Raise the Line

After battling chronic illness as a child, Dr. Janelle Sokolowich swore she’d never step foot in a hospital again and started pursuing a different path in college. But life had a way of bringing her back to the world of medicine. “I started thinking back to all the nurses that made such an impact on me as a child and helped me to grow up to be a functioning adult,” she explains to host Michel Carrese. Now as academic vice president and dean of the Leavitt School of Health at Western Governors University, Dr. Sokolowich is in a position to help many others like herself pay it forward by becoming healthcare providers. The school serves 20,000 to 30,000 students per month and seventeen percent of all BSN holders in the country are graduates, but Sokolowich is keenly aware this can be an unattainable dream when cost and other factors come into play. That’s why Leavitt strives to keep tuition low and her performance as Dean is evaluated based on how much debt students have when they graduate, and if they are earning a livable wage two years post-graduation. “We want to be the most inclusive university in the country and we see ourselves as personally responsible for advancing health equity through education.” Check out this thoughtful conversation about competency-based education, strategies for meeting health needs in rural America and the importance of mentoring. “I want to build that next set of nurse leaders and I take it personally, because I have been gifted and blessed with many that have done it for me.”Mentioned in this episode: https://www.wgu.edu/online-nursing-health-degrees.html If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

Major depression, smoking, anorexia nervosa, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Alzheimer’s disease...is it possible for psychedelics to play a positive role in all of these conditions? There are indications the answer may be yes, which is why Dr. Al Garcia-Romeu and his colleagues at The Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research are so busy. “We're learning more, but as we learn more, the rabbit hole gets deeper and so it's a really fascinating time to be involved in this work and to see the expansion in all these different areas.” As he explains to Raise the Line host Shiv Gaglani, this is not about research for the sake of research. “A big part of the end goal here is to get this in a place where anybody who wants to quit smoking in the country can go to a clinic and get this type of treatment because we’ve shown that it seems to work.” Garcia-Romeu recognizes there are many steps to be taken before that’s a reality --including, of course, FDA approvals if clinical trials are successful -- but there is also a need to train a national corps of providers to guide psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions, a better system for recruiting diverse populations for studies, and insight into how current and future providers perceive psychedelics and their potential utility, a topic the Center is also researching. Don’t miss this in-depth look at the challenges and opportunities in a fascinating area of medical research.Mentioned in this episode: https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

Deepak Thomas, Co-Founder of Phil, Inc., shares his personal experience with chronic Lyme disease and the inefficiencies in the healthcare system. He discusses the need for improving user experience in healthcare access and proposes leveraging familiar technologies for automation. The podcast explores a prescription process that improves efficiency and compliance rates while reducing burdens on prescribers. Thomas also discusses the challenges, future plans, and partnerships of Phil in improving the prescription process.

As our Year of the Zebra focus on rare diseases continues, we’re putting several neurological conditions in the spotlight whose symptoms include neck pain, vertigo, swallowing issues, memory trouble and many more: idiopathic syringomyelia; idiopathic scoliosis; and the Arnold-Chiari Syndrome type 1 caused variously by cavities in the spinal cord and brain herniation. Fortunately, our guide is one of the world’s leading experts in this area, Dr. Miguel Bautista Royo-Salvador, Director of the Institut Chiari & Syringomyelia Escoliosis de Barcelona, and President of the Chiari and Scoliosis and Syringomyelia Foundation.  In his fifty-plus years of focus on these conditions, Dr. Royo-Salvador has alternated between research activity and clinical practice in which he applies a treatment method he developed called the Filum System.  Inventing this new approach was sparked by a patient who experienced very little improvement from what was the standard surgical treatment at the time. “I have come to the conclusion that an abnormally intense caudal traction of the entire central nervous system is the cause of the descent of the cerebellar herniation in Chiari Syndrome type 1, as well as of scoliosis and syringomyelia and others. To speak figuratively, it's like a pull from below on the whole central nervous system,” he explains to host Michael Carrese. After 2,100 procedures with a subjective improvement rate of 95%, Dr. Royo-Salvador and the Institute are working to broaden awareness of this minimally invasive approach.  Tune-in for an educational journey into these rare conditions and a proven technique to relieve patient suffering.Mentioned in this episode: https://institutchiaribcn.com/  If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

In this episode of Raise the Line, we dive into the fascinating story of a very old technology, EEGs, being mined for data using a very new technology, AI, that's changing the way treatments are being developed for disorders of the brain. Joining host Michael Carrese to explain is Dr. Jake Donoghue, co-founder and CEO of Beacon Biosignals, a startup that’s using AI to unlock precision medicine for various neurological, psychiatric and sleep disorders. “We utilize our AI tools to bring quantitative endpoints into clinical trials to see if the drugs are impacting brain activity,” Donoghue explains.  AI’s ability to quickly recognize subtle changes in electrical activity that might otherwise go unnoticed can accelerate the trial process and hopefully, approval of new therapies. Donoghue is also interested in the area of sleep medicine because of its connection to a wide variety of issues including depression, PTSD, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. “We think there's a lot of opportunity to bring quantitative insights to this fundamental state that all humans go through and map some of these really robust features of brain activity to increase understanding of disease and health.”Mentioned in this episode:  https://beacon.bio/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

If psychedelics are eventually authorized by the FDA for use in mental health treatment, much credit will go to The Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research which sparked a renaissance of interest in the compounds starting in 2006 under the guidance of Dr. Roland Griffiths. The first study was actually not about clinical applications of hallucinogens but rather it observed their impact on healthy people. “One of the most remarkable findings Roland Griffiths encountered early on was that people would endorse the statement that they had one of the top five or the single most personally meaningful and spiritually significant experiences of their lives,” says Associate Center Director Dr. Fred Barrett, who met host Shiv Gaglani in his office in Baltimore for this extended conversation. And while the Center is actively researching potential clinical use of psychedelics, which is promising, it remains interested in how they may improve the lives of those not in need of mental health treatment. “What are the opportunities for spiritual growth? What are the opportunities for increasing well-being? There's an opportunity for exploration here that, if we're very careful, may have utility and value outside of the medicalization of these compounds,” adds Barrett. Don’t miss this expansive (dare we say mind-expanding?) discussion of the possible reasons psychedelics may help people with depression, why they are not prone to misuse, and what they tell us about the nature of consciousness itself. Mentioned in this episode: https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

“The unifying theme across our portfolio is that whatever a company we invest in is building can make a population-level health impact. For us, that means that what they're doing is going to lead to innovation that is ultimately accessible to huge portions of the global population,” says Gurdane Bhutani, co-founder and managing partner of MBX Capital, a venture capital partnership dedicated to investing in early-stage companies focused on big public health problems. As he explains to host Shiv Gaglani, that ambitious mission is focused on three main themes: accumulated environmental exposure (exposome), biosecurity and biodefense, and healthcare infrastructure. “The majority of disease pathogenesis today is environmental in nature, not genetic. So we're looking at companies that are developing exposomic sequencing technologies that help us better understand these environmental exposures.” One such company is using human-relevant tissue models to test for environmental contaminants. Others include a nurse scheduling platform and a firm that’s localizing radiology systems for underdeveloped areas. Bhutani has a track record of investing in interesting and impactful companies in healthcare (in fact, he was an early backer of Osmosis!) so you won’t want to miss his insightful perspective on promising ideas for improving health and healthcare systems.Mentioned in this episode: https://www.mbxcapital.com/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

One challenge in developing treatments for rare diseases is finding enough people with the condition to mount valid clinical trials.  Databases that contain diagnostic codes for specific conditions can help, but those miss people who may have the condition but have yet to be conclusively diagnosed.  That’s where Verana Health comes in, a digital health company that uses AI to mine its data network of more than 20,000 healthcare providers and the clinic notes they make about patient encounters. “If you wanted to find somebody with a specific genetic defect, or a specific condition for which a diagnostic code doesn't even exist, clinic notes represent really the only place you could discover that information,” explains Dr. Michael Mbagwu, an ophthalmologist and Verana’s Senior Medical Director. Verana partners with the American Academy of Ophthalmology, the American Academy of Neurology and the American Urologic Association to manage their clinical registries which were built to improve quality of care, answer research questions and help physicians report quality metrics. Join host Michael Carrese for an exploration of the ways medicine is being changed by the ever-growing amount of data available and the new technologies which allow clinicians and others to analyze and use all of that information. “Some of the things that we just assumed were never possible or were kind of hopeless endeavors are now possible for the first time thanks to AI.” Mentioned in this episode: https://www.veranahealth.com/ If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

“In 2010, it took three-and-a-half years for medical knowledge to double. Now it takes around seventy-three days,” says Dr. Ted O’Connell, who is among the many medical educators who wrestle with how to help students manage that kind of information load. Artificial intelligence can be a tool for synthesizing vast amounts of data, he says, but it also has the potential to massively increase the amount of information coming at a student. “I think it will be very important for learners to understand what their learning style is so they can harness AI to help them,” he tells host Shiv Gaglani. O’Connell plays an important role in the field, serving as regional director of undergraduate, graduate and continuing medical education at Kaiser Permanente in Northern California and the author of eighteen medical textbooks with Elsevier where he also serves as editor-in-chief of ClinicalKey MedEd. Don’t miss a wisdom drop from this best-selling author, podcast host, speaker, company founder and family physician about the importance of mentorship for medical students, the need for further diversity of images in medical learning materials, and other ways to improve medical education. If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast

We've heard many stories on Raise the Line about patients and their family members who, upon getting a rare disease diagnosis, build a non-profit organization from scratch to boost advocacy and research for the condition in question. This is obviously a pretty big hill to climb for people with no background in such things. Well, today we're going to learn about Beacon for Rare Diseases, a UK non-profit designed to provide the expertise and support needed to get a rare disease patient group off the ground, and to connect these groups with each other for the purpose of mutual education and support. “What we've seen is that people forming and building patient organizations can help really trigger a new community around that, and help drive the field forward,” Beacon CEO Dr. Rick Thompson tells host Shiv Gaglani. “What we want to do as an organization is help those patient groups form, to grow, and to professionalize their work.” Tune in to find out how Dr. Thompson’s background in evolutionary biology, research and education impacts his work at Beacon, why rare diseases should be approached in the same way as cancer, and his interest in repurposing existing drugs for use in treating rare diseases. Mentioned in this episode:  https://www.rarebeacon.org/  If you like this podcast, please share it on your social channels. You can also subscribe to the series and check out all of our episodes at www.osmosis.org/podcast