Empowered Patient Podcast

Steve Palma is the President of Medical Cost Solutions at Goodroot and we talk about what medical billing errors have to do with increasing healthcare costs. Steve also shines a light on hospital financial assistance programs and how they are not being used enough to help patients pay high medical bills. Steve provides some details, "Well, the billing errors include the cost of payers overpaying or underpaying claims, and the cost to the providers in billing correctly and then dealing with all the administrative headaches around audits by payers, and getting that claim ultimately right. These add a tremendous amount of administrative cost on both sides. It ends up getting passed to the consumer." "You'll hear some people on the health plan side say it's all abusive provider billing practices, whether it's fraud or potentially maximizing coding in a complex coding environment. On the provider side, often, they'll say it's health plans intentionally underpaying or playing their own types of games." "I think, over the years, what I've really come to conclude, is that, for the most part, people on the health plans and the providers are trying to do the right thing, from a coding perspective, but it's extremely complicated. So, the complication of the billing, the regulatory environment where payers have to pay those claims very, very quickly and get them out the door, it just causes an error on both sides, frankly." @Goodroot4 #goodroot #healthcare #healthcarereform #reinventinghealthcare #medicaldebt GoodrootInc.com Download the transcript here  

Dr. John Dobak is the President and CEO of DermTech which is leading the genomic revolution in dermatology to more accurately determine the presence of skin cancer. Their noninvasive platform changes the protocol for assessing a suspicious mole from visual review and surgically removing tissue to genomic analysis and using broader objective data before treatment is determined.  John elaborates, "Genomics is fundamentally changing the way medicine is practiced, and it is particularly changing cancer care and how cancer is detected and treated. We're really bringing that revolution to the dermatologist. We do that with our noninvasive genomics platform. We have something called the Smart Sticker, which is a special adhesive patch that can collect the sample of the skin noninvasively. And it feels a lot like scotch tape, you just press it on the skin, and you lift it off. And from that skin sample, the tissue we've collected, we can run a variety of genomic analyses, and that allows us to determine whether or not cancer might be present in a mole, for example." "Our first product in the market is specifically for melanoma skin cancer. That's the most deadly of skin cancers. It's the most concerning skin cancer. It's a real problem. Doctors don't want to miss melanoma because it can lead to higher mortality in a patient. But melanoma skin cancer can also be cured very effectively if it's found early. So, the 99% of patients that have melanoma detected at the earliest stages have a 5 to 10-year survival." @DermTech #DermTech #Dermatology #DermTechIt #PrecisionGenomics #SkinExams #Melanoma #SkinCancer #MelanomaDetection #EarlyDetection #SkinHealth #SanDiego DermTech.com Download the transcript here

Tom Isett is the CEO of iBio which is pioneering the next generation of biopharmaceuticals. Their goal is to reduce the cost, time, and risk of failure involved with drug discovery and development by using a plant-based recombinant protein manufacturing platform to create small and large batches of desired proteins. Tom shares his career journey from working with the USDA to iBio where he is back to working with the little leafy green guys again. Tom explains, "We are a biotech, so we're a developer of biopharmaceuticals, specifically focused in oncology, fibrosis, and infectious diseases, where we're really trying to address some of the bigger unmet medical needs out there. But what I think really makes us unique is how we develop these new medicines, molecules, and candidates. We use plants to produce these new drug candidates." "And as we move forward, we also use artificial intelligence for the design of the molecules. So the combination of the two winds up putting us in the position where we have this really strong design capability. Given the nature of our plant-based production system and the technologies that we employ, we get a certain speed component, so we can do it more quickly than other manufacturing systems. This is why we call the technology FastPharming." "This FastPharming system just uses plants. It's actually a relative of tobacco. It was originally from Australia, a little weed, and we like that because it grows quickly and it puts most of its energy into its leaves. So, we skip that whole step of all this time it takes to get it to produce the protein of interest." #iBio #FastPharming #ProteinDrugs #Biopharmaceuticals #DrugManufacturing #BioProcessing #Pharmatech #AI  ibioinc.com Download the transcript here

Paula Ragan is the CEO and President of X4 Pharmaceuticals, which focuses on the rare disease WHIM Syndrome. Patients have a deficiency in their immune system, and as a result, this diminishes their ability to fight chronic infections, and they have a higher risk for severe cancers. Paula explains, "If one thinks about doing the right test, it's easy to diagnose, and the right test is doing genetic sequencing. There are commercially available panels, so it exists for the patient and physician communities. The current challenge is getting the physicians to recognize the test is needed. And then to also enable payment. X4 has done a great job in providing free testing through our PATH4WARD program." "Our lead candidate is called mavorixafor, and it's an oral once-daily capsule. And the amazing thing is its mechanism. What it does is binds to a receptor called CXCR4. And it basically shuts it down a little bit. It's kind of blunting the signaling that normally exists in the cell. And for these patients with WHIM syndrome, their disease is literally caused by too much signaling, by profound over signaling of CXCR4. So we can give them a once-daily capsule that blunts that effect and really then restores the more normalized function of the immune system so that they can combat infections and hopefully minimize their cancer risk." @X4Pharma #WHIMSyndrome #ChronicNeutropenia #CXCR4 #Waldenstrom #RareDisease X4pharma.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Luca Benatti is the CEO of EryDel, a biotech company developing and commercializing cell-therapy treatments for rare diseases using autologous red blood cell encapsulation technology to deliver drugs. With a focus on the rare genetic disease Ataxia Telangiectasia (AT), Erydel has just completed a multi-center, multi-national phase III trial for the disease. Their symptomatic treatment has been shown to delay the progression of the disease and could be part of a regular immunoglobulin therapy session for these patients. Luca explains, "The first characteristic of our technology since there are similar technologies that utilize red blood cells to deliver therapeutics, is that we are the only one that has developed a technology that can work at the bedside. So, it's really the only one that can use the patient's blood, and we don't need to have a centralized lab. The beauty of this technology is that it is the only one that can use a sustained release formulations technology - that is, the one that is actually being developed for Ataxia Telangiectasia - on which we have completed phase III study results." "So, from the time of blood withdrawal from the patients and for our lead product, we take 50 milliliters of blood from the patient, a small amount, and within a couple of hours, patients can go home. They are only required to stay for the blood withdrawal and the blood infusions. The rest of the process is done by a small machine that is fully automated and operated by trained personnel." #EryDel #AtaxiaTelangiectasia #EryDex #RareDisease #AT EryDel.com Download the transcript here

Eliav Shaked, CEO, and Catherine Bornbaum, Head of Clinical Operations and Partnerships at RetiSpec are using hyperspectral retinal imaging to find more accurate and earlier biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases. As part of a regular eye exam, this non-invasive test can be administered by an ophthalmologist or optometrist using existing retinal cameras with the data being analyzed using AI to identify unique molecule signatures. Eliav explains, "What's unique about hyperspectral imaging or specifically hyperspectral retinal imaging is the fact that it's a tool that measures different coloring of elements in a much more detailed way. So, while we humans are limited to seeing and interpreting only three colors, hyperspectral retinal imaging can cover more than a hundred different colors in a very precise way. And it's really our way to get much more content from the back of the eye. And what RetiSpec is doing with that data is we're integrating our very own artificial intelligence that allows us to recognize patterns that no human eye can see." Catherine elaborates, "We are focused right now on identifying the markers for Alzheimer's disease through this hyperspectral retinal imaging. But because of the close connection between the retina and the brain, we believe that there are also a number of other indications and specifically neurologic conditions that can be detected using this approach for things like ALS, MS, Parkinson's disease, CTE, and a number of conditions." @RetiSpec @EliavShaked @CathBornbaum #RetiSpec #EarlyAlzheimersDetection #AlzheimersDisease #RetinalScans #HyperspectralImaging RetiSpec.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Sam Asgarian is the Chief Medical Officer of Scipher Medicine which is predicting drug response with precision immunology by building on the work of the Human Genome Project. Now that the human genome has been mapped, the next challenge is how to turn that information into use cases that are applicable in treating specific diseases. Sam explains, "The goal for us is to figure out which part, very specifically, of the autoimmune system is overacting and analyze that through a simple blood sample. We can take the blood in just a simple lab draw, just like other blood work, and analyze areas of perturbation or areas where the immune system specifically is overacting. That gives the physician enough to then treat it with a prescription that focuses only on that specific area which, of course, in the immune system is critically important because it's still serving a very important goal of protecting that person against disease. You don't want to shut down the overall immune system. You just want to quiet the area that's leading to that rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis." "I think in this early onset of what we have out there, our goal is leading with the diagnostics, giving the physician a treatment selection or therapy selection tests to get them out of trial and error and into this world of precision immunology." @ScipherMedicine #ScipherMedicine #PrecisionImmunology #PrismRA #Diagnostics #RheumatoidArthritis #AutoimmuneDiseases #AutoimmuneDisorders #IrritableBowelDiseases #HumanGenomeProject ScipherMedicine.com Download the transcript here

Sunny Jain is the Founder and CEO of Floré by Sun Genomics and is driven to better understand the microbe cells that live inside of our intestinal tract and all around our body.  With a history of working at Illumina, Sunny is studying the DNA from those cells, the microbiome, to understand their function and how they contribute to our overall health. Sunny explains, "Sun Genomics has created the world's only precision probiotic, And it utilizes AI, DNA sequencing, biome chromatics, and e-health technology. Our technology helps us build the largest database of microbiomes that are sequenced via metagenomics, or whole genome sequencing, to understand the modulatory effects or the changing effects that food ingredients and probiotics can have for 80 plus million Americans that suffer from gut health issues every year." "So, you truly are unique, from a gut microbiome perspective. Our human DNA is 99.9 percent similar. So, we're very identical from a human DNA perspective. But the DNA from microbes of the gut, you're maybe 10 percent similar, and you are 90 percent unique from the gut microbiome." "And this is really where I think precision medicine can enable a lot of advancement to our human health. It is really within that large, vast difference where we will be able to find much more customized solutions." @SunGenomics #SunGenomics #GutHealth #Probiotics #Microflora #CustomizedProbiotics #Microbiome #SanDiego Flore.com Download the transcript here

Tim Clackson is the President and CEO of Theseus Pharmaceuticals which has a mission to outsmart cancer resistance by developing pan-variant tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) that are designed to hit different types of cancer cell mutations. The goals of the therapy are to delay treatment resistant cancer as well as effectively deal with the variety of cancer mutations once they have occurred. Tim explains, "The unfortunate truth is that nearly all types of tumors at some point are going to develop resistance. We are at this stage now where some tumors that are caught early can be really cured and go into long-term remission. Still, there's a substantial portion of tumor types and certainly those that are caught a little bit later that unfortunately show an almost inevitable evolution of resistance. So, then the challenge becomes, can you delay how long that resistance takes to emerge? And then can you come up with therapies or approaches that will hopefully substantially prolong the post resistance treatment with a different therapy?" "So kinase is a name for a family of proteins that often goes bad in cancer. Often the mutations are in kinases, and our approach is really to develop what are called kinase inhibitors, tyrosine kinase inhibitors or TKIs. There are many TKIs already developed, but we believe that it's really important to develop a particular kind that we call a pan-variant inhibitor. So that is a molecule that is designed to hit any of the different flavors of resistance cancer that you can find in a patient. Unfortunately, one of the biggest problems in cancer treatment, especially when you have a cancer with a particular driver, is that you find multiple different types of resistance in the same patient." @ThereusRX #GastrointestinalStromalTumors #GIST #Cancer #Oncology Theseusrx.com Download the transcript here

Dr. John Krakauer is the Chief Medical Advisor at MindMaze, pioneers in digital neurotherapeutics focused on brain health and recovery from neurological diseases and injuries. John explains, "What we really mean by digital neurotherapeutics is the belief that one can actually administer a medicine in a way that's different from pharmacology, different from surgery or devices. But in fact, consider software as a pill so that you can actually have a software experience, an immersive gaming-like experience that can actually have an effect on a disease, in particular, neurological conditions in a way comparable to other medical approaches." "So MindMaze really would like to create immersive gaming software that allows the nervous system after injury or disease to undergo such change. We're different, I think, in so much that we realize that you can't just be an app on a phone or a tablet. You have to be in an immersive full-body experience that combines exercise, cognitive challenge, and skill learning. And so, we're creating that kind of digital therapeutic experience." @MindMazeTech #ImmersiveTherapy #NeurologicalDiseases #NeurologicalInjuries #DigitalHealth MindMaze.com Download the transcript here