Empowered Patient Podcast

Brent Lucas, CEO of Envoy Medical, highlights the lack of innovation in hearing aids and the need to better address hearing health. Envoy has developed fully implanted hearing devices that provide 24/7 hearing assistance without the need for daily recharging of the battery. With the introduction of over-the-counter hearing aids and the advanced Apple AirPods Pro 2, customer options have been expanded, making it easier to address some forms of hearing loss. Implanted devices eliminate the limitations of external hearing aids and reduce the impact of hearing loss on their daily lives. Brent explains, "Part of the problem in the hearing loss industry has been that it's not well understood. So there has not been a great deal of competition and innovation in the hearing loss world. Most of us have thought about hearing loss and how it's addressed by looking to our grandparents, the elders. Plenty of people joke about our dads or our grandfathers not being able to hear our grandmothers. When I tell people I'm in the hearing industry, the first thing that they say is, I can't hear you. And I always fall for it. And I say, I'm in the hearing industry, and they come clean that it was a joke. At the end of the day, there are unmet needs in finding solutions for people that are not just the status quo. That's really where Envoy Medical is building products that are fully implanted, in a sense, a better life because they're not tied to their hearing loss." "Right now, the current solutions on the market are all external products that need to be taken off at night or around water in the shower, during strenuous activity, working out, sweating too much, that sort of thing. You have to take your external device off. Our devices are fully implanted, meaning you can be capable of hearing 24/7, hearing all day, every day. We think that's the right thing to do for a patient because your hearing loss, after all, is a 24-hour problem. It shouldn't be that your solution is only on for part of the day." #EnvoyMedical #HearingLoss #Acclaim #HearingAids #CochlearImplant $COCH #HearingHealth envoymedical.com Download the transcript here

Caleb Manscill, President of Vyne Medical, has a mission to present a holistic view of data, from origination to use, within a healthcare organization. The goal is to guide them to find ways to streamline the workflow, save time, reduce errors and costs, and improve patient outcomes. Using AI to handle faxes, data entry, and other administrative tasks can free up staff to handle issues that require human intervention. Vyne Medical provides insights about implementing technology and overcoming cultural resistance to changes in healthcare organizations. Caleb explains, "We've got multiple use cases, but I'll speak to two. The first one is the simple handling of faxes. There's lots of unstructured data coming into different points of care. In this case, I'll talk about the hospital, but there are lots of referrals being made. There are lab reports being sent and there's data that needs to be appended through HIM. Often, this data will come in through the fax machine as unstructured data, and individuals will pick up this paper. And we're talking, again, going back to the paper and picking it up and keying it in. There's the risk, not to mention miskeying it or accuracy. Still, that process is potentially taking place anywhere. If it's a simple patient order, it could take a few minutes. If it's an extensive lab report, it could take upwards of 20 minutes. The automation or AI utilized within our product suite and platform can take that down to 30 seconds or even just a few seconds, depending on the workflow that needs to be initiated." "That's why we exist in that very specific use case of fax management. The way that our solution works is it streamlines the whole process so that there isn't any paper handling. So it's almost as if it's being sent electronically, through the internet, or however you want it to be. What's most important to us is that if they're not going to change their behavior, at least we can meet them where they are and streamline it as if they had adopted the most up-to-date APIs or ways of sending those data." #VyneMedical #Workflow #Hospitals #Automation #HospitalWorkflow vynemedical.com Download the transcript here

Andre Esteva is the CEO and Co-Founder of Artera, a company focused on improving prostate cancer diagnostics. The company uses an AI-driven test, validated in large-scale clinical trials, to analyze a tumor biopsy or surgical specimen and predict response to therapy and likely long-term outcomes. This helps inform treatment decisions, reduce the risk of over-treatment, and support healthcare equity in diverse patient populations. Plans are underway to expand the AI-driven diagnostic tools to other solid tumor types leveraging the ability of AI to learn across different cancers. Andre explains, "In general, when it comes to the treatment of prostate cancer, and this is true for most cancers, clinicians tend to be conservative, rightfully so, and there is a tendency to overtreat patients. You see, when it comes to assigning a therapy to a patient, there's this notion of the optimal therapy, and you want to get it right. If you undertreat your patient, the disease will progress, and nobody wants their cancer to progress. So as a result, patients tend to be overtreated when too much therapy is applied. While that does support killing the cancer, it also comes with a series of negative side effects. Real toxicities occur, and this is especially true in the case of prostate cancer." "The ArteraAI test is an AI that will look at an image of a patient's tumor, specifically a digitized image of the patient's histopathology of a biopsy or surgical specimen. It will look at all the patient's cells and the tumor morphology and the tumor microenvironment, everything else that you'll see on a histopathology slide in the form of a digital image. From that, it'll generate a report for the patient's clinician with two pieces of really important information on it. The first piece is how that patient will respond to therapy. The AI will predict the response to therapy. The second piece is prognostic information. So, the AI will prognosticate patient outcomes. Outcomes here mean will the patient's cancer metastasize in the next five or 10 years, will the patient die of cancer, will dangerous biochemical levels recur in time and so forth. And in doing so, we help to inform treatments." #Artera #MedAI #AI #ProstateCancer #CancerDiagnostics #Tumors #HealthEquity artera.ai Download the transcript here

Len D'Avolio is the CEO of Blue Circle Health a program launched with the support of the Helmsley Charitable Trust to provide care, education, and support to adults with type 1 diabetes. The program provides free, remote support for 6 months including access to continuous glucose monitors, endocrinologists, counseling, insurance navigation, and affordable insulin and clinical care. The program aims to address the care gaps that exists for people with T1D and support them to better manage their condition. Len explains, "The Helmsley Charitable Trust, which is a major philanthropic donor to the space dedicated to improving the lives of people with T1D, basically recognized that there's this big care gap between what people with T1D need to live healthy lives and what the US healthcare system tends to provide, based on what is or isn't reimbursable. So, they gathered a bunch of experts and conducted a number of focus groups and decided they'd like to close that gap. They formed Blue Circle Health as a free care education and support program designed to work with folks for about six months, trying to empower and educate them and close the gap." "Education itself is not as widely reimbursed as it should be, and this particular condition requires a thousand more decisions a day than the average person dealing with a health problem because you're playing the role of your pancreas. You're having to understand your blood glucose levels, the foods you're about to eat, and then it's one of the few diseases in which we ask people to measure out and administer a potentially deadly bolus of drugs many times a day." #BlueCircleHealth #T1D #Type1 #Type1Diabetes #DiabetesAwareness #CGM #TypeOneDiabetes #TypeOne #EmpoweredPatient #Florida #Ohio #Delaware #Maine #Vermont bluecirclehealth.org Download the transcript here

Henry O'Connell is the CEO and Co-Founder of Canary Speech, which analyzes voice biomarkers to detect various medical conditions, including neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cognitive decline. Their approach looks at the underlying mechanisms of speech controlled by the central nervous system rather than the words spoken. The technology has been validated to correlate with clinical diagnoses at a high accuracy level. It provides real-time, objective assessments to healthcare providers, which could help overcome biases and reveal early signs of the presence of a disease. Henry explains, "Canary Speech is now about eight years old. Jeff Adams, my business partner and friend, and I created Canary Speech to evaluate voice for a range of different human conditions and diseases. We actually established an approach that was unique in the market. Jeff has a history of innovation in voice and voice analysis. He was the lead that developed the first natural language processing commercial tools. He also led the team that developed Dragon naturally speaking, the most prominent tool for transcription services in healthcare. He also led the team that built the Amazon Echo." "With that deep experience and 40 years of relationship together and friendship, we created Canary speech. Canary looks at sub-language characters and elements. We look at 15 million different data elements every minute, and we process those for a range of different diseases, progressive neurological diseases, cognitive health, and behavioral health. We're beginning to build models for children's health." "Everything that we have built has been built in clinical settings with peer review with organizations such as The Harvard Beth Israel, Hackensack Meridian, Intermountain Healthcare, Cala Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, Belfast Hospital, and Alster Hospital in Belfast, and also National Institutes of Health in Japan. So, we use those rigorous environments and those clinical settings to build local biomarker algorithms that can identify." #CanarySpeech #Biomarkers #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #Alzheimers #Parkinsons #CognitiveDecline canaryspeech.com Download the transcript here

Greg Mayes, President and CEO of Reunion Neuroscience, is developing a psychedelic therapy for the treatment of postpartum depression. This serious acute, non-chronic mental health condition affects an estimated 20% of women after giving birth. A phase two trial is underway to evaluate how RE-104, a rapid-acting psilocybin-like novel molecule, can help women with moderate to severe postpartum depression get faster relief compared to existing treatments. Greg explains, "The course of our psychedelic administration is significant because we believe it can be shorter in time period than other psilocybin-like treatments. In our case, we were able to establish it as 3.7 hours. Because it's a psychedelic and it is for an acute and non-chronic indication, we believe that women who take our product will see a rapid uptake and potentially day of administration benefit of the psychedelic therapy. Our phase two study is called the RECONNECT study because it's named for women reconnecting with themselves, their families, their children, and the world around them." "Postpartum depression is considered to be a subset depressive of major depressive disorder, major depressive order that's not put into remission after two treatments becomes treatment-resistant depression. There's also generalized anxiety disorder. We believe that RE104 and our lead product have a lot of legs to potentially go in this area. But as the CEO of the company, we want to stay focused. We know what we need to do first and foremost is we need to get our RECONNECT phase two proof of concept study and women with moderate to severe postpartum depression recruited. And we need to show that we can work there. Once we show that, we'll pivot to other indications. One is adjustment disorder in patients with cancer and with other major medical illnesses like Parkinson's disease, ALS, MS, or pulmonary fibrosis." #ReunionNeuro #PostPartumDepression #PPD #Psychedelics #Mothers #MentalHealth #Depression #RECONNECTStudy reunionneuro.com PPDReconnectstudy.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Adrian Quartel, Chief Medical Officer at Zevra Therapeutics, has received FDA approval for their drug MIPLYFFA in combination with miglustat, the first treatment in the US for Niemann-Pick type C, an ultra-orphan disease. This hard to diagnose, rare genetic lysosomal storage disorder affects the recycling of cholesterol and lipids in cells, leading to neurological and physical problems. The Amplify Assist program has been set up to help patients access and afford the treatment. Adrian elaborates, "Niemann-Pick C is a very rare or ultra-orphan disease. It's one of what is considered a lysosomal storage disorder. I'll try to explain a little bit about what that means. So lysosomes are little organelles or little systems within the cell that are basically the waste disposal system from the cell. They break down worn-out parts on the inside of the cells, or they break down harmful molecules and waste products. They're effectively recycling materials in the cell. So, any lysosomal storage disorder actually affects the system where waste products are recycled within the cell. In Niemann-Pick C disease, it's specific for lipids such as cholesterol or sphingolipids inside the cell that need to be recycled." "The early onset of the late infantile onset usually occurs before the age of 10. Then, you have the juvenile and adult-onset, which usually occurs after the age of 10 and have different types of symptoms. Once you have the neurological symptoms, they usually start with delay in motor milestones in the younger children. But most often, we see a diagnosis happening between the ages of, say, three and seven, starting with problems in walking, stability or gait problems, clumsiness, delay in speech, or losing the ability to speak appropriately, as well as seizures, problems at school, problems to follow direction at school, some behavioral problems." #ZevraTherapeutics #RareDisease #OrphanDisease #NiemannPick #NPC #NiemannPickAwareness #PediatricRareDisease zevra.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Shika Pappoe, CMO and COO of Carna Health is working to identify and treat chronic kidney disease earlier through screening tests. This is a breakthrough for a disease that often shows no symptoms until the damage is irreversible. Using technology and AI-powered risk prediction models to improve early detection and intervention for CKD can help slow or even halt the progression of the disease. In recent pilot programs in Bermuda and Cameroon, Carna Health found high rates of CKD and is working to connect those patients with the necessary care. Shika explains, "Chronic kidney disease is a condition that has been growing over the years. We know that diabetes and hypertension are leading causes, and currently, CKD is the 10th leading cause of death globally. And by 2040, it's estimated that it will be the fifth cause of death. Carna is working on finding ways to identify kidney disease early so that we can slow progression and optimize the outcomes of patients around the world." "We are seeing globally increasing rates of, again, diabetes and hypertension, the number one and two causes globally. Interestingly, communicable diseases have often been the priority in low- and middle-income countries. Still, we're seeing the rise of noncommunicable diseases such as CKD. I should say one of the other causes of this increasing epidemic is the environmental stressors, particularly heat. So. we see a lot of individuals who are working or living in very hot climates who are developing recurrent episodes of acute kidney injury, which ultimately leads to CKD. So, we have numerous causes for the increasing epidemic of CKD around the globe." #CarnaHealth #ChronicKidneyDisease #CKD #EarlyDetectionCKD Carna.Health Download the transcript here

Karthik Ganesh, CEO at OnMed, is expanding access to healthcare through its CareStation, a self-contained medical pod that allows patients to receive comprehensive primary care services conveniently. The CareStation is designed to be easily deployed and operated in underserved communities, including rural areas, prisons, and foster care facilities. This scalable, hybrid approach provides a personalized examination using medical devices and cameras that allow a remote clinician to prescribe treatment and, if necessary, arrange for further actions. Karthik explains, "The OnMed CareStation gives you the psychological comfort and the confidence of a comprehensive primary care visit. With the rapid scalability and the convenience of telemedicine, it essentially takes the best of both worlds between virtual care and traditional care while also neutralizing the inherent scalability weaknesses and experience weaknesses of both of those. This is why we look at OnMed really as a hybrid care company and the CareStation as a tech-enabled, hybrid care vehicle." "Pretty much every day of the week without a wait, you can just walk in for care. It's cleaner than a doctor's office because, after every single visit, we use UVC lighting to clean out the CareStation. UVC has been known to essentially kill over 99.9% of viruses and bacteria inside of the CareStation. And then, finally, the third thing I would say that makes it unique is it's an extremely personalized experience. There are the reviews we've gotten back from the patients going into the CareStation, where they feel the interpersonal connection with a live clinician. Still, at the same time, they feel it's without any distractions of a doctor's office, people walking outside, the doctor coming in and out, and so on. They feel in that contained space, it's an extremely personalized and intimate conversation with the doctor, exactly as you would expect a highly personal doctor-patient relationship to be." #OnMed #HybridCare #HealthEquity #HealthcareAccess onmed.com Download the transcript here

George Eliades, the CEO of Mythic Therapeutics a company focused on the next generation of antibody-drug conjugates, ADCs, to treat cancer. Their approach aims to expand the population of patients who can benefit from ADCs by targeting proteins expressed at low levels on cancer cells. The company's lead candidate targets the MET protein in non-small cell lung cancer cells and is designed to deliver chemotherapy more selectively and effectively to cancer cells using the FateControl ™ technology. George explains, "We try to be different in two important ways for patients. If you think about ADCs, they've been around for a long time with the promise of bringing chemotherapy-like efficacy, but the safety of a targeted therapy because so much less chemo is being administered to the patient and that chemo is going directly, at least in theory, to the cancer cell. That was sort of the first promise. The second thing that's happened over the years is that the patients who benefit from ADCs tend to be a very small subset of patients, and those are the patients who express a very high level of the target. Generally, it's a protein on the cancer cell that the ADC binds to. And if you don't have a high level of that target expression in general, you don't benefit as much from the ADC." "What we're trying to do is two things. Number one, we're trying to make it so more patients can benefit from ADCs and bring it to the patients who have low expressions of those proteins we're trying to target. And the second thing that we're trying to do is deliver on the initial promise. When I say that, I mean to have a drug that is very tolerable for patients but gives them the tumor shrinkage that the patient wants. Also it lets them stay on the drug without feeling terrible so they can get on with their day." #MythicTherapeutics #ADCs #AntibodyDrugConjugate #FateControl #NSCLC #LungCancer #Oncology mythictx.com Download the transcript here

Karl Ulfers, CEO and Co-Founder of DUOS, helps older adults and their caregivers access government benefits and programs to improve the quality of life and enable aging in place. Working with Medicare Advantage and dual-eligible health plans, DUOS uses a combination of technology, generative AI, and personalized support to help patients navigate the system to apply for and receive state, Federal, and VA benefits and services. The focus is on addressing the social determinants of health and health equity, especially in rural and underserved communities. Karl explains "It's really interesting when you study these individuals that we work with. We tend to get about 15% of a payer's population activated and using our service, which is pretty high. And the people that make up that population, it's quite interesting - 88% of them make less than $28,000 a year. They're, on average, about 74 years old. They tend to skew female versus male and value what we bring to them in terms of helping them tap into these benefits and government programs available to them. They either didn't know about or didn't know how to use them." "We love to say that we are re-imagining the aging experience and to some of the comments where we started our conversation - we believe that we're not just creating a system of aging. We're creating a system of aging that we ourselves are going to inherit. So we're motivated by the direct impact that we can have on the older adults in our lives, as well as the impact that we can have on the system in the future for ourselves." #DUOS #AgeTech #MedicareAdvantage #Medicare #AgingIndependently #PowerofConnections #Healthcare #SDOH #VABenefits #FederalBenefits getduos.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Ed Glynn, Chief Clinical Officer at RhythmX AI, is bridging the gap between real-world clinical data and the use of artificial intelligence. One of the key problems RhythmX is trying to solve is the cognitive burden on primary care clinicians to understand all relevant details about each patient. Using the RhythmX platform, an AI-enabled intelligent assistant sits alongside the doctor to summarize patient information, track progress, and provide recommendations to help provide more holistic, patient-centered care. Ed explains, "Our vision is to really pioneer hyper-personalized care. We do this by enabling clinicians, specialists, and care teams to deliver the right care, at the right time for the right patient and the right channel. We do this through a very clear focus on marrying both real-world clinicians- clinicians who are out there on the front lines and see patients - with deep artificial intelligence experience. And we have a number of years in many different engineers in the background taking care of this. We believe that the synergy of these two aspects, real-world clinicians with deep artificial intelligence experience, is much greater than the sum of the two. And that's the spirit we're approaching primary care with this new tool." "As a starting clinical officer here at RhythmX AI, I see my focus as bringing together those two worlds: the real world, the clinical world, and this artificial intelligence world. It's bridging the gap between the two of those and assuring that the two of these aspects, clinicians and artificial intelligence expertise, can sit down and decide what are the prioritized problems that are facing primary care clinicians today? How do we approach that and bring safe, trustworthy artificial intelligence as an intelligent assistant to these clinicians on the front lines? Ultimately, through this process, we champion patient safety and quality here at RhythmX AI." #RhythmXAI #PrimaryCare #HealthAI #Healthcare #PatientCentric #ClinicianBurnout #CognitiveBurnout #PrecisionCare rhythmx.ai Download the transcript here

Marina Bigsby, Chief Customer Experience Officer at AccessOne, focuses on providing financial products and services to help make healthcare more affordable for patients and improve the physicians' revenue cycle management. The aim is to provide more transparency and payment options upfront to avoid situations where patients forgo needed care. Using AccessOne's technology and mobile payment solution, providers collect payments faster and proactively identify and address operational inefficiencies and staffing challenges. Marina explains, "We're a technology company. We partner with our providers and look at their various situations. Their situation might be that they have a pocket of their population with high debt problems, or maybe there is a staff shortage or some other operational efficiency challenge. We're designing a product that works for them. Our platform is highly configurable, and we built something that works for them and helps them collect more so they can allocate funds to wherever they need. We have a proprietary funding option, so they can work with us to accelerate cash quickly into their RCM or manage risk differently. So that's really what we're doing. We're working with them to collect more so they can help more patients." "It's a time savings so that they get cash faster, which is always good, but it's also a time savings from an operational savings. So responses are great -- we send out a text and our MobilePay product is a replacement, a complete replacement of a piece of paper. Awareness of the text helps people say that even if they don't want to pay through the text, they know there's a bill and know it earlier than they normally would have, so they can pay it however they'd like. Whether in a portal or through our text, that awareness is increased. There are lots of glowing reviews around that product." #AccessOne #RevenueCycleManagement #RCM #PatientExperience #PatientFinancing #PatientAccess accessonepay.com Download the transcript here

Aaron Patzer, Founder and CEO of Vital, focuses on the stress on patients and clinicians created in urgent care, emergency rooms, and hospitals. The Vital platform provides real-time updates and plain-language explanations for patients on their mobile devices. Managing expectations for wait times, connecting to electronic health records, and providing discharge instructions increases patient satisfaction, reduces the burden on doctors and nurses, and causes and addresses staff turnover. Aaron explains, "Everything is done on your mobile phone. You step into a hospital, whether it's urgent care or an emergency visit, or if you're admitted to stay overnight, it's called an inpatient stay. You'll get a text message. So it'll say, welcome to Children's of Los Angeles. Do you want to see what your wait times are? To understand your test results, click here. All you have to do is click this special link, like an airline record locator or password reset link. It can only be used by you. It's secure and brings up a mobile web application that is just a personalized webpage for you. Just like an Airbnb, a Facebook, or something personal to you." "The other thing we let patients do is ask them throughout their visit how things are going. Is it one star or five stars? If they say, you know what, it's been a four or five-star visit, we'll say, great, do you want to tell your nurse that you appreciate them?" "I was worried. I thought it was going to be mostly negative. It turns out that it's about 15% one- and two-star negative comments and 85% positive. And most nurses don't get compliments. They're in one of the most high-stress jobs you can have. They're often verbally or even physically assaulted. They're assaulted more than police officers. There've been a bunch of articles on this. It's crazy what happens in hospitals and emergency rooms. A steady stream of compliments has made all the difference in their quality of life." #VitalAI #AIinHealth #HealthcareTransparency #VitalPatientExperience #HealthTech #PatientEmpowerment vital.io Download the transcript here

Haitham Ayad, CEO of SPIMA Therapeutics, has developed a global licensing agreement for its lead peptide-based immunotherapy candidate, which targets the Myddosome complex involved in inflammation. This approach aims to target undruggable protein-protein interactions, leveraging the advantages of peptides over small molecules and antibodies. In addition to inflammatory diseases like acute pancreatitis, SPIMA is also exploring the potential in certain cancers with mutations in the Myddosome complex. Haitham explains, "In fact, what happened is that the four scientific co-founders worked together for long years to develop and to bring them to the clinical phase and to secure a global patent for that. So, at one point, the technology transfer office of the university, which is called SATT, decided that it was the appropriate moment to create a spin on the company so that the company could continue the work and take the lead candidate further to the clinical phase. And I joined at that point as a co-founder and CEO, immediately after the legal creation and incorporation of SPIMA, we signed a global licensing agreement with SATT to secure the rights of the lead candidate globally. At the same time, we were accepted in the incubator of the University, which is called the TTM factory. So we're happy to continue working with that set and the university to progress the lead toward the clinical phase." "It's known that more than 80% of drug targets consist of interactions between proteins, which take place inside the cells. So this is a big challenge for drugs because small molecules, small chemical molecules that can go inside the cells, are not very specific enough to inhibit this interaction between two big proteins. On the other hand, large molecules like antibodies have good specificity to inhibit such interaction, but they are too large to go inside the cells. This is the sweet spot of SPIMA Therapeutics because the peptides have the advantage of each category. They have very good cell penetration and good stability. So, it's allowed them to go inside the cell, and at the same time, they have enough specificity to block this interaction between the two proteins. This is where we choose our target, the Myddosome complex, which is the interaction between several proteins involved in the inflammation process." #SPIMATherapeutics #Peptide #Immunotherapies #Cancer #Oncology #StapledPeptides #Inflammation #Immunology #DrugDiscovery #DrugDevelopment #AggresiveCancers #PeptideTherapies spima-therapeutics.com Download the transcript here

This is a conversation with Nicole Andrews, a patient with LGSOC and STAAR Ovarian Cancer Foundation Board Chairperson, and Dan Paterson, President and CEO of Verastem Oncology. Low-grade serous ovarian cancer is a rare and slow-growing ovarian cancer that is often misdiagnosed. Verastem Oncology is developing a targeted treatment for LGSOC and working with the STAAR Foundation to inform researchers about the disease and ways to improve treatments. Nicole was finally diagnosed with LGSOC after 18 months of unexplained symptoms, and her role at the STAAR Foundation is to raise awareness and funds to support research. Nicole explains, "I have since learned that low-grade is difficult for pathologists who aren't used to seeing it and don't know the intricacies of diagnosing. My surgeon finally said I have to get this right because it changes treatment." "So, she asked permission to send this to a specialty cancer center. And we did. Once that happened, they came back pretty quickly and said this was low-grade serous ovarian cancer. They were used to seeing it. They had high volume cases of reading pathology reports and, therefore, were able to diagnose and diagnose it." Dan elaborates, "The majority of ovarian cancers are so-called high-grade, and that's when you hear about treatment with chemotherapies like platinum. A new class of drugs called PARP inhibitors came out in the last couple of years. And I think when you generally hear about ovarian, it's high grade. It was only in the last couple of years that the World Health Organization and, more recently, the FDA, based on some of our work, recognized it as a distinct and different disease because it acts very differently. It tends to occur in younger women, and it's slower growing, which, on the face of it, you would think is a good thing. And I think a lot of times, and we've heard anecdotes, and Nicole can probably speak to this, where women have said, oh, well, you have the good ovarian cancer. The downside of a slower-growing tumor is it's harder to treat." #VerastemOncology #STAARFoundation #LGSOC #LGSOCAwareness #LowGradeSerousOvarianCancer #Cancer #RareDisease verastemoncology.com STAAR Foundation Download the transcript here

Maria Perrin, President and Chief Strategy Officer at PPL, is focused on expanding access to self-directed and whole person care allowing people to stay in their homes and receive the services they need to maintain a good quality of life. Consumer-directed care programs funded by Medicaid allows disabled and the aged populations to choose their own caregivers they know and trust to provide personal services like meals, dressing, and transportation. PPL provides training, technology, quality assurance, and other support to help consumers and their caregivers participate in these programs. Maria explains, "So the programs differ from state to state. If someone needs care in their home, say they had an injury or they need help because of a disability or certain access, they can get help for people to, for example, come in, prepare meals, help them get dressed, and for bathing. Or if they're relatively healthy and can do that themselves, some programs support things like meal services, transportation, occupational assistance, and other goods and services they may need to thrive." "We see a lot of health disparities. I know that many people who work in healthcare talk about this, and you have communities that are underserved. They don't have enough home health workers in their community to serve them. Often, they don't have facilities that speak the language they speak or consider their religious or cultural implications. Therefore, the consumer-directed care program allows people to choose the caregiver that meets their needs and to have them deliver the services within their home." "That's a little different than, for example, a home health agency model whereby the agency will choose the caregiver they get, and that person may or may not be trusted by the individual consumer. They may not speak the same language as the individual consumer. So this elevates the care that the consumer is getting to what they specifically need and establishes trust by enabling them to choose the caregiver. A caregiver may be a family member, it might be a church member, a friend of the family, someone who's in the community who they already know and trust, and who can best serve that particular consumer." #PPL #Healthcare #Caregivers #ConsumerDirectedCare #SelfDirection #AtHomeCare #CommunityBasedSupportServices #LongTermServicesSupports #Medicaid PPLfirst.com Download the transcript here

James Grover, President of Vyne Dental, addresses the friction and inefficiencies in the dental healthcare system to facilitate payments and improve patient outcomes. The dental care environment is fragmented and lacks coordination between patients, dentists, and payers. Vyne Dental works with dental practices to streamline the revenue cycle management process, improve patient communication, and ensure timely and accurate payments. James explains, "We sit at the commerce crossroads between patients, practices, and payers, basically helping patients to pay, helping payers to pay, and helping practices to get paid for the services that they’re rendering." "Then in the payer space, they’re trying to avoid fraud. They also have certain places where there are plans that approve certain things but don’t allow for others, and they need to do their work. Unfortunately, there’s a tremendous amount of waste between all three constituents. That waste results in higher prices for patients and less business success for both practices and payers." "So you have a patient who gets services and the practice is pretty much programmed to get that payment when the patient comes back in the next time. Why? Because they want their insurance to pay for it. For practices to get paid, that patient has to come back in. Well, there’s a huge problem. The ADA says that only about 41% of new patient visits result in the patient returning. And so, about six in ten new patients don’t return to the practice, and there is only about 85% retention of existing patients." #VyneDental #AccelerateRev #DentalBilling #RCM vynedental.com Download the transcript here

Professor Piotr Trzonkowski, CEO of PolTREG, is focused on developing cell therapies for autoimmune diseases like type-1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis using polyclonal T-regulatory cell therapy. Treg cells are key in regulating the immune system and preventing autoimmune diseases. Clinical trials are showing promise for safe and effective treatments for preventing type-1 diabetes in pre-symptomatic patients and maintaining insulin production for years after treatment in those with this form of diabetes. Piotr explains, "My initial research subject was vaccination in the elderly, and I was looking for the reasons they did not respond to the vaccine. It was initially on the flu vaccine. The same is valuable, for example, for the COVID-19 vaccine. What we found is that elderly people do not respond to the vaccines because of the high level of accumulation of T-regulatory cells. T-regulatory cells can suppress immune responses, which is bad for the elderly." "A very simple answer would be if you compare the immune system to kind of an army. The majority of the army fights with enemies. In the case of the immune system, these enemies are bacteria and viruses that attack us, and in each and every army, there must be police who keep an eye on the soldiers. So, the soldiers really fight with the enemies and do not fight with the self-tissue." "The T-regulatory cells are a kind of military police of the immune system, which really keeps an eye on the immune system. So, the immune system fights with bacteria and virus cells and does not touch our own tissues. We call it in immunology, keeping the immune tolerance. So, proper immune tolerance is very dependent on T-regulatory cells. We say that this is an immune-dominant mechanism. T-regulatory cells are present in each and every process where the immune system responds to the bacteria. So, we successfully fight the infection, and at the same time, we do not destroy ourselves." #PolTREG #TregCells TRegulatoryCells #CellTherapy #AutoimmuneDiseases #Diabetes #Type1Diabetes poltreg.com Download the transcript here

Cecil Pineda, Senior VP and Chief Information Security Officer at R1 RCM, is focused on integrating robust cybersecurity into the revenue cycle management process. When healthcare organizations are hit with ransomware attacks, they must respond rapidly and accurately communicate with internal and external partners. Long-term strategies include controlling network access, backup/recovery testing and educating personnel in order to limit damage from attempts to invade the network. Cecil explains, "I think most organizations, not just R1, many organizations have made that decision beforehand whether to pay or not. And that decision is not easy. That’s something that takes into account several factors, starting from patient safety to protecting customer data and being able to go back into operations. So there are a lot of things that they can do, the analysis before making that call. So, beforehand, a lot of organizations have their stance on payments." "Another key area besides speed is communications. This is something that organizations should focus on. You don’t want patients, relatives of your patients, business partners, shareholders, and other groups to learn it from social media. Going out there quickly with the proper level of messaging and the right amount is key in communicating with your partners." "I would say that in the first couple of hours, you probably need to make sure that you can communicate quickly at the right level and with the right information without causing any panic. It’s good to be able to reach out quickly to your partners before they get the wrong information from social media." #R1RCM #CyberSecurity #CyberAttacks #DataSecurity #Ransomware #DataProtection #InformationSecurity #RCM R1rcm.com Download the transcript here