Empowered Patient Podcast

Amir Raza is the Vice President, Strategic Services at Encora and is working with technology-enabled companies to design and support patient engagement, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, digital clinical trials, and connected care solutions. Amir explains, "So, if you peel back the onion on the statement, we are a product engineering services company. I think what it unveils is four core capabilities that support that assertion. The first is the ability to build underlying digital platforms. The second is having mastery of data because data is increasingly crucial and critical, certainly within the empowered patient, consumer engagement, patient engagement space. I mean, data is the oil of that industry. So, all things data." "Then, of course, I think the other key capability that comes into play when you're designing these kinds of platforms is CX, or what is known in the industry as CX/UX, which is consumer experience and user experience. How do you design delightful, intuitive products? Finally, I think the core competence, which is the scaffolding that holds these first three capabilities together, is around what's known as dev sec ops and cloud ops." @EncoraInc #Techtalks #MedTech #SoftwareDevelopment #Healthcare #Healthtech #DigitalHealth Encora.com Download the transcript here.

Khalid Al-Maskari is the CEO of Health Information Management Systems (HiMS) and a thought leader in healthcare informatics. Behavioral healthcare is an area that Khalid has identified as ripe for innovation and where integration of systems needs to be better focused on transparency and the coordination of the care of patients. Khalid says, "So in behavioral healthcare, a lot of the communication is between care coordinators and case managers. And most of it traditionally has been on the side of the healthcare providers having a lot of information, and then patients communicate with them. But the communication typically is long-term communication. It's not instantaneous. A lot of times, the patients have to request that information rather than them having access to it directly. So it's a longer process, unlike going to a PCP for a specific issue, behavioral health typically is a long-term process." "One of the things that COVID made clear is that behavioral health patients are ready to be more active and participate in their healthcare. The other part that has accelerated also is the use of technology and machine learning. So there's a lot of data. There's very little, in my opinion, kind of looking at that data and translating it into something that would improve both the patient and the provider side." @HMSFirst #EHR #IntegratedHealthcare #BehavioralHealthcare #PatientEngagement #HealthTech #BehavioralHealth #COVID19 HMSFirst.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Paul Peter Tak is the President and CEO of Candel Therapeutics which is focused on educating the immune system to recognize and kill tumor cells in patients with a solid tumor. Candel is developing immunotherapies using engineered oncolytic viruses for prostate cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and eye cancer. Paul Peter explains, "Viruses probably got a bad reputation during the pandemic, but you can actually use them to do something beneficial to a patient, and that's what we are doing. So, using molecular engineering, we change the viruses in such a way that they infect the tumor cells and that they induce cell death. They kill the tumor cells in a way that activates the patient's own immune system, which is basically a very natural way to fight cancer." "So, at the same time, we change the so-called tumor microenvironment from a cold tumor, a tumor that is not very active in terms of immune activity, into a hot tumor where we activate a whole variety of immune cells. And that's an optimal way to immunize the patient against the patient's own variety of so-called cancer neoantigens, the molecules that are being recognized by the patient's immune system." #CandelTherapeutics #Oncology #OncolyticVirus #Immunotherapy #LungCancer #ProstateCancer #BrainCancer #Glioma #PancreaticCancer #EyeCancer #Cancer CandelTx.com Download the transcript here

Bronwyn Spira is the CEO of Force Therapeutics which is supplying tools to manage procedure-based care. CMS  created CMMI, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to evaluate new alternate payment models and service delivery models that were designed to reward high-value, high-quality care while also reducing payments. They would reduce the payments to clinicians who were not meeting the performance standards but preferentially reimburse high-quality and high-value providers. And these were called alternate payment models or APMs.  Bronwyn explains, "I think the important key here is that in order to reward quality, you first have to be able to measure quality and collect quality measures. So this is where patient-reported outcome measures and performance measures become so key. You actually now need those measures to submit for reimbursement based upon the services you're providing." "And this has changed provided behavior in a big way because before these APMS were implemented, a lot of providers actually didn't even have organized ways to collect or report quality measures, patient-reported outcomes. Some of them were using pieces of paper or mailing them to patients' homes and then spending a lot of money on nurses or medical assistants who would then have to input the data into some kind of a system." @ForceTherEx #carecoordination #carepathways #careredesign #COVID19 #digitalcare #HospitalatHome #patientengagement #patientexperience #PhysicalTherapy #PROMS #Recovery #Rehab #RehabatHome #Rehabilitation #RehabTherapy #Treatment #ValueBasedCare ForceTherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Matt Walz is the CEO of Trialbee which is empowering patients through a more inclusive trial process. The Trialbee Honey product provides three user experiences on top of one common data architecture linking the patient, the test sites, and the sponsors providing real-time information about enrollment and how a study is performing. The Trialbee Hive product uses real-world data to model outreach to a hyper-targeted audience. Matt explains, "In terms of remote participation for studies, COVID brought to light the fact that there are tools and methods that have been available to allow patients to participate more and collect data more during clinical research without having to have frequent visits to a site. Not in all cases, but in a number of cases. And that also accelerated timelines to get to the point where you can seek a regulatory authority approval." "One of the things we've done in some of our studies, and this really comes down to how you do outreach for recruitment, is we've started to look at rare diseases that have unique symptoms. And so Pompe disease, for example, has a set of rather unique characteristics. We recently recruited for Pompe disease where rather than just look for patients or try to recruit patients that have already been diagnosed but to actually do outreach based on the symptoms." @Trialbee #ClinicalTrials #TrialRecruitment #RareDisease #COVID19 Trialbee.com Download the transcript here

Sheeza Hussain is the Chief Commercial Officer of Biofourmis which is developing a hospital-at-home model for health systems that is even more in demand due to the stress of COVID-19 patients.  In addition to acute care, Biofourmis is also applying its remote monitoring technology to post-acute and chronic care. Sheeza explains, "When we think about hospital-at-home, we think about acute level type care-at-home. It's not about being cared for exactly as you would be in a hospital. But it's for those patients who still, for all intents and purposes, need to be monitored and need to be admitted to a hospital. But instead, they get to go home. They get monitoring equipment, they get to go to the comfort of their own bed, and they're still visited by clinicians or physicians every day in person as is a requirement for some of the reimbursement." "So when it comes to hospital-at-home, it's about in our case, a patch and we're device agnostic. We offer a patch that the patient wears on their chest, and it is continuously capturing data, things like the single-lead ECG, heart rate, respiratory rate. And that is feeding our analytics engine and allowing us to be able to establish a personalized baseline for each and every patient." @Biofourmis #HospitalatHome #RemoteCare #CareatHome #PatientMonitoring #PostAcute #ChronicCare #Hospitals Biofourmis.com Download the transcript here

Tomer Shussman is CEO and Hila Glick, VP of Physical Therapy and Customer Experience of OneStep and we talk about the ways OneStep is set to augment PT for both patients and their physical therapists using the patient's smartphone.  OneStep is a smartphone-based digital physical therapy service that provides around-the-clock dedicated physical therapy courses, clinical-grade motion analysis, and real-time feedback and progress reports of patients. Using the smartphone as the gait lab equivalent, OneStep is able to measure walking in all kinds of environments and when performing day-to-day activities. Tomer explains, "What we are doing, and in that way, we are changing physical therapies substantially, in that we are enabling physical therapy to continue outside of the clinic. So, we augment the physical therapists, allowing them to treat more patients from the convenience of home, for both the PT and the patient. And that way, we enable the patients to, for example, exercise five minutes a day, their own time, build life-lasting habits, instead of having to drive to the clinic and then meet the PT once a week, every week." Hila says, "While physical therapy is a practice that you do with hands-on, I was amazed to see how wonderful and meaningful results you can get with working remotely and what amazing connections and tremendous results are possible for walking and recovery when you work with a PT remotely." @DigitalOneStep #GaitAnalysis #MotionAnalysis #PT #PhysicalTherapy #DigitalHealth OneStep.co Download the transcript here  

Mike Gladstone is the Global President of Inflammation & Immunology at Pfizer.  We talk about conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and atopic dermatitis (AD) and how minority patients with these conditions are often misdiagnosed. Mike explains, "Well, it turns out that a lot of these diseases are completely unseen, or those diseases that are seen are just not well understood. And the reason why is, for instance, if I look at someone suffering from atopic dermatitis, for example, you may see some of the symptoms that they have, and those are bad enough, some of the redness and scratching and so forth. But what you don't know and what you don't see is how the patients suffer sometimes. They have the stares from others, they feel those stares, they feel the distance. They feel the judgment from others who see their condition, but it also goes much deeper than that. What you don't see for those patients is the constant itching." "Now, Black and Hispanic children are also more likely than White children to miss school because of AD, and they're likely to report uncontrolled or longer duration AD. And despite the prevalence of skin conditions like this with minority individuals, they're underrepresented in medical dermatology textbooks and clinical research." @Pfizer #ChronicConditions #AtopicDermatitis #Dermatology #HealthEquity #HealthInnovation #DigitalHealth #AFib Pfizer.com Download the transcript here

Kleanthis Xanthopoulos is Co-Founder and CEO of Shoreline Biosciences. He talks about the Shoreline cell therapy platform that uses standardized manufacturing of allogeneic induced pluripotent stem cells to create an effective treatment to kill tumor cells with multiple advantages over autologous T-cell therapies. Kleanthis explains, "We are focusing specifically on two different effector cells, Natural Killers and Macrophages, and we derive them from a platform which is induced pluripotent stem cells. This gives us the ability to really engineer the NK cells and Macrophages that we derive from iPSC, so they become allogeneic standardized, meaning they can be introduced to any patient and then are targeted and specific." "Initial clinical results are showing us that iPSC derived NK cells don't appear to have the kind of side effects that you see with T-cells. So we are very, very excited about that. And we are seeing that there's a different dimension in cell therapies that can be served very, very nicely through these allogeneic pluripotent stem cell based therapies." After the interview, Shoreline announced it has raised $140 million in its latest fundraising round. #ShorelineBio #ShoreBiosciences #Oncology #Immunotherapy #NKCells #iPSC #Macrophages #SanDiego Shorelinebio.com Download the transcript here  

Francois Michelon is the CEO of ENDRA Life Sciences and describes the thermoacoustic enhanced ultrasound -TAEUS-technology ENDRA is developing to provide a safe and cost-effective way to measure the fat in the liver and diagnose non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). NAFLD is overtaking hepatitis as the world's leading root cause of the need for liver transplants. Current diagnostic options are using expensive MRI machines or performing a liver biopsy. Francois says, "There are no blood tests that currently we're aware of that can measure fat in your liver. It's not like cholesterol that floats around in your bloodstream. You have to measure it directly, and it doesn't even deposit uniformly in your liver." "ENDRA's technology uses a combination of radiofrequency pulses, which are akin to an MRI going in. Those radiofrequency pulses get absorbed differently into tissues. And we've been able to decode the sonic sound waves that come back out of tissues from that absorption of radiofrequency." "As a result, we can do things that are very different from ultrasound, including measuring fat in the liver, along with other things like showing tissue temperature change to guide thermal ablative surgeries and other things that we have in our roadmap." @ENDRALifeSci #NAFLD #NASH #LiverDisease #Ultrasound #TAEUS ENDRAInc.com Download the transcript here