Empowered Patient Podcast

Brian Drozdowicz, Senior VP and General Manager for Acute and Payer at PointClickCare, provides a platform using predictive analytics and AI for data sharing and collaboration across healthcare stakeholders. Interoperability has been an ongoing challenge due to the lack of standards and clear governance to support data sharing. The shift to value-based care drives the need for more access to patient data to improve patient outcomes, facilitate care transitions, and reduce readmissions and costs. Brian explains, "PointClickCare has been a player in the market for quite some time. We're best known for the market-leading senior care EHR that we've had in market for 20-plus years. I run a business unit that sits by the side of that. We refer to that as the acute and payer business. And ultimately, this additional business and value proposition to the market operates the largest care collaboration network, sharing healthcare data across all the different stakeholders, hospitals, health plans, ambulatory clinics, community providers, and connecting is our core business. So we're ultimately in the business of sharing data and doing that safely, securely in a trusted way." "There are a lot of ways of driving adoption and sharing data at scale. I'd call out a couple of key areas in which we've seen a lot of progress in recent years. First is having well-established technology standards that safely and securely transmit that data. Number Two is having to share that data. So, otherwise, it's a bunch of data flowing back and forth just for the sake of data. And that doesn't solve anything with value-based care. Putting a set of guardrails in place requires providers and payers to work together with this data." #PointClickCare #HealthcareData #Interoperability #MedAI #DataSilos #ValueBasedCare #VBC pointclickcare.com Download the transcript here

G.T. LaBorde, CEO and Co-Founder of IllumiCare, focuses on reducing hospital clinical waste. Doctors often make decisions about tests, medications, and procedures without knowing the actual cost to the hospital and the patient. The IllumiCare platform aims to nudge doctors to make cost-effective decisions without compromising the quality of patient care by providing cost information and clinical guidance at the point of care. Another benefit is the reduction in overtesting and overprescribing, supporting efforts to improve patient safety.. G.T. explains, "When doctors make decisions about what test to order and what medications to prescribe, particularly in the inpatient setting, they have no idea what the cost is. They don't know the relative cost of one drug or another, and it's not a knock on doctors. It's very difficult to know because there are, in our average hospital across hundreds of hospitals, something like 2,000 different medications on the formulary that are available to order if you're a provider." "We self-impose a limit, on average, taking only 60 seconds of a provider's attention a day. We calculate when we nudge somebody, when we present something in their workflow, how much time is it on the screen? And it comes down to 60 seconds a day of attention that we take. So we take great pride in how much technology we use to figure out when not to say something or not. We try to figure out the person most likely to take action, and is this information germane to this person for this patient, such that there's a high probability they'll take action? And we measure how frequently people take the action we recommend, and it's several times higher than similar alerts within the electronic medical record." #IllumiCare #ValueBasedCare #VBC #HealthcareInnovation #ClinicalDecisionSupport #HealthIT #HospitalIT #EHR illumicare.com Download the transcript here

Gary Falcetano, Scientific Affairs Manager for Allergy at Thermo Fisher Scientific, is a leader in allergy and autoimmune diagnostics, providing specific IgE tests and the instruments to run them. Accurately diagnosing allergies can be challenging, but specific IgE testing can help confirm the underlying causes by looking at individual allergen components for precise diagnosis. This is the first step in determining the appropriate management approach to potentially interrupt the atopic march, where allergies can progress or even be life-threatening. Gary explains, "It runs the gamut of just about anything that could potentially be an allergy disease. So I think the majority of our testing is done in both environmental allergies and food allergies. What people think about when we, especially this time of year in the US, with spring about to become a big onslaught, are environmental allergies, including pollens, grass, trees, and weeds. Also, looking at some of the indoor triggers to environmental allergies like dust mites, pets, molds, and mice is pretty key when assessing for respiratory-type symptoms. On the food side, any of a number of foods can potentially cause a patient to produce specific IgE, which is the sensitization that allows us to become allergic." "We all think of respiratory allergies as straightforward, but there's an overlap of symptoms, especially from non-allergic causes, that can cause similar symptoms. So when thinking about respiratory allergies, we think about nasal congestion, post-nasal drip, and cough. Those symptoms can all be certainly caused by allergies, but they also can be caused by non-allergic triggers. That's one of the places where diagnostic allergy testing or specific IgE testing comes in to confirm whether we're dealing with an allergy. Then, if it's an allergy, what specifically is driving the symptoms? Once we rule out allergy, we can go down a whole other diagnostic pathway for all the various causes, like non-allergic rhinitis." #ThermoFisherScientific #Allergies #AllergyTesting #ClinicalDiagnostics #PatientCare #IgETesting thermofisher.com Download the transcript here

Chia-Lin Simmons, CEO of LogicMark, is developing technology solutions to help seniors age independently and safely. Their AgeTech ecosystem addresses the requirements and comfort levels of the diverse aging population and provides predictive technology to identify potential health issues and emergencies. The key is keeping a human-centric approach to the application of this technology and integration with other health monitoring devices and apps. Chia-Lin explains, "At LogicMark, we tell people that the medical react technology business is saying that our job is to make better technology to help identify that fall or a catastrophe or a health issue, and then help as we can within that golden hour in a medical emergency. When I joined the company in June of 2021, our goal was not just to be even better at reactive technology but to develop predictive technology, which is to take a look at the pattern of living and your experiences and being able to stop that first initial catastrophe or fall if we can. And that's where our interest and a lot of our IT development have been focused on." "Our job as technology providers to caretakers and those they love is not that we're meant to be technology that is helicoptering over, for example, your parents. Our job is to provide a safety net. And I think that visual, to give you a sense of what we think is important, at the end of the day, your parents are not your children. They want to live independently and live the life that they want to live fully as grown adults. And so our job is to provide them with the capability to be independent and safe, as well as the safety and privacy they want as grown adults. And so, how does that translate? At the center of everything we do, we call compassionate technology or human-centric technology." #LogicMark #AgeTech #HealthTech #MedTech #ElderCare #AgingInPlace #SeniorSafety #Innovation #FutureOfHealth #HealthcareInnovation #ConnectedHealth logicmark.com Download the transcript here

Martin Brenner, CEO and Chief Scientific Officer of iBio, is focused on the untapped potential of therapeutic antibodies for obesity and cardiometabolic diseases. Leveraging AI and machine learning, iBio is streamlining the antibody discovery and optimization process and addressing the need for more complex antibody mechanisms of action. Their lead candidate, iBio 600, is an anti-myostatin antibody designed to address the side effects of muscle mass and bone density loss associated with current GLP-1 therapies. Martin explains, "We can separate this into multiple areas. First of all, there's a predictive model that suggests that there are 5,000 different targets related to disease out there. So, there are 5,000 different possibilities to make medicines. All of the currently approved antibodies target only 92 targets. Even worse, 40% of approved antibodies only target about 10. So you can imagine there's a huge untapped potential of novel targets for which antibodies could be used. The problem is that the technologies must keep up with this to open that novel target space. That is problem number one." "So, as you know, AI has gotten a little bit of a bad reputation over the last few years, and there was a huge hype about this, and I want to be very clear about this. It takes more than 10,000 steps to make a medicine. At iBio, we enable three of these steps with generative AI. So, that does not make us an AI company. That does not make our molecules AI drugs. What it does is it actually makes it possible for us to create medicines that we couldn't do before. So, the way we use AI at iBio is multiplefold. First, we start our discovery process with the epitope steering engine. You have to imagine that drug targets are massive proteins, and only very small regions on these proteins have a biological function. So you want to get your antibody exactly to those regions that cause a biological function." #iBio #DrugDiscovery #MedAI #Obesity #GLP1 #CardioMetabolicDiseases #Antibodies #AntibodyTherapies #Myostatin iBioinc.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Lauren Parks Nicola, Chief Medical Officer at RevealDx, has extensive experience dealing with the challenges of accurately describing lung nodules and distinguishing between benign and malignant nodules based on visual inspection of CT scans. RevealDx software tool integrates into the radiologists' workflow and uses advanced algorithms and a large database of lung nodule data to provide a malignancy score for lung nodules. This technology can help reduce unnecessary follow-up scans and invasive procedures for patients with benign lung nodules while identifying high-risk ones requiring more aggressive investigation. Lauren explains, "Reveal's product is a software that characterizes lung nodules. So lung nodules, little blips on a lung that we find on a chest CT. And the thing is, they're very, very common. Lots of patients have them, they can turn out to be cancer, most of them aren't. But with the knowledge that we have right now, just as radiologists looking at those nodules, it's really hard to tell which ones are going to turn out to be cancerous and which ones aren't." "The software tool characterizes which nodules are more likely to be malignant and might need faster diagnosis, more aggressive workup, biopsy, some interventions, things that can help us diagnose cancer earlier when it's easier, less expensive, and much better for the patient to treat versus the ones that don't need that kind of care. And for a lot of patients, that means not needing follow-up scans, not needing biopsies, and not needing invasive treatments to prevent something that would never have been a problem for them in the first place. So it is that added information, as well as added clinical information, gives us and the patients tools to better predict how these are going to behave." #RevealDx #RadiologyAI #MedicalImaging #Radiology #LungCancer #DigitalHealth #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AIinHealthcare #MedicalAI reveal-dx.com Download the transcript here

Daniel Getts, the CEO and Founder of Myeloid Therapeutics is focused on the role of myeloid cells in the immune response to solid tumors. These cells are the first responders in the immune system and play a crucial role in bridging the innate and adaptive immune response. The Myeloid Therapeutics' mRNA technology activates myeloid cells in tumors, making the tumor microenvironment hot and attracting other immune cells to fight the cancer. Daniel explains, "The ability to harness our immune systems has revolutionized how we treat cancer. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go, and if you think about some of the worst of the worst cancers, such as pancreatic cancer, liver cancer, and so on, immunotherapy has still not gotten us to a place where we can solve this. It's our mission at Myeloid Therapeutics to overcome these challenges. We've uncovered a lot of really interesting things about these cancers in the last 20 years, and we've been harnessing that knowledge." "Myeloid cells are at the heart of the immune system. They're the first responders. So, if you have an infection or bump your knee, these cells are immediately called to the site to wall off and prevent any more damage. However, they also serve as the bridge to adaptive immunity, the T cells and the B cells, which are also important for integrating an immune response. In the context of COVID vaccines, we talk about antibodies and T cells, it's the myeloid cells that are essential. In the context of what we've been learning, immunotherapy, up until recently, had been very focused on T cells and how to short-circuit the whole system just by using or activating those cells to kill cancer. And what we're starting to learn is to harness the full capability of our own immune systems, you've got to go back to the start. You've got to harness the myeloid compartment so you can orchestrate all immune elements to kill cancer." #MyeloidTherapeutics #MyeloidCells #ImmuneSystem #SolidTumors #Cancer #ImmuneResponse #Oncology #TumorMicroenvironment myeloidtx.com Download the transcript here

Saul Marquez, Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, emphasizes the need for strategic healthcare communications, including earned media and paid advertising, content creation, and social influencers. The explosion of social media and online news outlets has changed the healthcare information environment, challenging companies to express authentic and intentional messages to their target audience. Identifying pain points and unique propositions is key to effective healthcare messaging that persuades, motivates, and informs. Saul elaborates, "I started the Outcomes Rocket agency as a podcast, and then it evolved into a full-service agency focused on healthcare organizations, leaders, and brands looking to maximize their impact in the market and accelerate their growth. We work in four areas: strategy, earned, owned, and paid. So, under each of those categories, there are different focus areas." "It's never been more important for leaders to be authentic in an age of artificial intelligence and just so much noise. Authenticity cuts through that noise. And when I say authenticity, it's important for brands as well as leaders to be true to who they are, and it's important that the message be well-crafted and intentional. So, if you're being authentic on the fly or on the whim, that's not very strategic. You want to make sure that under the strategy and the work you do to put your messaging out there, that everything ties back to why you do what you do. How is it different? Whether you're an individual influencer or a brand, what is the promise?" #OutcomesRocket #HealthcareInnovation #DigitalMarketing #HealthTech #HealthcareCommunications OutcomesRocket.health Download the transcript here

Robert Maxwell, Founder of ClinConnect, is building this neutral third-party intermediary between patients and clinical trial sponsors, improving on the clinicaltrials.gov platform by streamlining the clinical trial enrollment process. This patient-facing platform provides patients with up-to-date information about trial options and eligibility criteria and guides them through the enrollment process. This resource is particularly significant for the rare disease community, where ClinConnect works with patient advocacy networks to improve study design and identify trial participants. Robert explains, "One thing that has changed over the last year since we last spoke is we have far more relationships and far better relationships with many clinical trial sponsors. So the folks behind whatever therapeutic or investigational, drug, biologic, whatever it might be. And so when it comes to recruitment and enrollment, we have what are called enrollment criteria, inclusion and exclusion criteria. Those are filed within the protocol with the FDA. Every clinical trial has some set of enrollment criteria." "Anyone can go to the FDA and get an understanding of what any trial enrollment criteria might be. It's listed on clinicaltrials.gov. But oftentimes what we have found is that the protocol that is on file with the FDA actually might be out of date, it might be invalid. There might be an update. There might be 10 updates that haven't been submitted to the FDA. And so what's helpful when patients work with a platform like ours, or I think we're the only one still somehow the only one doing this, is that we have those direct relationships with the sponsors." #ClinConnect #ClinicalTrials #ClinicalTrialRecruitment #ClinicalTrialEnrollment #ClinicalTrialRetention #RareDiseases clinconnect.io Download the transcript here

Angela Adams, CEO at Inflo Health, is addressing the opportunity to improve the tracking and follow-up of radiology findings. Info Health uses natural language processing to understand radiologists' reports and identify findings that require additional imaging and possible actions. Healthcare providers often lack the resources to manage radiology test results effectively. Inflo Health's solution can drive significant revenue to these providers by minimizing missed follow-ups and appointments. Angela explains, "Inflo Health is a technology company that serves healthcare—primarily health systems and imaging centers. We're built around solving the problem for health systems of never missing a follow-up related to radiology. If you look at the research, it will show you pretty readily that about 50% of radiology findings and actionable findings are missed in the healthcare system today, primarily because it's a really difficult problem to solve. You've got a radiologist who dictates a report in real-time, understanding what the imaging is showing on a patient. Many times, they dictate multiple follow-ups in a study. They might find something that's incidental, meaning they're going for an image of their cervical spine because they have an upcoming surgery, but they might find a thyroid lesion on that scan. So, for the patient, not only how do we identify that there's a follow-up in that report, but also how do we care navigate the patient in the right direction?" "The really big issues in the health system today are care navigation and the identification of follow-ups, which Inflo helps solve. We built a large language model. You probably hear that term a lot these days with ChatGPT and OpenAI and things like that. If you can think of one that's very specific to radiology language. What we've done is teach a computer to speak radiology language so that it can understand what the intention was of the radiologist. So we very much empower the radiologist, and whatever their follow-up is that they're identifying, we basically put a microphone to that, and we automate the tracking, the follow-up, the patient communication. So, we engage with the patient to ensure they understand their care. And in doing so, we're able to save - our last estimate was close to 20,000 patient lives a year." #InfloHealth #Radiology #PatientCare #HealthTech #HealthcareInnovation #MedAI inflohealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Chris Duma, President and Founder of Regeneration Biomedical, is developing stem cell therapies to treat neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, ALS, and multiple sclerosis. Their approach involves directly injecting the patient's stem cells into the brain ventricles to stimulate the brain's innate stem cells to repair and replace damaged neurons. Current clinical trials are showing promising results and, notably, minimal side effects compared to other Alzheimer's drugs. Chris explains, "So our focus is to treat the full disease and make a difference in the disease's progression. The way the disease presents itself and the way that the disease is actually cured. The focus until now has been to target particular areas of abnormality in patients’ brains. Those with Alzheimer's disease, as we know, have plaques in the brain, and they have tangles in the brain. Alzheimer's disease was discovered or invented by a pathologist in the early 1900s. When they sliced the brain of an Alzheimer's patient, they found these abnormal collections of protein, and they called them plaques and tangles. The target of most research and most treatments have been monoclonal antibodies to these plaques and tangles. And we at Regeneration Biomedical do not necessarily feel that that is the cause of the problem. We think that they're the end product of cell death. So, what you need to do is fix the problem from the origin, and there might be nothing other than a stem cell that could do that. So that is our trajectory, and that's where we are today." "We had rogue stem cell clinics out there that were giving stem cells for every possible disease, and patients were lured to places like Mexico, Germany, and China to get very expensive stem cell treatments that were probably completely worthless. The difference between them and us is that we're an FDA-cleared trial. We have gone to the FDA to do this and believe me, you are right, the FDA opening up their arms to stem cells is absolutely brand new. We're actually one of the newest kids on the block who can do this. What we're doing with our stem cells, which is directly injecting them into the brain, which we can discuss later, is the first in the world. We're at that threshold now that the FDA is probably looking more and more into this and more and more into personalized medicine. And that's what this falls into the category of as well." #RegenerationBiomedical #AlzheimersDisease #AlzheimersResearch #RegenerativeMedicine #StemCellTherapy #NeurodegenerativeDiseases #MedicalInnovation regenerationbiomedical.com Download the transcript here

Will Ho, President, CEO, and Co-Founder of IN8bio, a company developing next-generation cellular therapies using gamma delta T cells, which play a unique role in bridging the innate and adaptive immune systems. GDT cell therapies may have reduced side effects compared to other T cell therapies as they can more selectively target tumor cells while sparing healthy tissue. IN8bio is conducting clinical trials using autologous and allogeneic gamma delta T cells for leukemia and glioblastoma with the goal of eliminating the cancer. Will explains, "As you probably are aware, our immune system is generally broken down into two halves. One is the innate or the immediate portion of the system, which is why we're called IN8bio, the gamma delta T cells, which are considered innate immune cells. On the other, the adaptive is the memory part of our immune system. The gamma delta T cells bridge between both the innate and the adaptive. They actually have features across both. In particular, one of their natural functions is actually to discriminate and to distinguish between those cells that are healthy and safe versus those that are transformed or should be eliminated. That's the very challenge of cancer cells. At the end of the day, they're our own cells, and the gamma delta T cells have a unique ability to distinguish between what should be safe and left alone versus those cells that they should kill." "With the CAR T therapies, we have genetically engineered specific targets such as CD 19 or DPMA into an alpha-beta T cell - somewhat of a release and let it go. Those cells go and seek out every cell in the body that expresses its specific target and kills it. I kind of half-heartedly joke that it's a little bit like Terminator- once you let it go, it seeks its target to try to kill it, no matter the secondary damage. In many cases, we've had numerous toxicities, some of which have resulted in patient death. The gamma delta T cells are more nuanced in its approach. We have created CAR T, specifically for the biology of gamma delta T cells." "Early preclinical work shows they can discriminate between the leukemic cells that should be eliminated and the healthy tissue. This will become increasingly important as we try to target solid tumors. Solid tumors is a market that's nine times bigger than that of leukemias and lymphomas. It's challenging because the tumors, at the end of the day, are intertwined in an organ. Most likely, we need to keep those organs, whether they're your brain like in glioblastoma that we're targeting, or lung cancer or pancreatic cancer and others, we need to be able to discriminate and pick out the healthy tissue versus the tumor tissue because we can't just completely ablate the organ." #IN8bio #CancerZero #Immunotherapy #Immunology #CancerResearch #TCellEngagers #GDTCells #CART #CellTherapy #GeneTherapy #Pharmaceuticals #BioTech #ClinicalResearch IN8bio.com Download the transcript here

Patrick Mobley, CEO and Co-Founder of Vivid Health has developed a platform to address the inefficiencies in the post-acute care industry. Home health and hospice nurses often spend hours completing required paper-based forms and assessments to create personalized patient care plans and submissions for payments. This technology aims to streamline the workflow and collection of patient information while proactively monitoring patients and using AI-powered voice agents to improve patient engagement. Patrick explains, "So the way it works with your standard home health organization is that referral is received from a hospital, and most of the work from that point on takes place within any EMR. There are some other vendors that process places, but there is no getting around that form. It is required that you've got to complete every single step. There's really no difference no matter what state you're in or what jurisdiction; you might see slight variations between Medicare, Medicare Advantage, or Medicaid, but it's rather consistent across every single home agency." "Well, it's a mixture of the nurse and medical director. The nurses are often called startup care nurses. They go in the home and complete the work. It can take anywhere from two to three hours to be in the patient's home, and then once it's done, the response care goes to the medical director for sign-off. From there, there are a couple of extra steps to validate some of the information and coding associated with it. Then, it can be submitted to CMS for payment." "For that problem, we wanted to take those anywhere from one to four hours and get them down. Well, not because we're trying not to be thorough or rush onto the next patient or anything like that. It's just that there were better ways to do it, and the technology advances, especially in the AI space, have gotten to the point where you can be efficient, lower that timeframe, and still provide good quality care." #VividHealth #AIinHealthcare #HomeHealthAI #HomeHealth #HomeCare #Hospice #EmergingAI vividhealth.ai Download the transcript here

Dr. Jonathan Usuka, CEO of Sapient, uses insights about proteomics and metabolomics to provide deep molecular characterization of diseases from a single sample to support drug discovery, development, and approval. The company's unique dataset combines real-world data with longitudinal molecular profiling of tens of thousands of samples across different diseases, ethnicities, genders, and ages. By measuring proteins and metabolites, this data and insights engine helps pharmaceutical companies gain a significantly more comprehensive view of the molecular basis of disease, better understand drug targets, and predict potential drug outcomes and safety. Jonathan explains, "We support drug discovery and drug development, and a couple of things are going on in the industry right now in discovery and development. One is the overall pharma landscape of how a drug gets approved. That's been fairly static since the 1970s with the creation of the FDA. So clinical trials are well established, but the structure of it was based around not knowing much about the underlying drug target that your drug is interacting with. Since then, they've tightened up the requirements around mechanisms of action, but mostly, the process itself is almost protein agnostic in terms of the development process and how the drug interacts with patients." "So what we do, what has happened recently, is a revolution in understanding the molecular basis of disease and how the therapeutics interact with it at a molecular level. We support pharmaceutical companies in understanding the safety and the efficacy and being able to predict how their therapies will do in the clinic, and then really understanding a lot more about the available drug targets, which expands the arsenal of ways to fight disease." "At Sapient, we don't just identify dynamic biomarkers, biomarkers that change with disease or change in response to therapy. We also give a lot of context about those biomarkers. We also say where we have seen those biomarkers occur and how they have changed in response to other therapies, disease conditions, and immunological responses. So, a pharma company can see better what it's getting into when it invests in a dynamic biomarker." #SapientBio #Multiomics #Proteomics #Metabotomics #DarkProteome #BeyondtheGenome #Plasmaproteomics #Biomarkers sapient.bio Download the transcript here

Dr. Joel Salinas, Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, and Dr. Julius Bruch, Co-Founder and CEO of Isaac Health, leverage virtual care and home visits to provide proactive, technology-enabled services for early diagnosis and treatment of dementia. Their mission is to reduce barriers to cognitive assessment and improve access to personalized care plans and treatments that can delay brain disease progression. The key is respecting the patient's decisions and building trust with the care team. Joel explains, "The first thing is really just meeting people where they're at. It's so hard to get access to high-quality care due to wait times and geographic reasons. What we're building at Isaac is meant to require zero distance and move a hundred times faster than the current care journey. The other piece is we develop these partnerships where we're much more proactive about identifying changes that someone might be having with memory or thinking. We are looking at risk factors that they may have within their health record and then actually doing some outreach to those who may have some undiagnosed cognitive impairment. Part of the goal here is by meeting people when their symptoms are at their earliest, we have an opportunity of really a golden window of time to be able to bring in interventions that can impact the long-term trajectory of their brain health." Julius elaborates, "We have built a very extensive technology platform that underpins the entire care journey, from identifying and screening patients to diagnosing, treating, and care management, and seeing as you specifically asked about the diagnosis part. So once we've identified that the member is at high risk, we reach out to them and enroll them in one of our programs. The first visit is generally a medical assessment, and we use a neuropsychologist who does that initial assessment. Still, our platform guides that whole interaction to make sure that we collect all the right information in the most efficient way possible. So it's still very much over Zoom because it is the most effective way to get to the information in this population. Our platform supports the whole care flow and makes sure that it's run as efficiently as possible." #IsaacHealth #BrainHealth #DementiaCare #Caregiversupport #GUIDEModel #DigitalHealth #HealthEquity #EarlyDetection #DigitalHealthcare #Telehealth #InnovativeHealthcare #PatientEmpowerment myisaachealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Traci Sweet, Co-Founder and COO of Holon Health has developed an approach to treating substance use disorder that emphasizes integrating physical and behavioral health with an awareness of the impact of social determinants of health. Focusing on serving a marginalized criminal justice population that has struggled to navigate the healthcare system, Holon Health is making treatments accessible with 24/7 digital support and human-to-human interactions. Features of the Vibe app include daily affirmations, lessons, and contingency management. The key is looking forward, not revisiting the past. Traci explains, "We developed Holon Health because so many people struggle with navigating the system, particularly in terms of integrated complete treatment, for so many years now. And I've been a doctor in the field for 31 years. For so many years, we've had such a spidered system where we look at the physical health of a patient, and we look at their behavioral health and SUD needs, and we never come together to look at that in a whole body space. So Holon focuses on fully integrating care between physical health needs, substance use disorder, behavioral health, and the additional social determinants of health. So housing, employment, education. We throw everything we can at the clients. On top of that, the addition of our digital app called Holon Vibe really makes treatment accessible 365 days a year, 24/7." "We serve predominantly folks at the intersection of criminal justice and healthcare. My co-founder is formerly very enmeshed in working with the criminal justice population from his former company. I also have some Department of Corrections in my background as well. This patient has been marginalized in many ways and has found just getting through the system without judgment, without stigma, without having to focus on their shame. Their trauma has found it very difficult to navigate. So we're focused on changing that experience, moving this patient in the direction of preventative care, rewarding pro-social behaviors, and offering support that is kind of like Planet Fitness, just judgment-free. And it's been an amazing experience so far." #HolonHealth #CriminalJusticePopulation #HolisticHealthcare #SDOH #SubstanceUseDisorder holonhealth.com Download the transcript here

John Orosco, CEO and Co-Founder of Red Rover Health is focused on interoperability in the healthcare industry and the potential impact of AI and automation in streamlining healthcare processes. The emergence of revised industry-wide standards has helped improve integration, but true ease of data sharing remains elusive. An app store approach and real-time data access are the next steps in the evolution of integration methodologies, allowing providers to access the best solutions and integrate them with the core EMR systems. John elaborates, "The app store concept, which goes back to what I was saying when I started in this industry in 1998, was the approach. It was to pick the best solution regardless of the vendor that solves this departmental workflow need and let's implement the best solution. Well, integration with the core electronic medical record system was so tough and so painful and so ugly that pretty much the entire industry shifted to one vendor of record. They were like, we're just going to select one vendor. We're going to forego and give up feature functionality. We know that other solutions are better, but everything will be integrated. So, the entire industry shifts to one vendor. With the advent of APIs and interoperability becoming less painful, that was the right model." "So an app store helps facilitate this notion that any provider, regardless of where you're in the country, should have access to the best solutions that any of these vendors offer. They should be able to integrate it with the medical record. It shouldn't be up to the EMR vendors, let's say, to dictate which solutions do and don't integrate or that their solutions are the only ones that are available. A true app store concept would open the door for all these great solutions that providers would have access to, and they get to decide which ones they want to implement and use." #RedRoverHealth #HealthcareInnovation #HealthTech #Interoperability #DigitalHealth #HealthIT #AIinHealthcare #SeamlessIntegration redrover.health Download the transcript here

Mike Esworthy, Chief Strategy Officer at EnableComp, understands the challenges that health systems face when dealing with complex health claims such as workers' compensation, Veterans Administration, motor vehicle accidents, Medicaid, and out-of-state claims. These exception-based claims require deep subject matter expertise to identify the right payer and process the claims correctly. Using AI-driven technology, EnableComp helps hospitals manage complex claims, minimize the number of denials, optimize revenue, and allow them to focus on their core commercial claims. Mike explains, "I think the easiest example to provide in that context, if you look at a worker's comp claim, more often than not, when a patient comes into the hospital, they don’t know who their company's workers' comp provider is, and so often they hand over the commercial insurance card. If that doesn't get caught early, the commercial insurance gets billed, it results in a denial, and the claim sits out there in the ether for 30, 45 days before it comes back to the provider to go figure out who is the right payer class for this. So that's the big picture of the challenges. And then each of those claim types has unique nuances that make this challenging." "I think there are a lot of good things happening in the VA that are, in theory, improving access for veterans, and that's a great thing. From a claim standpoint, though, I think all of the core challenges still remain. And so I know that many of the EMRs have been putting a focus on interoperability, and all of that is great from a treatment care coordination, getting veterans seen in hospitals, and getting them through the door." "But once they've been treated, all of the same challenges that were prevalent before, all of these announcements are still out there. And I think the complexity still exists in terms of not being a normal payer pathway for providers and not knowing all the specific rules. One such example is that you were only allowed one appeal level within the veteran's claims, which means you have to get it right the first time. And so there's a really important component of knowing how to process the claim, getting it done correctly, and ensuring that you're maximizing the yield and the outcome of the claim itself." #EnableComp #VeteranCare #HealthcareInnovation #ComplexRCM enablecomp.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Neal Kassell, Founder and Chairman of the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, is working to raise awareness and drive the utilization of focused ultrasound to treat a wide range of medical conditions. This non-invasive technology uses medical imaging to precisely target and treat tissue deep in the body. Focused ultrasound has multiple mechanisms of action and can be used for destroying tumors, modulating neural activity, delivering drugs, and stimulating the immune system. Neal explains, "So focused ultrasound is a new, totally non-invasive therapeutic technology, and it's the intersection of medical imaging, which is either ultrasound or MR imaging, which is used to identify the portion of the body that we want to treat to plan the treatment, and then to guide the treatment. Then, the focused ultrasound technology delivers the energy that treats the tissue. The way it works is analogous to using a magnifying glass to focus beams of light and burn a hole in a leaf." "But at that focal point where all the beams converge, we now understand 30 ways ultrasound can affect tissue. That's in contrast to, for instance, radiation therapy, which is only one mechanism of action. Or a surgical robot, which is one mechanism of action. Focused Ultrasound has at least 30 mechanisms of action, including destroying tissue at that focal point by a variety of mechanisms, stimulating or blocking neural activity in the brain called neuromodulation, and delivering drugs or other therapeutic agents precisely to a point in the body where they are needed. This increases both the effectiveness and decreases the systemic side effects, stimulates the body's immune response to tumor, and to the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy agents." "The point in the body where the ultrasound is targeted is, as I said, previously guided and controlled by medical imaging, either ultrasound or MR imaging. Now, the fact that there are so many different mechanisms of action creates the opportunity to treat a wide variety of medical disorders. Today, around the world, there are more than 180 clinical indications or diseases in various stages of research and development in commercialization. Ten years ago or so, there were only three. That's how rapidly the field is growing." #FocusedUltrasoundFoundation #FUSFoundation #FocusedUltrasound #Glioblastoma #ClinicalTrials #NeuroOncology #Innovation #Healthcare #MedTech #Oncology #Neurology fusfoundation.org Download the transcript here

Bryan Mazlish is CEO of Surf Bio, a company focused on novel subcutaneous formulations of biologics to enable patients to self-administer these treatments at home. The limitations of subcutaneous administration have historically made time-consuming IV infusions necessary for many biologics. The growing number of biologics and biosimilars in development will further strain the capacity of infusion centers, making subcutaneous administration a way to increase access, reduce healthcare costs, and improve patient adherence. Bryan explains, "Surf Bio is focused on enhancing the ability for patients to take a lot of the innovative and novel biologics that are currently on the market and in development. The vast majority of these historically have required a trip to the infusion center at the hospital, which is quite burdensome and takes a lot of time and resources from the patients and the healthcare system. We focus on creating novel formulations of those same drugs. These biologics can be self-administered at home in seconds instead of requiring a patient to spend the better part of the day commuting to and from an infusion center and sitting in a chair." "When you formulate biologics, they typically are formulated in water and concentrated to very high levels. They become extremely viscous and, consequently, not injectable. So, the ability to inject very high-concentration biologics subcutaneously is limited by the volume that can be administered and the concentration of the biologic that can be squeezed into that volume. As a consequence of this, historically, a large quantity of drug has been diluted at great levels and then dripped into your bloodstream through the intravenous route, which can typically take an hour or, in some cases, multiple hours." #SurfBio #BiologicsDelivery #SubcutaneousInnovation #HealthcareEfficiency surf.bio Download the transcript here