times. So, over the course of that pregnancy, we're looking at 12 to 14 data points, blood pressure data points." "Compare that to us collecting that data from home. We're shipping them a blood pressure cuff, it's Bluetooth enabled, and they can take it, in certain instances, every single day. Or at least every single week. So there is a much higher order of magnitude difference of data that we're collecting, and also creating more and more real-time instances to identify risk and ultimately intervene. We're catching things quicker and allowing care teams to intervene quicker." @Babyscripts #DigitalHealth #Healthcare #MaternalHealth #RemoteMonitoring #Prenatal #Startup Babyscripts.com Download the transcript here

Lynn Carroll is the Chief Operating Officer at HSBlox and is in the business of helping payers and providers move from a fee-for-service to a value-based model. One of the critical challenges in scaling these solutions so that they can work with legacy systems and provide data and performance metrics to determine and improve outcomes in the value-based arena. Lynn explains, "So, as we think about the overall landscape of healthcare that traditionally has been on a fee-for-service basis, the legacy systems on both the payer and provider sides have been geared toward billing and transactional mechanisms. Submitting claims and getting paid based upon those claims is a very fragmented approach." "And what we have noticed is that the ability to operationalize these value-based programs with the legacy system is a challenge. Both hierarchically in terms of which providers are participating, what population is assigned, but also in the funding pool management, whether they're from employers, from commercial payers, from Medicare Advantage, or state programs, Medicaid, children's health. Keeping the funding pools straight, managing the associated risk corridors, and then ultimately reporting performance is not how the traditional systems have been geared in the past." @Blox_HS #communityhealth #healthcare #healthequity #homehealthcare  #managedcare #SDoH #valuebasedadministration #VBC #valuebasedcare HSBlox.com Download the transcript here

Craig Parker is the CEO of Surrozen, experts in the Wnt pathway, which is one of the fundamental pathways that help to establish the structure of organs, renewal of stem cells, and recovery from injury. This is a story of discovering the right combination of their tissue-specific approach and the right molecules to enhance or activate the Wnt pathway. Craig elaborates, "So, in the liver, for example, when we injure our liver by drinking too much alcohol, the Wnt pathway is activated and is really the key pathway that's responsible for the regeneration that we're all able to stimulate in our liver." "There are many, many other organs where the Wnt pathway is known to play a role in how that particular organ is maintained and responds to injury. So, what we're trying to do is take advantage of that biology that's so important in all of us during development and in adulthood and to stimulate it in a very selective way to get organs like the liver or the intestine or the retina to regenerate in response to the injury that certain diseases caused to that tissue." "When you have biology that's so powerful, and that is so relevant in different organs, the challenge, really, probably the most fundamental challenge, is to utilize it or activate it only in the tissue that you want, only in the tissue that you're targeting for a specific disease. We don't want to activate this pathway throughout the body. So, it's that selective approach that really distinguishes our technology and our approach, and that was really an impediment to utilizing this pathway over the last 30 years." #Surrozen #WntPathway #Wnt #WntBiology #WntSignaling #SevereAlcoholicHepatitis #LiverCells #IBD #TissueRepair #Biotech #FrizzledReceptors #ZincFIngers #ClinicalDevelopment Surrozen.com Download the transcript here

George Georgallides is the Founder of Basis, a start-up that is taking an advanced view of helping patients achieve better health and reach health and fitness goals.  Integrating data from a wide range of sources, Basis is striving for a real-time approach to engaging patients in making small but significant adjustments as they go through their day. George explains, "So, what we've essentially built is the unique integrative approach to help them that combines all this information that we're getting. We're actually addressing and combining it with workout, nutrition, mindfulness, and sleep in one platform. Those are things that exist in silos. The data exists in unstructured and incomprehensible ways for the person." "We've structured all those things around specific health goals. My background is in bioinformatics. My team is data scientists and health experts from universities and programs. So, we have an amazing team, and we've been able to build very interesting models around data that most people don't really have much use for. Most people don't really understand how to put a resting heart rate or heart rate variability as a number into affecting their day-to-day life. So, we take that obscurity of that, and we put that into a specific, actionable task. So, how does it influence recovery? How does your sleep last night influence how you should eat, exercise, the level of activity you have today? @Basis_Health #Healthcare #Fitness #WearableTech #DigitalHealth #HealthandWellness #AI #Startups #Entrepreneur BasisHealth.io Download the transcript here        

Dr. Jim Feng is the CEO and Founder of Phyxable which is serving up curated content specific to an injury or chronic condition to help patients overcome physical pain.  Using a virtual approach, Phyxable is engaging patients with gamification and social media type notifications to keep people on a plan and encourage them to not drop off. Jim elaborates, "We actually combine it with some machine learning algorithms to personalize the solution for you. And along the way, we also found that good guidance and coaching still play a good part in recovery, so we provide that service as well." "And the last point, we're actually building on the high technology side in the augmented reality part. So, there's one side to understanding where you're at and what you need to do. But the other aspect of it is checking in to make sure you're actually doing it right on a daily basis. We're utilizing augmented reality technology just on your phone camera in order to provide the feedback in real-time." @Phyxable #Health #Pain #Telehealth #Physiotherapy #Chiropractic #PhysicalTherapy #OnlineCoaching #OnlineCoach #OnlineTherapy #Entrepreneur Phyxable.com Download the transcript here