Empowered Patient Podcast

Matt Blosl, CEO of DexCare, has a core mission to help large health systems use AI responsibly to attract patients and work with them to get appropriate care. While AI's data-processing capabilities are transformative, its use in clinical recommendations remains in its early stages, constrained by fragmented data and the limited availability of validated diagnoses. Matt advises healthcare leaders to adopt a problem-first approach to AI implementation and to use technology to drive significant change rather than just incremental improvements to existing workflows. Matt explains, "Artificial intelligence is interesting. We're still in what I consider to be the Gold Rush phase of a new technology. Certainly one as disruptive as this. So I think a lot of our clients are still trying to figure out what it means. From my perspective, you said it very well. Google or the internet was kind of our first foray into providing patients more access before they even seek care or before they go in to receive care. And what I see right now is that the AI platforms are kind of the next level of that. The richness of the information is greater. And so patients are coming in more informed, and they can feel comfortable making decisions even more than they could with Google. That's clear in terms of how it's impacting the patients. I think the health systems are still trying to get their arms wrapped around what the appropriate use of AI across the enterprise is." "Now, when it comes to making treatment recommendations, I still think we're in the early stages. There are still many hallucinations. The data sources we're pulling from are still fragmented. Data hygiene and some of that data are not always accurate. So I think there's going to have to be a lot of evolution in how we manage the data and improve interoperability, so that all of the data can start to talk to one another, and we can really have a complete picture before these platforms can really impact care." #DexCare #AIinHealthcare #DigitalHealth #HealthSystems #ClinicalAI #HealthcareInnovation #PatientAccess #DigitalFrontDoor #CareOrchestration #HealthIT #Interoperability #DataQuality #PrecisionMedicine #PersonalizedCare #ClinicianExperience #HealthcareLeadership #DigitalTransformation #HealthTech #HospitalOperations #CallCenterAutomation #EmergencyMedicine dexcare.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Mayank Gandhi, CEO of NEOK Bio, discusses the company's work on bispecific antibody drug conjugates and the limitations of conventional ADCs, which target a single antigen. Using a bispecific antibody to target two unique antigens on a tumor can address the shortcomings of earlier approaches by improving delivery of the toxic payload, overcoming tumor heterogeneity, and reducing off-target toxicity.  NEOK has drugs in development for prostate cancer, and lung, head, neck, and gastrointestinal tumors. The trend for ADCs is toward multi-specific and multi-payload drugs, though Mayank warns it is not a simple task to go from one to many in designing these drug conjugates. Mayank explains, "There have been a lot of advancements in the last couple of decades, and especially the last few years, in various modalities in the treatment of hematological cancers, as well as to a certain degree in solid tumors. However, for many, many solid tumors, there's still a high unmet need given the still significant outcome, poor outcomes that patients experience, particularly with patients having metastatic disease across a variety of solid tumors. Now, if you look at specific modality like ADC or antibody drug conjugates, which is where NEOK Bio is, there's been a renaissance, if you will, with this modality in the last five to six years, particularly after the approval of a drug called Enhertu, which targets HER2 mutation. Now, many ADCs have been approved with different payloads. And so definitely that's made a dent in a variety of tumors, particularly in hematological cancers and select solid tumors as well."   "Conventional ADCs thus far target one antigen or one target on a tumor. So it's an antibody-based approach. The antibody is typically pursuing one specific antigen that's usually an antigen that's expressed on tumors selectively versus normal tissue or normal cells. And then you have a linker and a payload, usually a toxic payload that's conjugated via a linker to the antibody. So that's an antibody drug conjugate construct."   "Thus far, all the ADCs approved have been targeting only one antigen with a couple of different payloads. And so our bispecific approach is targeting two different antigens. If we use a bispecific antibody that targets two unique antigens on the tumor, we have more than one place that a potential antibody can bind and deliver the toxic payload. And then we have made some very significant improvements or changes in the antibody itself." #NEOKBio #DrugDevelopment #Innovation #AntibodyDrugConjugates #ADC #Oncology #Biotech#Oncology #SolidTumors #BispecificADC #CancerResearch #TranslationalResearch #MedicalOncology #HematologyOncology #ClinicalTrials #Biotech #Pharma #DrugDevelopment #PrecisionOncology #TumorMicroenvironment #TargetedTherapy NEOKBio.com Download the transcript here

Louis Blankemeier, CEO and Co-Founder of Cognita, describes the significant gap between the number of radiologists and the rising volume and types of medical imaging that need to be reviewed.  The Cognita generative visual language model is an advancement over earlier radiology AI applications that were designed to flag single findings.  This integrated approach emulates a radiologist by analyzing complex images and generating full draft radiology reports, demonstrating reduced time per case, increased detection of critical findings, and decreased cognitive burden on radiologists. Louis explains, "Radiologists look at a number of different imaging types. So there are X-rays, and these are basically 2D images or 2D projections of the inside of the body. So you see all the organs superimposed on each other in a 2D image. And the radiologists have to take this 2D image and create almost a 3D representation in their head to understand what's going on in the body. They also read CT scans, which use X-ray radiation but take multiple images from different angles of the body. And then you basically reconstruct a 3D video that shows you what the inside of a body looks like. And then there are also MRI scans, which use magnetism to create a video of the inside of the body. And CT and MRI are 3D imaging modalities. So they're both kind of like videos. And you have an ultrasound, which uses sound waves, and you have a long tail of different imaging types.  But radiologist spend most of their time looking at X-rays, CT scans, and MRI images."   "A vision language model is a model that has eyes, so it can actually look at images, and then the language part describes how we are generating text in the output. And we can actually add one more descriptor to vision language. We can add the term generative. So we're actually generating text in the output of our model. We're generating the radiology report. And this is in contrast to most models out there today that are discriminative. There are these classifier models that are saying, " Is there a disease present or not? And the output is binary. It's zero one. It's not a text report in the output." #Cognita #AIinRadiology #GenerativeAI #VisionLanguageModels #RadiologyWorkflow #DiagnosticImaging #MedicalAI #HealthcareInnovation #RadiologistSupport #ClinicalDecisionSupport #PatientSafety #BurnoutReduction #FDA #BreakthroughDevice #DigitalHealth #HealthTech Cognita.ai Download the transcript here

Dr. Ashok Gupta, CEO and Founder of Theranow, highlights the growing demand for physical therapy and the challenges patients face in accessing care. The Theranow telehealth solution uses technologies such as computer vision and AI to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of virtual care and to measure and document progress to support the clinician's work with the patient. Virtual physical therapy is demonstrating outcomes equal to in-person care and showing higher patient engagement and compliance, driven by the convenience of scheduling and remote monitoring tools. Ashok explains, "Physical therapy is growing with experiential growth. Means you would look at the data. It's approximately 6% to 7% a year growth going long. On top of that, not only are there requirements, but this is also like a demand-and-supply situation. If you'll just look at the other side of the data, the demand side of it, where every day, like recently, I read, it was like 10,000 people are crossing the Medicare eligibility. So every single Medicare-eligible person means there's more demand for physical therapy and rehab services."   "The physical therapists specialize in different settings or different styles of treatments. So I would say virtual care can address almost 80% of all diagnoses and 100% of all patients at any time during the injury or recovery period of rehabilitation. So we do have multiple programs. We have an ortho program for virtual care. We have a neuro program for virtual care. And then we have a pelvic health or women's health program for virtual care. So we're taking one step at a time and adding different programs. The next would be the pediatrics, and then we'll be adding that as well, slowly. So we're trying to bring in experts from each field and then make sure that our program is very tailored to the patient's needs. And then obviously it's not a traditional, conventional physical therapy that you can do." #Theranow HybridCare #PatientExperience #HealthcareAI #DigitalHealth #ClinicianWorkflow #PhysicalTherapy #Telehealth #DigitalHealth #RehabInnovation #VirtualCare #AIinHealthcare #RemotePatientMonitoring #ValueBasedCare #HealthSystems #Medicare #HealthTech #PatientEngagement #ClinicianExperience #MusculoskeletalCare Theranow.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Javier Szwarcberg, CEO of Spruce Biosciences,  is developing drugs for rare diseases with a primary focus on Sanfilippo Syndrome Type B, a devastating genetic neurodegenerative disease affecting children.  The source of this condition is a lack of an enzyme, which results in a buildup of a toxic substance in the brain.  The company's drug is an enzyme replacement therapy administered directly to the brain to bypass the blood-brain barrier, and clinical trial data is showing a strong effect on the toxic substrate in the brain and a meaningful benefit on cognition. Javier explains, "It's a devastating, profoundly affecting disease whereby children are typically born normally and born asymptomatic. And over time, they develop an accumulation of a toxic substrate throughout the body, but primarily the brain. And because of that, it eventually results in a fairly young age, usually between two and a half and I would say three and a half, in symptoms starting. That toxic substance builds in throughout the brain and starts affecting initially learning behavior. Sleep patterns are very much affected, whereby children don't sleep at night and sleep during the day, and they're very hyperactive. And sometimes the diagnosis is confused, and there's no clarity as to what is going on with the child, early in the onset of the disease."   "Yes, it's a genetic disease that's inherited. There's a missing enzyme responsible for the metabolism of this toxic substrate, which I talked about, called heparan sulfate. So when heparan sulfate builds up in the brain, it causes inflammation and neurotoxicity, ultimately resulting in neurodegeneration. Think about it as a disease that is very similar to what you end up seeing with Alzheimer's, whereby the toxic substrate in Alzheimer's is between neurons and outside of the actual cell. In this case, in this disease, the toxic substance, which is different than the one that accumulates in Alzheimer's but builds within the neural cells. Yes, so that's very well-known and very well-characterized." #SpruceBio #SanfilippoSyndrome #MPSIIIB #CureSanfilippo #RareDiseases #EnzymeReplacementTherapy #LysosomalStorageDisorders #BiopharmaceuticalInnovation #ClinicalTrials #RareDiseaseResearch #HealthcareInnovation #PrecisionMedicine sprucebio.com Download the transcript here

Zach Shultz, Senior Director of Product Policy and Solutions at EnableComp, describes the challenges of revenue cycle management in healthcare with a focus on the strategic importance of full-time equivalent (FTE) allocation.  Hospitals could improve their bottom line by outsourcing complex, low-reimbursement claims, such as those from the VA so that in-house staff can focus on higher-value commercial claims. Despite the emergence of AI as a significant factor in automating the review process, human intervention is irreplaceable for quality assurance, managing escalations, and resolving complex claims. Zach explains, "I think that, especially serving the post- COVID landscape that we exist in today, staffing has become a kind of delicate thing. If you think about the rate posts or during the post-pandemic period, it was really hard to staff revenue cycle offices or staff business in general. Now, you kind of fast-forward to 2026, and maybe it's not as difficult as it was, but I think hospitals and businesses want to make sure they're very precise and strategic in how they utilize resources."   "Obviously, keeping overhead at a manageable level is really important to growth and success. So I think it's an invariable value that should always be discussed, particularly when it gets into the complex claims space, as we do. The work comps, the VAs, and claim types like that may take or require a little bit more manual intervention. It's super important to determine whether it's worth taking on these things myself or if outsourcing them is justified so I can focus on things that maybe have a slightly higher yield."  #EnableComp #RevenueCycleManagement #RCM #HealthTech #FTEEfficiency #ComplexClaims #RCMTechnology #HealthcareRCM #RevenueCycle #HealthcareFinance #StaffingStrategy #HealthcareOperations #AIinHealthcare #WorkforceOptimization #HealthcareLeadership #PatientFinancialServices enablecomp.com Download the transcript here

Lon Hecht, CEO of Care2U, has designed an innovative model of providing in-home high-acuity care as an alternative to emergency room visits or hospitalizations.  The process includes sending a clinician to the home within 2-4 hours, with extensive mobile medical equipment, and physician support via telehealth.  Benefits include better patient recovery outcomes, significant cost savings for patients and payers, and prevention of costly hospital readmissions. Lon explains, "My company, Care2U, and I are bringing high acuity care into the home. So think of it as kind of a replacement for ER-level care or hospitalization. When you think of home care, that's typically skilled or unskilled care. So it could be someone coming in to help you with daily living needs, or it could be some kind of skilled nursing. What we do is very different. We're sending a clinician into the home. Typically, within two to four hours, they bring in a physician via concurrent telehealth and treat true high-acuity needs. Once again, things that you would typically see in the ER in the hospital. So that's how it's different. And what's great about it is it really allows you to stay in your home, be around your loved ones, which is fantastic. And the cost is a fraction of what you would pay for ER or hospital-based care."   "There's a lot of data out there that shows people heal better at home. When you're in a hospital, there are all kinds of things going on. You're around plenty of infection. You're up all night. It's very chaotic for folks. Being able to be at home with their loved ones, pets, and others, and move freely throughout the home, really makes a difference in their recovery. So, it's been published as being incredibly positive for the care of patients."  #Care2U #HospitalAtHome #ERAtHome #CareAtHome #HealingAtHome #EmpoweredPatient #DigitalHealth #Telehealth #VirtualCare #HealthTech #ValueBasedCare #PopulationHealth #AgingInPlace #ManagedCare #ValueBasedCare #Readmissions #Caregivers #OlderAdults #Geriatric #Elderly#HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare #PatientExperience #HealthcareDelivery #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareCosts #PatientOutcomes care2U.com Download the transcript here

Patty Hayward, General Manager of healthcare and life sciences at Talkdesk, describes how a hybrid model of humans and AI is reshaping healthcare contact centers. Patient access and revenue cycle management are the primary, interconnected challenges for these centers, and modern large-language AI is being used to handle complex scheduling logic. Data analytics helps identify patterns in patient inquiries, predict demand peaks, and move care from reactive to proactive. The expectation is that AI agents will guide patients, becoming a normal and accepted part of healthcare. Patty explains, "I think that the challenge has always been in healthcare that it's difficult to automate things in comparison to other industries. If you call retail, it's very hard to get a human. You're constantly dealing with bots or being deflected to digital front doors versus in healthcare, as much as organizations have tried to push people to the digital apps and MyCharts and different things like that, it's been difficult. And there are good reasons, and there are bad reasons for that."   "When you think about scheduling, scheduling really drives your revenue cycle because if people don't come to your organization, you can't bill them for things, you can't bill their insurance. And so your organization has problems with the revenue cycles. That's why I say they're inextricably linked, and it's very important to solve the access problem in order to solve the revenue cycle problem."  "So, making sure that you match that patient with the right provider, making sure that you have the right requirements around insurance authorization and things like that. And then, of course, letting the patient understand what their burden will be as far as the charges go for that appointment is all part of the dance, so to speak. And that really requires a large language model that can consume and understand that information. You're right, the decision trees weren't going to work as far as an AI piece goes." #Talkdesk #AgenticAI #AIAgents #ArtificialIntelligence #AI  #Automation #CustomerServiceAutomation #ValuebasedCare #VBC #PatientExperience #MemberExperience #CustomerExperience #Providers #Payers #HealthcareAI #PatientExperience #HealthTech #ContactCenters #AIInHealthcare #DigitalTransformation #HealthcareInnovation #PatientAccess #RevenueOptimization #HealthcareLeadership talkdesk.com Download the transcript here

Scott Xiao, Co-Founder and CEO of Luminopia, is developing a novel, FDA -cleared VR-based treatment for neurovisual disorders with a primary focus on amblyopia, lazy eye, in children aged 4- 12 years old.  This approach uses popular TV shows to create an engaging, effective therapy that trains the eyes to work together and is designed as a replacement for traditional eye patching. Clinical data indicate that the vision improvements from this therapy are durable and that the VR approach is well-received by children and their parents. Scott explains, "We are pioneering a new class of treatments using virtual reality to treat various neurovisual disorders. So these are conditions where patients have vision loss that's driven by deficiencies in the brain, in the visual cortex. We're starting with amblyopia, which is often known as lazy eye. It's the number one cause of vision loss in children around the world. And it's an area of significant unmet need. There hasn't been much in the way of new treatments for decades. Typically, patients will go through glasses followed by eye patches, which is exactly what it sounds like. You take a patch, and you stick it on your stronger eye for multiple hours a day. And that's a really challenging treatment for a lot of kids and families. So we saw an opportunity to use technology to create something better, something that would be more engaging and more effective."   "We've developed a VR-based approach that takes popular TV shows like SpongeBob and Sesame Street and turns them into a treatment by modifying how the images are shown to each eye. And this technology has been extensively validated at this point in multiple clinical trials. It was cleared by the FDA, and it's now commercially available. So over the past year, we've really been making strides on the commercial front, increasing awareness for the product among physicians and patients, and securing insurance coverage for the product."  #Luminopia #Amblyopia #PediatricOphthalmology #VirtualReality #DigitalTherapeutics #LazyEye #VisionTherapy #Optometry #PediatricCare #HealthcareInnovation #MedicalTechnology luminopia.com Download the transcript here

Joseph Kleiman, President of Buzz Health, is working to improve price transparency and affordability of prescription drugs. He states that providing price transparency as early as possible in the prescription process is critical for prescribers, patients, and health plans to make better, more cost-effective decisions. To achieve true transparency, all parties in the ecosystem must cooperate and share data, moving beyond pricing visibility to fully integrate systems and use real-time information to improve patient adherence and lower costs. Joseph explains, "Buzz Health really focuses on improving the process behind the scenes, developing technologies that sit within the prescription ecosystem, creating opportunities to improve price transparency, early adoption, and integrated benefits for members."  "We work with everybody from pharmacies to PBMs to payers to employer groups. Anybody we believe has an opportunity that, with technology and early adoption of price transparency and adherence, could benefit them and the members they serve." "What's interesting is that, like most things, the earlier you have information, the easier it is to make actionable change, things with long-term impact. So if you have price transparency and you have it early on, a prescriber can make more informed decisions. A patient, rather than showing up at a pharmacy counter, can make decisions earlier on. So again, it's kind of like the earlier you have anything in making a decision, the easier it is for you to make a really actionable change all the way up through a PBM or health plan. If they see gaps in coverage and they have that information, they can make changes early on as well." #BuzzHealth #PrescriptionDrugs #Pharmacies #HealthcareIT #PriceTransparency #PrescriptionAffordability #PharmacyTech #MedicationAccess #HealthcareTransparency #PrescriptionPricing #PatientCare #HealthTech #PharmacyBenefits #HealthcareInnovation #PatientOutcomes #MedicalTechnology buzzhealth.com Download the transcript here  

Dr. Bill Kerr, Co-Founder and CEO of Avalon Healthcare Solutions, highlights the critical role of advanced precision diagnostics and how these tools are driving true precision medicine, where therapies are targeted to specific genetic mutations. There have been significant innovations, such as less invasive liquid biopsies and the application of AI to interpret medical images and complex lab results, which provide faster analysis and make it easier to monitor disease over time. The future of diagnostics includes more routine tests and imaging to enable earlier interventions and more effective treatments by overcoming the logistical and physical challenges of traditional tissue biopsies in cancer care. Bill explains, "At Avalon, we believe that if you don't get the diagnosis right, the rest of healthcare is wasted, and time is wasted on getting a patient better. So our number one focus is getting the science of diagnostics deployed into the healthcare ecosystem. I think a lot of people know that there's been a lot of innovation in lab testing, as well as in advanced diagnostic imaging. And historically, it takes 17 to 20 years to get new science evenly adopted, and we want to accelerate that process. So that's really our focus. We say sciences are True North, and our goal is to get that science deployed into the healthcare system."   "I think, unfortunately, we used the phrase precision medicine too early. When it was really precision diagnostics, and I'll separate the two out. For over a decade, we've been able to measure, let's say for instance, in cancer, what mutations might be in the cancer cells, but we didn't have any new therapies to offer. So while the phrase precision medicine was used, all we did was identify the mutations, build up an understanding of the disease, but offer the same cancer therapy. Now we actually have therapies that target some of those specific mutations."   "We truly have reached the era of precision medicine. But I think getting people to understand that now it's not just measuring the mutation, it's measuring the mutation and selecting the chemotherapy based on that. That's the new reality, and that's what we're trying to get people to understand. And that's why I think undertesting still happens, because people aren't maybe aware that now there are therapeutic decisions you can make off those results." #Avalonhcs #PrecisionMedicine #Diagnostics #HealthcareInnovation #LiquidBiopsy #Healthtech #DiagnosticIntelligence  #AIinHealthcare #PersonalizedMedicine #Oncology #HealthcareProfessionals #MedicalTechnology #PatientCare avalonhcs.com Download the transcript here

Zack Tisch, Partner of Portfolio Services, and Molly Kalinowski, Vice President of Managed Services at Pivot Point Consulting, describe how the role of IT in healthcare has evolved from a reactive, support function to a central strategic component of business. As AI becomes more important, healthcare systems are navigating a challenging environment and recognizing the need for managed services partners to handle day-to-day operations so they can better focus on big-picture goals and priorities. Zack and Molly emphasize the need to drive incremental changes to streamline provider data capture and clinical documentation, which could lead to broader changes in workflows and patient outcomes.  Zack explains, "A lot of what we're doing today is really helping health systems of all shapes and sizes navigate this challenging environment. Whether it's financial pressures, dealing with cybersecurity and risk, or having to implement new technologies every day. Whether it's AI or technologies in the cloud, and really helping them navigate this new normal of healthcare, putting together five- to 10-year strategic roadmaps and plans."   Molly elaborates, "I would say there's a shift in that many organizations are very heavy on the strategic priorities, with AI being one of those. So we're seeing more of our clients needing to support those projects and long-term initiatives. And then they need a partner like a managed services group to really support the day-to-day breaks and fixes, and maintenance types of activities so that they can focus on those AI strategic initiatives." #PivotPointConsulting #Healthcare #PatientExperience #ManagedServices #TalentSolutions #AI #CompanyCulture #WorkerBurnout #WorkforceTransformation #CostPressures #AIGovernance  #HealthcareIT #AIinHealthcare #DigitalTransformation #HealthTech #ManagedServices #ClinicalWorkflow #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare pivotpointconsulting.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Patricia Hayes is the Chief Medical Officer of Imagine Pediatrics, which has developed a hybrid care model for children with special needs.  Imagine Pediatrics provides 24/7 virtual and in-home care, which integrates medical, behavioral, social, and pharmacy services to support families and existing providers and help prevent unnecessary emergency room visits. The organization uses technology and predictive models to identify at-risk children and proactively target interventions to increase the number of safe days at home for children with complex conditions. Patricia explains, "Imagine Pediatrics is a 24/7, 365 virtual and in- home care for children and youth with special health care needs and medical complexity. We offer integrated medical, behavioral, and social services, inclusive of also pharmacy services, social services, as I mentioned, behavioral health therapy. It's just really an amazing form of wraparound care supporting these kids and supporting the providers that care for them outside of Imagine Pediatrics as well."   "We are in multiple states, and we can provide those services in the states where we're practicing from border to border. So because we're virtual first, we're able to see kids in rural areas, urban areas, wherever they may be, and offer in-home services to them as well when they may have any sort of difficulty, either need additional services that we can't provide virtually, or they may have difficulty going to an emergency room or difficulty seeing their primary care pediatrician or their specialist. We could offer that support in home as well." "It's a very wide spectrum. We have anywhere from children who have extreme medical complexity, who may be dependent on equipment, who may have a tracheostomy, be ventilated, have a G-tube, all the way to children who may just have severe asthma or be seen and utilize the hospital quite a bit for their asthma. See a wide range of behavioral health conditions as well, anywhere from severe depression to bipolar or anxiety, and early schizophrenia. And so it's an extremely wide range of really our care that we provide." #ImaginePediatrics #pediatrics #PediatricHealthcare #ComplexCare #ValueBasedCare #VBC #PediatricCare #HealthcareInnovation #VirtualHealth #SpecialNeeds #ChildHealth #HealthTech #PatientCare #MedicalHome #HealthcareAccess #PediatricMedicine #TeleHealth #IntegratedCare Imaginepediatrics.org Download the transcript here

Dr. Gabriel Brooks is Chief Medical Officer at Solid Biosciences, a precision molecular genetic medicines company focused on rare cardiovascular and neuromuscular diseases, including Friedreich's ataxia. Currently, there are very limited treatments for this rare, progressive neurologic disease caused by a genetic deficiency. Solid Biosciences' novel gene therapy uses dual-route administration to deliver directly to the heart and brain and to replace the missing frataxin gene, which is critical for energy production. Dr. Brooks explains, "Our flagship program is our DMD program, where we have two clinical trials, a first-in-human INSPIRE study, and a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled phase three trial for the SGT-003 DMD medicine. And for Friedreich's ataxia, we have the SGT-212 program, which uses a novel dual route of administration to target not only the cardiomyopathy, but also uses direct injection into the dentate nucleus. We're trying to address the central pathophysiology of the ataxia that patients live with every day." "So Friedrich's ataxia is a rare and devastating neurologic disease that afflicts around 5,000 patients in the United States and much more actually in Europe. There is a genetic predisposition. And Friedrich's ataxia is really a disease where the patients experience difficulty in moving, what's called ataxia, which you could think of as poor coordination, where when they try to move, their brain is sending a signal to their muscles, let's say to grab that cup of coffee or climb the stairs." "In fact, there are specific neurologic tests in terms of looking at nerve conduction and other things that can make the formal diagnosis. And certainly, we can get there with genetic testing. And what you're picking up on is absolutely something that's important with rare disease, is that oftentimes there's a lag between when a patient first manifests symptoms and when they ultimately have the diagnosis. In Friedrich's ataxia, like other genetic diseases, it is horrible. And so, for patients who do make the diagnosis of Friedreich's ataxia, there is often what we call cascade screening, where we look for the disease gene in relatives. Oftentimes, it's then that siblings are identified, and eventually they start manifesting the disease as well."   #SolidBiosciences #GeneTherapy #GeneTherapyResearch #RareDiseases #FriedreichsAtaxia #PrecisionMedicine #Neurology #Cardiology #ClinicalTrials #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #SolidBiosciences solidbio.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Payam Zamani, Founder and CEO of MY DR NOW, is directly solving the challenge of access to healthcare by creating a hybrid model that includes convenient walk-in clinics with extended hours, house calls, and virtual visits.  This approach is consistent with modern on-demand expectations and attracting patients in dense urban areas as well as rural communities. Patient acquisition is driven by word-of-mouth and relationships with payers and hospital systems, to improve outcomes and reduce hospital readmissions. The model is also attractive to physicians by minimizing administrative tasks and flexible scheduling, leading to less burnout and higher retention. Payam explains, "The big issue with healthcare, as we've seen it and that MY DR NOW has taken on, one of the most challenging issues of healthcare is accessibility. For far too long, there's been this discrepancy between what we believe and what we know as healthcare practitioners to be important versus reality, versus what actually happens. We have a tendency to focus on all the right things and give patients all the right instructions and directions, as far as focusing on prevention, cancer screenings, and annual wellness visits. And we tell them to manage their chronic conditions because it's important, and to take their medications. But in reality, what ends up happening is that patients have to take time off work just to be able to see their healthcare provider. They have to wait weeks or, in many instances, months in advance just to be able to get in to see someone."   "What MY DR NOW really set out to solve is how to deliver healthcare services in a manner that's more consistent with our daily lives, with what our expectations are. In a manner that makes more sense for working people, for working families, for moms and kids and for parents, and in a way that delivers better outcomes. And that's MY DR NOW in a nutshell." "Well, along those same lines of accessibility and convenience, what we set out to do was first of all, build an omnichannel network. And what that means is having multiple modalities by which you can obtain healthcare services. So there are clinics, and we like to make sure that those clinics are ubiquitous, and we can expand on that here in a little bit. But we have clinics that are open seven days a week. They're open early and late, on weekends and holidays. They're open when you expect them and need them to be open. But more importantly, you can not only schedule an appointment for those clinics, but also walk in whenever you want. And just as importantly, you can walk in for anything you go to your family medicine office for. So it's not an urgent care where you're only going in for acute and episodic issues."   #MYDRNOW #HealthcareInnovation #PrimaryCare #PatientCentered #HealthcareAccessibility #DigitalHealth #ValueBasedCare #HealthTech #PhysicianWellbeing #HealthcareDelivery #MedicalInnovation #AccessToCare #HealthcareInnovation #OmnichannelCare #HealthcareTransformation mydrnow.com Download the transcript here

Tom Kim, Chief Medical Officer at Sound Long-Term Care Management, discusses the role of accountable care organizations, ACOs, in improving healthcare for the long-term care population. The unique complexities and challenges of these patients include multiple medical conditions, frequent hospitalizations, and fragmented care.  By using predictive analytics, telemedicine, and value-based care principles to deliver more coordinated care, patients are avoiding hospitalizations, receiving higher-quality care, and experiencing reduced costs. Tom explains, "So, in essence, an accountable care organization (ACO) is a group of healthcare providers that come together with a commitment to Medicare to improve the quality of care for the Medicare beneficiaries they serve and to decrease the cost of care for that population. And it's a way to really better coordinate care for those residents or for those Medicare beneficiaries to really receive the best outcome possible."   "Yes, so in the fee-for-service world, there is a lot of focus, at least from a provider standpoint, on volume. So you're really focused on seeing as many patients as you can. In a value-based care model, we're really moving away from the volume model toward one focused more on quality. So, instead of being rewarded for high volume, you're being rewarded as a provider for the quality of care you provide. And not only is this beneficial to the provider, but it's also beneficial to the patients. So, there's having more time with their provider, receiving better care, and hopefully avoiding unnecessary or avoidable care. And so it's really a win across the board, from both a provider and a patient standpoint."  "Our patient population tends to be more complex with more medical problems. They tend to be hospitalized more often. They tend to rely on others to make healthcare decisions and closer to the end of life. And so, care is really different from those who are still living at home and in the community. And on top of that, in terms of the long-term care space, and why it's so challenging is that you just kind of mentioned it a little bit, is that the population is aging."   #SLTCM #ACO #AccountableCareOrganizations #AccountableCare #LongTermCare #ValueBasedCare #HealthcareInnovation #Telemedicine #SeniorCare #HealthcareLeadership #PatientCare #HealthTech #Medicare sltcm.soundphysicians.com Download the transcript here

Lisa Israelovitch, Co-Founder and CEO of AssistIQ, is addressing the challenges in healthcare supply chain management caused by a lack of accurate data on supplies used across the care facility, which leads to operational inefficiencies and financial losses. The previous methods of tracking have often been manual and unreliable, involving product stickers, barcode readers, and manual data entry.  Using computer vision and AI to automatically see, track, and document every product used is improving data accuracy, saving clinicians' time, enabling inventory tracking and product expiration management, and delivering significant financial benefits. Lisa explains, "What really took us from building this inside one hospital to a market solution was spending time across dozens of systems in the US and Canadian landscape. And we found that three things were predominantly happening. Either there was a lot of manual entry searching and typing into the electronic health record system, such as Epic, or others. Often, barcode scanners worked only a portion of the time when the product was in the hospital's ERP system, but they often weren't. And so the barcode scanners only worked for a portion of the time. And then, honestly, the thing we saw a bunch of was nurses with product stickers on their sleeves, and they would basically post those stickers on paper. And so it was really a combination of waste to try to get to that documentation."   "So everything from implants to staplers to glue and things are typically hundreds to thousands of dollars. And just the accuracy was simply not there. In most hospital operating rooms, it's a huge revenue center in US hospitals, but for all markets, it's a huge cost center in terms of just the supply chain in general across the system, which is the largest cost category that the health team has after wages from their labor. And the OR, it's often the leading cost factor. So the supplies can be pretty expensive, as you said." "The key became really figuring out how we could automate that work so that the clinicians, the nurses, the technicians were truly focused on the patient. Focused on assisting the physician for the case and making sure that they weren't having to do any of this extra sort of administrative work. Ultimately, it is their responsibility to document what gets used, but it has to be much more automated to get to that level of data accuracy and quality." #AssistIQ #HealthcareAI #ClinicalSupplyIntelligence #HealthTech #HospitalOperations#SurgicalIntelligence #SupplyChainInnovation #HealthcareSupplyChain #HealthTech #PatientSafety #DigitalTransformation #HealthcareInnovation #AI #ComputerVision #OperatingRoom #HealthcareLeadership #QualityImprovement #CostReduction AssistIQ.ai Download the transcript here

Ronen Eckhouse, Co-Founder and CEO of Rapid Medical, identifies the limitations of current stroke treatments, which are primarily effective for large vessel occlusions.  The Rapid Medical TIGERTRIEVER device is designed to safely and effectively treat strokes and remove clots in smaller vessels deeper in the brain.  The unique adjustability of the device allows physicians to control the size and force during a procedure, allowing for precise and safer clot removal in complex anatomies. Ronen explains, "So the quicker or the less time there is between the stroke and the ability to open the occlusions and resupply the brain with oxygen, the better. There are two types of treatments. One is a drug called TPA. It's a clot buster, and that can be administered up to four and a half hours. And then there's what's called thrombectomy, which is basically using a catheter to get to the clot and then removing the clot with a catheter or stent, kind of in mechanical terms. But today, that's only applicable to what's for the bigger arteries in the brain, what's called large vessel occlusions. And these account for about 15% or 20% of the population. So there are good solutions, but they are limited in when they can be used."   "That's exactly where we come in. The reason it's difficult to treat these kinds of smaller vessels in the brain, or what we call the medium-vessel occlusion, is that the deeper you go into the brain, on the one hand, the complexity of the procedure increases. So the vessels are a little bit more fragile. There are more turns and tortuosity. So getting to the clot is a little bit harder, and pulling it out as well." "At the same time, the benefit is a little bit smaller. So now we're not saving half of the brain. Maybe we're saving 30% of the brain, which is still very significant, but the benefit is a little bit smaller. So the risk-benefit ratio, which is critical and everything we do in medicine, changes when you're going deeper into the brain. And as a result, you need new tools." #RapidMedical #DMVO #MeVO  #Stroke #StrokeCare #Neurology #MedTech #DISTALS #Neurovascular #MedicalDevices #HealthcareInnovation #Thrombectomy #PatientCare #MedicalTechnology #StrokeAwareness #HealthcareProfessionals rapid-medical.com  Download the transcript here

Robert Schickel, Chief Executive Officer at NUAgo Therapeutics, is developing a cancer therapy using short RNAs to target and disrupt interconnected survival genes in cancer cells. The therapy has been shown to be non-toxic to healthy cells, which have high levels of microRNAs, whereas cancer cells downregulate microRNAs to become metastatic. This is a systems-biology therapeutic approach that targets the entire survival network of a cell, making it independent of specific mutations or pathways and potentially applicable to the vast majority of solid tumors. Robert explains, "NUAgo is a technology company. We are developing what we define as short RNAs, and these are going to be cancer therapies that really target the survival system of a cancer. This survival system keeps the cancer alive. And instead of going after single components, pathways, or mutations as targeted therapies do, we're using short RNAs to reduce the expression of multiple essential survival genes. And when you get enough of these genes disrupted, the cancer cells can no longer maintain the system that keeps them alive. And at that point, the cell will activate a death response that eliminates the cancer cell by activating several cell death pathways simultaneously. So this is really a unique area in science, and we're developing this. It's a new modality. You see a lot of promise of this in the solid tumor patients."   "The platform that we're building has the potential to go across solid tumor markets. The recent IP that we're filing is for the 11 largest tumor markets from breast and lung, kidney, liver, and all the way down to the smaller, more lethal cancers in pancreas, ovarian, and other small cancers as well. So right now we think we can apply this to about 85% or 90% of the market."   "What we're doing is we take a step back. We're in fundamental biology. So this mechanism really goes back almost a billion years. I mean, fungi have the same mechanism. And so when we go after what are called survival genes, and they are essential for the survival of a cell, they deal with all kinds of cellular functions." #NUAgoTherapeutics #CancerResearch #Oncology #Biotechnology #PrecisionMedicine #RNATherapeutics #SystemsBiology #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareBreakthrough #CancerTreatment #SurvivalGenes #BiopharmaDevelopment NUAgotherapeutics.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Babak Saboury, Chief Scientific and Innovation Officer and Physician Founder of United Theranostics, discusses the emergence of nuclear oncology as the fourth pillar of cancer care.  United Theranostics is combining advanced molecular imaging and radiopharmaceutical therapies to identify a cancer cell's unique fingerprint and then delivering targeted radiation, reducing side effects by sparing healthy cells. Molecular imaging can serve as a unifying map for guiding a collaborative, multimodal approach to treating a range of cancers.  Babak explains, "I can just very quickly tell you that there are four pillars of treating cancer. Traditionally, when we approached cancer, we wanted to cut it out. That was surgical oncology. Whatever could not be cut out was treated by giving a medication. That was medical oncology. After a while, there was just a modality to the things that were difficult to cut out, but that was a localized hit from outside. That was the radiation oncology. And right now, we are at the beginning of a new horizon. You treat patients systemically, which means all the lesions everywhere. However, you are really there, a magical radiopharmaceutical that goes to find the cell and kills it by radiation. That's a nuclear oncology. So nuclear oncology is the fourth pillar of cancer care."   "So you can imagine that in the past we tried to attack cancer cells. We didn't know what shape they had, which proteins were expressed, or what their characteristics were. So we kind of went blindly and tried to attack them. Imagine that we have a way to find a fingerprint of those cells and go there first to find that fingerprint. And if the fingerprint exists, then go after those cells as a targeted attack. That is where molecular imaging and radiopharmaceutical therapy come into play. So molecular imaging profiles the cancer cells to see what their fingerprint is and whether a certain fingerprint exists. Radiopharmaceutical therapy uses this information to target just those cells and not other cells. And that is the principle of Theranostics, which is a combination of diagnostics and therapeutics, finding and then destroying in a very precise manner." #UnitedTheranostics #NuclearOncology #PrecisionMedicine #Radiopharmaceuticals #CancerCare #MolecularImaging #Theranostics #OncologyInnovation #PatientCare #HealthcareInnovation #CancerTreatment Unitedtheranostics.com Download the transcript here

Shaun Bagai, CEO of RenovoRx,  has designed a drug-delivery platform to treat hard-to-reach chemo-resistant tumors such as pancreatic cancer by delivering chemotherapy directly to the tumor site. The RenovoCath device increases the drug concentration in the tumor while significantly reducing systemic toxicities and side effects. The technology is not intended to replace the traditional approach using systemic chemotherapy and radiation, but to achieve better results in tumors with low blood supply that prevent drugs from reaching their target in sufficient concentrations. Shaun explains, "Generally, when we think about oncology therapies, it's really trying to balance the detriment to the patients with the toxicities and hopefully keep the tumor at bay or kill the tumor such that patients live longer. And unfortunately, we often forget about the patient and hyper-focus on the disease. And the challenge we've taken on is, can we take both into account and actually treat both the patient and the disease by limiting systemic toxicities and effects, and then trying to improve survival by keeping the tumors at bay."   "So, when we look at certain tumors in the body, like pancreatic tumors, for example, they don't have a high level of blood supply. Generally, when we think about tumors, we think of balls of blood vessels with tumor cells, and of tumors such as pancreatic tumors. They don't have large tumor feeder vessels that end in a tumor. And what this does is create a level of chemo resistance because the blood can't carry the chemotherapy forward. And what we've developed with TAMP is a mechanism where we push the drug across the wall of a blood vessel to saturate and bathe the tumor in chemotherapy, such that we get almost a hundredfold increase in tissue concentration compared to if you just gave it systemically throughout the entire body." #RenovoRx #OncologyInnovation #DrugDelivery #CancerCare #MedicalDevices #PancreaticCancer #ClinicalTrials #PatientCare #Interventionalradiology #Oncology #MedicalTechnology #TAMP #Chemotherapy #CancerTreatment #HealthcareInnovatio#TargetedOncology #InnovativeCancerTherapies #PancreaticCancerAwareness #PrecisionOncology RenovoRx.com Download the transcript here

Suzy Jackson, a digital health specialist focusing on Patient Tech, highlights the shift in the pharmaceutical industry from a provider-focused model to direct engagement with patients. Using AI to create a more consumer-like, personalized healthcare experience will benefit patients and inform researchers and providers about adherence to care and drug side effects.  Patient Tech helps reach underserved populations and moves from providing information to a proactive environment, enabling action and more informed discussions with healthcare providers. Suzy explains, "So everything for me in the Patient Tech space is anything that helps a patient find care, navigate care options, or indeed stay on care, including anything to do with lifestyle interventions and preventative care as well. So I think the category is expanding very, very rapidly, and I'm excited to see what will go on in the next few years." "Well, I think it's pretty safe to say that this is a new venture for the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. I think traditionally, a lot of time has been spent on ACP education and thinking about how we make HCPs aware of all the choices and therapeutic interventions that are available for their patients. But in the last couple of years, we've really seen a shift, and I think that's caused by a multitude of different factors I'm sure we can speak about, but there's really been a shift to standing on the frontline with patients for pharma and making sure that they're providing patients with care that otherwise patients are going to find in other spaces."  #PatientTech #DigitalHealth #AI #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCenteredCare #HealthEquity #PharmaTech #HealthTech #PatientExperience #WomenInHealth #HealthInnovation #AIinHealthcare #HealthcareLeadership #FutureOfHealth #Lifesciences #PharmaDTP suzy-jackson.com Download the transcript here  

Dr. Robert Rifkin, medical oncologist and hematologist at the University of Colorado in Steamboat Springs. He was also a clinical investigator in the trial that led to the approval of BLENREP, a multiple myeloma drug from GSK. Multiple myeloma is the second most common blood cancer, and while the prognosis has dramatically improved, BLENREP is a novel treatment for patients whose disease has relapsed after other therapies. It is the first drug antibody conjugate approved for relapsed multiple myeloma, targeting the BCMA antigen, which is present on nearly all myeloma cells. Robert explains, "This is a condition that is really what I would call a disease of the Medicare population. So the median age of diagnosis is often early 60s, but occasionally you do see the younger patients with more aggressive disease. It's thought that African Americans who contract myeloma also may have a more virulent form of the disease."   "Right now we live in a great day and age where we have a tremendous number of good treatments, both upfront, which we really won't be discussing today. And then in patients that have unfortunately relapsed and failed other lines of therapy, that's where the exciting new drug BLENREP comes into play. It's going to have a very specific slot in the myeloma armamentarium."   "So BLENREP is unique in that it targets something on the myeloma cells called the BCMA target or B-cell maturation antigen target. That's expressed in 98% of patients with myeloma. So it provides a really great target to shoot at, if you will. Right now, we really have sort of three main classes of therapy to go after it: CAR T-cells and bispecific antibodies that your audience will likely be familiar with. This one is unique in that it's the first drug antibody conjugate approved to treat myeloma. So it's not a cellular therapy, but instead it's a molecule that has the BCMA that binds to the myeloma cells, and then it unloads a payload to kill the myeloma cells. So that's nice. You don't have to go to a huge center with experience in cellular therapies. It can be done readily in the community." #MultipleMyeloma #Oncology #BLENREP #BloodCancer #Belamaf #CancerResearch #Hematology #ClinicalTrials #PrecisionMedicine #CancerTreatment #MedicalAdvancement blenrephcp.com Download the transcript here

Haresh Patel, Founder of Diagnostic MD AI, discusses the transformative potential of AI in healthcare diagnostics, particularly for patients with chronic or complex issues. Based on his own struggle to get an accurate diagnosis of an autoimmune condition, Haresh has developed a patient-centric platform where individuals can build their complete health story, integrating modern and functional medicine with a more holistic approach, which AI analyzes to help doctors connect disparate symptoms, ask the right questions, identify patterns, and reach the correct diagnosis faster while reducing human bias.  Haresh talks about his own journey in his book The Ghost in My Body, where he emphasizes the need to identify the root cause of disease and to understand the patient narrative over time.  Haresh explains, "Sometimes that story has to come together in different ways because sometimes the patient doesn't want to share it or doesn't remember. But if we can get the whole story, then we're going to have a much better chance. AI is going to open up the world of possibilities. And I immediately went into high gear because that's exactly what I did with the prior company that I sold to State Street Bank. It was a FinTech platform, but we had FinTech investors put together all of their fragmented data, create a visualization so they could actually see patterns." "In the medical world, we're a machine too, but the difference is we had a symptom, which is a scenario. And so I all of a sudden thought, wow, I can solve this problem with AI, and if I can help solve one person's problem, my 12 years of suffering while I was building this company will all be worth it. So that's kind of a quick overview about how this all came together. Had I not had any of the experiences of my medical journey or my own journey in the FinTech world, and how I connected the dots, maybe this idea might not have sparked with me. Maybe somebody else would've gotten that spark." #EmpoweredPatient #HealthcareInnovation #AutoimmuneAwareness #PatientAdvocacy #HealthTech #ChronicIllnessJourney #MedicalMystery #PatientEmpowerment #TechForGood#HolisticHealth#AIDiagnostics #DigitalHealth #PatientCare #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareAI #IntegrativeMedicine #HealthTechnology #MedicalDiagnostics Hareshpatel.ai  Download the transcript here

Ben Scharfe, Executive VP of AI at Altera Digital Health, addresses the evolving regulatory landscape for AI in healthcare, emphasizing AI developers' primary responsibility to ensure transparency so clinicians can understand and verify AI-generated outputs. AI is positioned to be a supportive tool for providers, not as an autonomous decision-maker, with emerging regulations beginning to codify the human-in-the-loop requirement. Ben warns of setting higher standards for AI than physicians and automation complacency, in which clinicians might over-rely on AI. Ben explains, "Altera provides electronic health records predominantly as well as interoperability solutions for hospitals, health systems, and ambulatory systems. We predominantly serve the US, but we're also present in Canada, in Europe, and in the Asia Pacific region. So we have a global presence, but we do a lot of our work in the US."   "I think the regulatory landscape around the division of responsibilities is really something that is evolving. And so last year, at one point, there was a proposed federal moratorium on state-level legislation, with little, I would say, federal regulation to counterbalance."   "Maybe fortunately, it didn't pass, but since then, there's been a patchwork of state regulation. So I'd say the responsibilities are not entirely defined because they vary by state, and some of those regulations are somewhat contradictory. But recently, the FDA did put out some new guidance and essentially where the responsibility lies for builders. I'd say the primary responsibility is around transparency and enabling clinicians and care providers to understand the reasoning behind any output from an AI system. To be able to review the citations, the evidence used, and the data points the AI may have ingested or consulted in creating some sort of output, so the provider can still have ownership of the care. And essentially, I'd say the core theme there is not having AI that is really acting autonomously on a patient, but rather AI that supports providers who know what they're doing and are licensed." #AlteraDigitalHealth #HealthcareAI #ClinicalAI #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #AIRegulation #PatientSafety #HealthcareInnovation #MedicalTechnology #AIInMedicine #HealthcareLeadership Alterahealth.com Download the transcript here

Dr. John Birkmeyer, President of the medical group at Sound Physicians, defines value-based care as an evolution from older managed care models, with closer alignment of incentives for quality of care and cost-effectiveness. Working within the hospital environment, this approach emphasizes standardizing patient-centered care and communication across multiple hospital departments, reducing redundant tests and improving patient outcomes. The use of AI is one way to reduce the administrative burden on physicians, freeing up more time for patient care, a departure from earlier technologies that added to clinicians' workload. John explains, "Sound Physicians is a multi-specialty medical group. It's distinguished in a couple of ways from a lot of the physician groups that your listeners and patients are used to. Number one, it focuses exclusively on specialties that are practiced inside the hospital. So in that context, we work in anesthesia, in the ICU, in hospital medicine, and in the emergency department. And we're different to the extent that we're a very large group. So we're in our 25th year of operations, but we currently run over 400 practices in about the same number of hospitals across most of the states of the US. So in that context, we've learned a lot about what care looks like in different parts of the United States, what things are similar, what things are different, and most importantly, what things work."   "Some of the most important strategies for succeeding with value-based care are things that are very aligned with ensuring not just high quality, but high empathy care to patients. And most importantly, making sure that clinical decisions physicians make in partnership with their patients account for not just scientific evidence but also the values and preferences of patients and their families. More often than not, there's no single right answer for what that patient needs in terms of tests or procedures or other types of care that occur in the hospital. And many of them involve trade-offs between quality of life and length of life, how patients feel about being in the hospital and for how long, how they feel about risk, and what they want to do when they're ultimately discharged from the hospital." #SoundPhysicians #ValueBasedCare #HospitalMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare #HealthTech #MedicalGroup #QualityImprovement #HealthcareleaderShip #PhysicianLife #HospitalAdministration soundphysicians.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Jim Berenson, Founder of the Institute for Myeloma & Bone Cancer Research and the Berenson Cancer Center, describes the Institute's work, which includes maintaining a large biobank of patient samples that support both its own research and that being conducted by external groups. This biobank is being used to develop new blood markers for faster disease diagnosis, to assess treatment efficacy, and to support drug development for multiple myeloma and other cancers. Real-time monitoring of patient symptoms with a mobile app is capturing critical, often-missed patient data and providing evidence of clinical trial success. Jim explains, "Myeloma is a bone marrow-based cancer of a type of white cell called a plasma cell. These cells normally make a type of protein antibody that helps us fend off infections. And what happens in myeloma is that one of these types of cells goes rogue and takes over the bone marrow.  As a result, these patients make lots and lots of only one type of antibody, and that protein becomes our tumor marker. They can get into trouble with their kidneys, their blood counts, their bones, and their immune system because they can become very compromised both by the disease and the treatment. Therefore, patients can develop frequent infections." "It's diagnosed mainly through blood work, bone marrow examination, and radiologic tests. The latter used to be X-rays, but today it is MRI, CT, or PET scans. The bone marrow test usually demonstrates too many plasma cells that are clonal, meaning they are all of one type. So, usually, the bone marrow plasma cells make up only one-half percent. Myeloma patients have no less than 10% and up to 99% plasma cells, and they are all of one type. They all make one antibody because normally one plasma cell makes one antibody, but this is a clone that's grown a lot in the bone marrow. So, because the bone marrow directly releases proteins into the blood, there's a lot of the myeloma cell-produced antibody in the blood and/or the urine of these patients." "We now have nearly 60,000 bone marrow and blood specimens collected over the last 25 years from our patients, and we collect them in a way that's very systematic. So we obtain blood weekly in the first month, and bone marrow when they undergo the procedure. And then after the first month, the blood is drawn and obtained for research and for the Biobank about every month. And this is a huge resource for not only our own research, which has uncovered two new blood biomarkers through the use of these samples. And we are also able to use the Biobank as a resource for other research groups and companies, whether biotech, pharma, or in vitro diagnostics, to see if they can find a new marker. So we send them a sample, and they can use it for their work." #IMBCR #MultipleMyeloma #HematologyOncology #PrecisionMedicine #PatientMonitoring #DigitalHealth #CancerResearch #Biomarkers #PersonalizedTreatment #QualityOfLife #MedicalInnovation IMBCR.org Download the transcript here

Tom Looby, CEO of Conavi, is focused on developing hybrid intravascular imaging technology that combines two established modalities into a single imaging catheter to provide a comprehensive view of the coronary arteries. This eliminates blind spots when using either intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) or optical coherence tomography (OCT) alone and is driving a shift away from relying solely on traditional angiography toward the use of advanced intravascular imaging to guide coronary procedures. Using AI to analyze dual-stream co-registered data allows interventional cardiologists to more accurately assess lesions, determine the appropriate stent size, and ensure proper placement, thereby reducing cardiac death and blood clots around stents. Tim explains, "So our technology is an imaging catheter. We're unique in that we combine two imaging modalities that are already well established in the market. But because each of them has blind spots, by combining them into a single catheter, we remove those blind spots, and we think we produce the best imaging catheter to help guide coronary interventions."   "It is well known that these strengths and weaknesses occur in both ultrasound and optical imaging. But to set the stage, this is a trend happening in the marketplace. There are four million angioplasty stenting procedures performed each year, and most of them rely solely on traditional angiography. Most of your audience probably knows that angiography is an X-ray that uses a contrast agent, so you're seeing the vasculature around the heart through a secondary image. The detailed view inside the blood vessels is limited when using only angiography, which has restricted the types of procedures doctors have been able to perform over time. Recognizing that intravascular ultrasound, sometimes called IVUS, and separately, OCT—short for optical coherence tomography—were developed independently to examine inside the blood vessel." #Conavi #CardiovascularImaging #InterventionalCardiology #MedicalDevice #HeartHealth #Innovation #IVUS #OCT #AIinHealthcare #CardiacIntervention #HealthTech #Medtech #Cardiology #HybridImaging Conavi.com Download the transcript here  

Theresa Lyons, CEO and Founder of Navigating AWEtism, is providing parents with current, accurate information about autism to help them focus on manageable issues for their child. She strongly cautions about information about autism from social media, which is often over-generalized and incorrect. Autism spectrum disorder presents a wide range of behaviors from mild communication difficulties to complex challenges requiring lifelong care, and Theresa advocates for an individual approach, including lab testing, before choosing a treatment plan. Theresa explains, "What we strive to do is educate parents on the cutting-edge information of autism so that they can make the best decisions for their kids. All too often, parents and I, including myself, are autism parents. We get information that is 20 to 30 years old. So it's really important to make decisions for your child's future based on quality information."   "So autism is a spectrum, and we can talk about one end of the spectrum. A child might be speaking, but they might have difficulty having a back-and-forth conversation. They might be very limited in what they're talking about. Let's say maybe they have a huge interest in trains, and you can talk to this child about trains, but then if you try to have a conversation about the weather, your sneakers, or the beach, something you like to do, then that's where conversation doesn't happen at all. Kids on that end of the spectrum can dress themselves, and they can feed themselves. And when they get older, they will go across the street and potentially drive a car. So that's one end of the spectrum. And then on the other end is more profound autism. And those are kids who might not ever dress themselves or might not have the ability to cut their food ever." #NavigatingAWEtism #AWEtism #Autism #AutismSpectrum #Pediatrics #Healthcare #EvidenceBasedMedicine #Neurodevelopment #FamilyCenteredCare #HealthcareProviders #Misinformation #QualityCare AWEtism.net Download the transcript here 

Lori Runion, a director at Resultant, identifies inadequate scheduling and related staffing unpredictability as a central cause of clinician burnout. Healthcare organizations traditionally rely on historical averages for scheduling, often resulting in a mismatch between patient demand and clinician capacity. Breaking down data silos and using analytics and AI to create predictive staffing models can help forecast demand, anticipate seasonal spikes, and enable proactive staffing to reduce clinician burnout. Lori explains, " From my perspective, burnout is driven at the operational level. To say it most simply, I think that burnout is driven by unpredictability, specifically, what I want to talk a little bit about, predictive staffing. And so, when we think about staffing, the unpredictability and misalignment between patient demand and staffing capacity are really what's driving it. So I don't think it's a lack of resilience. I don't think it's necessarily that there are gaps in care, but there are constant coverage gaps and volatility in the workload. And so I think it's ultimately driven by that mismatch when patient demand and clinician capacity are misaligned. I think that healthcare is traditionally staffed based on historical averages rather than dynamic demand or patterns, and that's what creates the unpredictable shifts and last-minute schedule changes that lead to overextension and exhaustion, which drive burnout."   "So, for example, you think about your EHR, which includes your demand, your patient medical record, and you have a scheduling system that shows available capacity, and you may have claims data that shows utilization patterns or other things. So when they are only looking at one system, they have some blind spots. And so I think that if they're looking at connected systems and pulling all that data together to identify patterns and really see the full picture, that's where they can align patient demand with staffing capacity." #Resultant #HealthcareBurnout #PatientSafety #HealthcareLeadership #PredictiveAnalytics #HealthcareData #WorkforceOptimization#ClinicianBurnout #HealthcareAnalytics #PredictiveStaffing #HealthcareIT #DataDriven #PatientCare #HealthcareLeadership #AIinHealthcare #WorkforceOptimization #HealthcareInnovation resultant.com Download the transcript here

Bill Heller, Chief Operating Officer at CHG Healthcare,  is focused on the significant and growing demand for physicians across numerous specialties and on providing a flexible solution for healthcare facilities to maintain services with temporary physician staffing. Rural healthcare facilities are especially dependent on temporary staffing to overcome challenges in attracting and keeping permanent medical professionals. Physicians at all career stages are drawn to locum tenens work, and it has evolved from a niche practice to a mainstream strategy for healthcare facilities and physicians. Bill explains, "CHG Healthcare is a physician workforce solutions company, which means our primary business is physician staffing. So we're the largest physician staffing company in the country. We staff primarily on a part-time temporary basis, but we also do perm and a whole bunch of other stuff. We also do allied staffing, so we have a big staffing arm."   "In addition to that, we have an advisory services arm where we advise clients on how to run more effective client solutions through a ton of different advisory opportunities. We also have a tech solutions arm, and so that's what makes up our workforce solutions. On the primary business, our locum tenant business, which is our temporary physician business, we connect healthcare providers with hospitals, clinics, and communities across the country where there are significant gaps in healthcare delivery, and we help them fill those gaps."  #CHGHealthcare #HealthcareStaffing #LocumTenens #PhysicianJobs #HealthcareWorkforce #RuralHealthcare #MedicalStaffing #HealthcareSolutions #PhysicianRecruitment #HealthcareCareers CHGhealthcare.com Download the transcript here    

Jean-Philippe Vert, the Co-Founder and CEO of Bioptimus, is building a foundational AI model for biology to solve the problem of siloed biomedical research. Key goals are to bridge the translational gaps between drug discovery and development, and between clinical research and real-world patient outcomes, and to redesign clinical trials for greater efficiency and improved results. Creating digital twins of patients is a way to simulate treatment outcomes and create synthetic control arms for clinical trials, ultimately lowering the risk and cost of drug development and enabling the creation of new medicines for a broader range of conditions, including rare diseases. Jean-Philippe explains, "So at its core, what we try to build at Bioptimus is the foundational AI infrastructure for biology. The problem we're trying to solve is that biology is complex and operates across different scales, from genes and proteins to cells, organs, patients, etc. And historically, lots of research, lots of biological, biomedical research has been very siloed, has been focusing on specific aspects of biology, like studying only genes or studying only cells. What we are building at Bioptimus is an AI-intelligent system that can see across all these layers, all of these cases, to get a holistic picture of biology. And it's not only a scientific endeavor, but the reason why it's hard to make a drug today, why so many diseases remain untreated, is that the siloed nature of biomedical research has created difficulties in how we move from research in discovery, like understanding a disease, to making a treatment for the patients."   "So we have indeed a model called H-Optimus, which is a foundation model for one type of modality, which is one thing you see in an image. It's for histopathology slides. This is when someone has, for example, a cancer, you take a biopsy and then typically a pathologist looks at the biopsy under the microscope to characterize the disease, to see if there are cancer cells, to see the shape, to see the organization, and so to pose a diagnostic and suggest a treatment. We have trained an AI system that helps pathologists be better because our systems have been trained by looking at billions of such images, and so have a very detailed understanding of the subtle variations that can be observed in images."  #Bioptimus #ArtificialIntelligence #DrugDiscovery #Biotechnology #PrecisionMedicine #FoundationModels #BiologyAI #ClinicalTrials #CancerResearch #RareDiseases #DigitalHealth #Innovation bioptimus.com Download the transcript here

David Stamler, CEO of Alterity Therapeutics, is developing a drug to treat multiple system atrophy (MSA), a rare and rapidly progressing neurodegenerative disease that often presents as Parkinson's disease but is distinct and more aggressive. There is no single genetic cause or specific biomarker, making accurate diagnosis a significant challenge. The lead drug is a novel small molecule designed to manage excess reactive iron in the brain, which drives the disease, and may be effective for other neurodegenerative diseases involving iron dysregulation. David explains, "Multiple system atrophy is a rare disease, and that's part of the reason people may not know so much about it. It is a neurodegenerative disease, and as the name implies, there are multiple regions of the brain that are affected, hence the term multiple systems that are governed by those regions of the brain. And as the disease progresses, some of these regions degenerate, and you get abnormal function in various areas."   "Now, we like to characterize the disease as a Parkinsonian disorder, which means early on, it can look like Parkinson's disease. And that's kind of a good descriptor to help people understand what it might look like, but it's distinct from Parkinson's disease, and it progresses a lot faster, a lot more rapidly. So it's a disease that people don't know about, probably because no one famous has been diagnosed with MSA, although I'm sure various famous people have probably had the disease and maybe didn't know it."  #AlterityTherapeutics #MultipleSystemAtrophy #MSAAwareness #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Biotech #Phase3 #Neurology #MSA #ClinicalTrials #AlterityTherapeutics #ATH434 #Biotech #RareDisease #Neurodegeneration #DrugDevelopment #MedicalBreakthrough #IronChaperone Alteritytx.com Download the transcript here  

Greg Mayes, President and CEO of Reunion Neuroscience, and Dr. Manish Agrawal, the Co-Founder and CEO of Sunstone Therapies, shine a light on adjustment disorder, a disproportionate emotional or behavioral reaction to a significant life stressor such as a cancer diagnosis. This under-recognized condition lacks FDA-approved treatments and is often managed with SSRIs or talk therapy.  The REKINDLE study evaluated the use of a psilocybin analog drug in development for treating adjustment disorder and has shown positive results by integrating emotional treatment into the standard of care for serious illnesses. Greg explains, "In fact, there are no approved investigational assets that had been approved by the FDA for adjustment disorder. But it was an area of exploration that the FDA encouraged us to move into in light of people's disproportionate and really unfortunate reactions in terms of a depressive or anxiolytic reaction to cancer diagnosis or other major medical illness like Parkinson's disease, MS, ALS, or pulmonary fibrosis."   Manish elaborates, "Well, usually you have to have had some stress-related event. For example, it could be things like divorce or job loss. But here, specifically, this study is targeting an illness, and the ones that Greg had just listed out, the neurologic conditions, as well as the cancer diagnosis. And then usually it leads to symptoms, intense feelings of sadness or anxiety or hopelessness. You can have a depressed mood with its subtypes with depressed mood. Some people have more anxiety. And so both a stressor and the symptoms that present are associated directly with that. So, for example, for the study, the symptoms of sadness need to be tied to the illness, such as cancer or MS." #ReunionNeuroscience #SunstoneTherapies #AdjustmentDisorder #MentalHealth #REKINDLEStudy #Psychedelics  #PsychedelicMedicine #CancerCare #MentalHealth #ClinicalTrials #Psilocybin #Oncology #PatientCare #MedicalInnovation #Neuroscience reunionneuro.com sunstonetherapies.com Download the transcript here  

Russ Nix, Consulting Associate Director, and Dr. Stacey McCoy, Pharmacy Clinical Program Manager for the Clinical Surveillance and Compliance business at Wolters Kluwer Health, highlight the problem of drug diversion in healthcare environments and the shared responsibility to prevent this breach. AI-enabled software is becoming crucial in detecting suspicious patterns, the types of individuals most likely to steal drugs, and gaps in the supply chain from ordering to delivering drugs to the patient. While opioids are the most commonly diverted drugs, motivated by substance abuse and addiction, other medications, including non-controlled substances, insulin, and high-cost cancer drugs, are also at risk. Effective prevention programs focus on a culture in which staff feel safe reporting concerns and seeking help. Russ explains, "Drug diversion is basically when you're in a healthcare system where the medications in that facility are not going to their intended destination. And that's typically what we see most of, a deliberate taking of those medications, whether it was a substance abuse issue or your healthcare practitioners or staff outside of the facility, are taking those medications and basically denying your patients that medication. And it is a pretty significant issue since the opioid crisis, again in the early 2000s or late 1990s."   Stacey elaborates, "So ideally, we want to be in a position where we're able to utilize software applications or a mixture of software applications to have oversight of what's being ordered, what's coming in, and what's going on inside our pharmacies, what's inside the machines on each hospital floor. Just imagine you have such a varied audience. Every single hospital floor has 15 or so nurses working. Those nurses need to grab medications from machines, like a vending machine. So the pharmacist is responsible for making sure that's taking place properly." "Then that same team or person was also responsible for making sure that what's removed from the machines truly makes it to the patients in a safe and sound manner. So there are a number of breakpoints within the process that someone has to oversee. Ideally, we'd like to make sure that drug diversion prevention takes place using the most up-to-date software applications that are AI-enabled, and that we have multidisciplinary governance on these teams." #WoltersKluwerHealh #AISurveillance #DrugDiversionPrevention #Sentri7DrugDiverison #PatientSafety #DrugDiversion #HealthcareSecurity #OpioidCrisis #PharmacySafety #HealthcareCompliance #PatientCare #MedicationSafety #HealthcareLeadership #AIinHealthcare wolterskluwer.com Download the transcript here

Meghan Gutierrez, CEO of the Lymphoma Research Foundation, and Jennifer Branstetter, the Executive Director, North America Corporate Affairs at BeOne Medicines, join me to discuss the growing use of AI in patient care with a specific focus on individuals with lymphoma and other blood cancers. Emphasis is on the necessity of a collaborative, patient-centric approach to developing AI tools, bringing together patient advocacy organizations, healthcare professionals, and pharma partners to provide accurate information to patients. The goal is to serve a diverse population by providing personalized, accessible information to help patients have more meaningful discussions with their healthcare providers, not to replace the clinician's role. Jen explains, "We know that tens of millions of people are using AI tools in general, like ChatGPT, for health questions, including patients with blood cancers like chronic lymphocytic leukemia or CLL, they're all turning to the different AI tools that are out there. And from our perspective, we see this continuous growth of use, we want to make sure that the right healthcare information is getting fed into those AI resources and tools so that patients are getting the most accurate information possible."   Meg elaborates, "Many patients are using these AI tools to make sense of everything from their PET scans to their blood results, to some of the treatment language they receive in their clinician's or doctor's office. And one of the things that I heard recently from a cancer patient who had uploaded his scans and some test results into an AI platform. And he called me incredibly concerned. He was very concerned about his prognosis and the limited treatment options that he believed were available to him." "So when I pressed further, I found out that this AI platform was the only source of information that he had. So I became concerned when I recognized that the information he received was antiquated. So the treatment results and some of the information he was working from in this incredibly anxious and anxiety-provoking moment were 10 years old. And so in this case, antiquated information was as dangerous as inaccurate information. And both of these remain top concerns at the Lymphoma Research Foundation. And I think across our sector, as we see more and more patients using these tools and platforms to help educate them about their disease and their treatment options." #LymphomaResearchFoundation #LRF #BeOneMedicines #LymphomaAwareness #AIinHealthcare #PatientAdvocacy #BloodCancer #HealthcareInnovation #PatientEmpowerment #PrecisionMedicine #CLL #HealthTech #CancerCare lymphoma.org BeOneMedicines.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Mike McCullar, CEO of RegCell, is developing a novel cell therapy to treat autoimmune diseases that specifically addresses the loss of tolerance, in which the immune system mistakenly attacks the body's own tissues. This approach contrasts with current treatments, which broadly suppress the immune system and may cause side effects. The key goals of the therapy are to achieve long-term disease control and restore the immune system's natural balance. The company's manufacturing process is designed to simplify cell therapies, making them more affordable and accessible to a broader population of autoimmune patients. Mike explains, "The real driver of immunity, we believe, is what's called loss of tolerance, which is a system in our bodies that protects us from bad immune cells that attack our tissues. So that's a fundamental limitation in biology, and there really is not a curated treatment at this point. So our view has really been to try to restore the natural balance of our immune system by regulatory T cells, which are an indispensable non-redundant cell type to maintain tolerance against our autoimmune disorders. So we think the current treatments really don't address these challenges. They are broadly suppressing the immune system, and they don't offer curative potential."   "We've been using the same kinds of drugs for the immune disease for about three to five years, and they will broadly suppress the immune system. They are really unable to distinguish between a good immune cell and a bad immune cell. And I think that's the fundamental limitation of how these drugs work. They could be very affected, but they do really broadly suppress the immune system in an indiscriminate way." #RegCell #AutoimmuneHepatitis  #Biotechnology #MedicalResearch#AutoimmuneDiseases #CellTherapy #PrecisionMedicine #Immunology #Biotech #RegulatoryTCells #Innovation #HealthcareTechnology #ClinicalTrials regcellbio.com Download the transcript here

Amy Mendoza, Chief Marketing Officer at Alphaeon Patient Financing, highlights the advantages of working with a finance company that provides options for treatments in cosmetic, dental, vision, audiology, and veterinary care. This is an approach for patients who might delay or forgo treatment and preventive care due to cost, including those with average credit or who need subprime options.  Working with providers, Alphaeon helps grow their practices and improve patient experience and outcomes.  Amy explains, "I think the most charming and attractive part of Altheon in healthcare is that it is opening access and providing solutions for patient financing. This includes access to treatments that providers can offer in healthcare markets, including cosmetic, dental, vision, audiology, and now veterinary care."   "Financing is access. And so it's not that patients lack a desire for care, they're lacking affordable pathways. And so, being able to deliver and present the right financing solutions opened the door to preventive care before something becomes urgent and to completing full treatment plans instead of piecemeal care. And then maybe more especially impactful for middle-income patients and families and patients without robust insurance benefits. So when patients can say yes to care earlier, outcomes improve, and that's clinically and financially."   "The setup is pretty straightforward, and the reality is the fees and terms are much more friendly, giving them the opportunity to open up a revolving access or line of credit that they can apply to taking care of their pet within the family, or maybe dental or vision, and support a handful of members within the immediate family."   #Alphaeon #PatientFinancing #HealthcareFinancing #PatientAccess #HealthTech #MedicalFinancing #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare #HealthcareLeadership #DigitalHealth #FinTech #Healthcare goalphaeon.com Download the transcript here

Dane Stevens, Founder, CEO, and Director at Optimi Health, a Canadian company that manufactures MDMA and naturally derived psilocybin from mushrooms for use in therapy for PTSD and treatment-resistant depression. These psychedelic-based mental health treatments are being used in the regulated market in Australia and in Special Access programs in Canada, and showing real-world evidence of a positive impact. Dane emphasizes the importance of a clinical setting for the administration of psychedelic medicines and integration with traditional therapy. Dane explains, "We exist to support the responsible use of psychedelic medicines within regulated healthcare systems. We are a manufacturer of both MDMA and psilocybin, and our company exports those products to the only truly regulated market in the world right now, which is Australia. There, our MDMA is being prescribed for PTSD, and our psilocybin, naturally derived psilocybin extract, is being prescribed for treatment-resistant depression. And so we're not your classic drug developer. We're on a mission to be in the clinic and inpatient today, and that's where we are."   "Right now, they're still scheduled substances, but in Canada specifically, you have what's called the Special Access Program, where if you're suffering from end-of-life distress or PTSD in a very serious way or treatment-resistant depression, you can apply directly to the health minister for an exemption to access psychedelics. But they are still scheduled and restricted." "If you're looking at just the Australian model in Australia, they rescheduled specifically MDMA for the use in PTSD treatment. Specifically, around psilocybin, it's only to be used for treatment-resistant depression. And so, when we, as a company, actually export directly from Canada to Australia, the permits say it's only to be used within that framework. So it's not a take-home medicine, it's all done within the guidance of your healthcare professional at the clinic." #OptimiHealth #PsychedelicMedicine #MentalHealth #PTSD #Depression #Innovation #Healthcare #Australia #TreatmentResistantDepression #Psilocybin #MDMA #PsilocybinTherapy #MDMATherapy #MentalHealthInnovation #FDAApproval #HealthPolicy #CanadaHealth #ClinicalResearch #RealWorldEvidence optimihealth.ca Download the transcript here  

Renzo Luzzatti, Founder and CEO of US-Rx Care, discusses the role and practice of the Pharmacy Benefits Managers and the advantages of working with a company that uses a fiduciary model. Inherent conflicts of interest in the traditional PBM model, such as manufacturer rebates and requirements to use PBM-owned pharmacies, drive up prescription drug costs. US-Rx Care eliminates these conflicts by charging a flat administrative fee with its sole incentive to lower drug costs for the plan and its members. Renxo explains, "We've been around since 2007. We do have about 5 million lives under management, both self-funded employers, which is the bulk of our business. Then we also tap into Medicare health plans and have some programs and offerings that we assist there to lower costs and improve the quality of care. Our approach is unique in that we've taken a fiduciary stance from day one. We can talk about that in a little bit. It is a legal term. It's defined under ERISA, which governs health plans. They have a fiduciary duty to the plan, the members, and the management of the plan assets. And the industry as a whole has shied away from any fiduciary obligation whatsoever, in part because it's rife with conflicts of interest, and you cannot have conflicts of interest as a fiduciary."   "That is really at the core of all of the issues and complaints that we're hearing about PBMs - they're driving up the cost of prescriptions rather than having the intended effect, which is to reduce the cost of prescriptions. And I would say in the last four or five years, employers have really started to ask the right questions because they're becoming more and more educated."   "For folks like us, we're growing like crazy because the industry finally gets that. The deal that they were getting through their traditional model is not so good. The other thing is when we move to a fiduciary model, savings are typically in the realm of 30% to 50% in the first year, and then we typically see additional savings in year two and three, and then after that, the goal and the intent, which we've been successful at, is to keep costs stable."  #USRxCare #PBM #PharmacyBenefits #EmployeeBenefits #HealthcareCosts #FiduciaryResponsibility #BenefitsConsulting #HealthcareTransparency #CostContainment #SelfFundedEmployers #HealthcareReform usrxcare.com Download the transcript here 

Kory Daniels, Chief Security and Trust Officer at LevelBlue, discusses the multifaceted cybersecurity challenges in the healthcare industry and the risks posed by legacy systems not designed for secure internet connectivity. Artificial intelligence is being used successfully to defend against cyber attacks, while threat actors are using AI without ethical constraints to launch sophisticated attacks. Managing cybersecurity includes using digital twins to model vulnerabilities and to develop strategies for identity and access management for human and non-human identities, such as robots and AI agents.  Kory explains, "We must recognize that we're not starting from a clean slate - we have a lot of decades-old systems operating both within the physical footprint of the healthcare and hospital facility and in record retention and data management. Many organizations are looking at how to get ahead in identifying what needs to happen to embrace new technology and much of the innovation. At the same time, being conscious and cognizant of opportunities to retrofit, taking what's there already today and making it internet-connected as an example, making it Internet of Things-connected so that devices that weren't purpose-built to communicate to the internet now can communicate to the internet, but it creates some risks and it poses some challenges."   "We highlighted that some of these legacy systems or initial systems that have been in the organization for years, some 10 years or more, were not necessarily purpose-built or designed at the time of manufacturing, nor with the software needed for those tools to operate with current speed, expectations, and requirements. Healthcare entities are engaging both patients and supporting care doctors and patient care professionals in 2026 and beyond."  #LevelBlue #HealthcareCybersecurity #DigitalTransformation #AIinHealthcare #LegacySystems #PatientSafety #CyberThreats #HealthTech #DataSecurity #MedicalDevices #DigitalHealth #HealthcareIT #CyberDefense #HealthcareInnovation #RiskManagement #ComplianceMatters LevelBlue.com Download the transcript here

Chase Idleman, Chief Executive Officer of Arlow, is leveraging emerging AgeTech and the longevity economy to develop solutions for an aging population, their families, and caregivers. With a human-centered approach to the entire aging process, Arlow uses AI to create a system for action for adults over 65 and their support networks. The main goal is to make tasks like care coordination, document management, medication adherence, and detecting changes in behavior and physical abilities easier. Chase explains, "AgeTech is more around the people in the population. So if you look at aging, it is not one point in time, but is truly a continuum and impacts so many people. It's not just the person who's aging, but also the family members and the entire circle of care around them. So, AgeTech is that kind of emerging field, which is how I try to differentiate it. Again, it's not product-centric, but it is really human-centric over a continuum of time."   "What we felt was the biggest opportunity was not only creating a solution for older adults, but creating a solution for the circle of care, the people every single day who are helping those older adults. And in parallel, we really started to lean in on this employer front with the workforce. So in the workforce environment, it's pretty interesting, 25% of FMLA is for caregiving. And right now, there's not a ton of solutions that can support them. So those workers are essentially the circle of care." #Arlow #AgeTech #AI #Healthcare #Aging #Innovation #DigitalHealth #Longevity #Caregiving #HealthTech #SeniorCare #FamilyCaregivers #CaregiverBurnout #OlderAdults #EmployeeBenefits #EmployeeAssistantPrograms Arlow.ai Download the transcript here

Dr. Ivan Horak, Founder and CEO of Tikva Allocell, is focused on next-generation allogeneic cell therapies using modified T-cells from healthy donors to make these therapies more scalable, accessible, and affordable. Using virus-specific T-cells, this approach is showing effectiveness against solid tumors, which are difficult for traditional CAR-T therapies to treat. The primary target is an antigen found particularly in Epstein-Barr virus-associated malignancies and is showing potential for treating autoimmune diseases as well as cancer. Ivan explains, "Cell therapy has a long history. We started with many scientists, but probably the godfather of the technology, Zelig Eshhar, who's not with us anymore. He passed away last year. The idea behind that was to use patient cells and modify them and use them as a fighter against the cancer. But over time, we realized over the last two decades that it's very useful, very successful in the treatment of hematologic malignancies, but it's very expensive and labor-intensive. The question was how to enhance this technology and bring it to more patients in a friendly and affordable way." "The second generation are therapies where we are using healthy people's cells, primarily T-cells, but can be NK cells, can be gamma-delta T-cells. And these cells are being modified, and they are infused into a patient. The advantage of this technology is that patients are identified, and the provider can request the cell from different biotechnology companies, which can be available within the next few days, because from one healthy donor, you can make multiple doses for patients."  #TikvaAllocell #CellTherapy #CancerResearch #Immunotherapy #Biotechnology #Biotech #Innovation #ClinicalTrials #AllogeneicTherapy #Allogeneic #SolidTumors #NextGenTherapy #PrecisionMedicine #CellTherapy #CART #Oncology #ImmuneOncology #CellandGeneTherapy tikvaallocell.com Download the transcript here

Tyrone Lam, is Chief Business Development Officer at GATC Health, a company that has developed a predictive AI model to derisk and accelerate drug discovery and development. A significant partnership with Lloyd's of London to use this technology to underwrite insurance for clinical trials enables the insurer to base financing decisions on objective reports that predict a drug's safety and efficacy with high accuracy. There is potential for this technology to become a standard for biotech investment, reducing reliance on animal testing and enabling more efficient development of drugs for smaller patient populations.  Tyrone explains, "GATC Health is a technology company that is de-risking and accelerating the drug discovery and drug development process. So at a higher level, our mission is to take as much of the financial and scientific risk out of the drug discovery business as possible, which would enable better, safer, and more available drugs to be available for humans."   "Our overall platform is called Operon that has literally hundreds of AI models built in that basically do three things. One is that we're able to discover and validate in silico the targets in the body associated with a particular disease. And then the second piece of our platform broadly is the ability to generate novel compounds to treat those diseases. And then we created off of Operon an independent validation that would run in silico, like an AI-generated clinical trial to understand how those novel drugs would perform against those targets in human physiology."   "That third part of the platform is where we created a product called Derisq, and that is an independent, objective report that we can run on other people's drugs, biotech pharma's drug candidates, to give them a very rapid indication of how that drug's going to perform in a human clinical trial."  #GATCHealth #DrugDiscovery #AIinHealthcare #PharmaInnovation #ClinicalTrials #HealthTech #MedicalAI #Biotechnology #PrecisionMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #FutureOfMedicine #DrugDevelopment #AIplatform #DueDiligence  #DeriskingBiotech #Derisq #CapitalEfficiency #RiskIntelligence #BiotechInvesting  GATCHealth.com Download the transcript here

Kristin Ashcraft, Co-Founder and CEO of OncoRx Insights, is determined to bring current information to community-based oncologists to help them identify precision therapies for their patients. The AI platform is designed to augment the oncologist's expertise by analyzing molecular diagnostics, pathology reports, and patient history to identify appropriate FDA-approved drugs and possible clinical trials. The aim is to democratize access to advanced treatment information, bringing the capabilities of academic medical centers to the community setting. Kristin explains, "Our goal is to increase the lifespan of cancer patients by enabling community oncologists to more efficiently identify precision therapies for their patients. We do this through a unique, comprehensive analysis of the molecular diagnostics, patient history, and pathology reports. The reason that we are here is that it can be summed up really well in a study that was recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, in which they found that only 36% of eligible lung cancer patients receive precision medicine therapies. And so OncoRX Insights is focused on bringing greater access to precision medicine for cancer patients."   "Cancer results from genetic mutations from external or inherited causes, and it presents in over a hundred different forms. So as you pointed out, understanding the best possible treatment really is a challenge. But using the molecular diagnostic report and additional information like pathology reports, patient history, understanding those details can really help drive the most targeted treatment to have the best chance of the best outcomes for those patients." #OncoRxInsights #PrecisionMedicine #CancerCare #AIInHealthcare #Oncology #CommunityOncology #HealthTech #MedTech #CancerTreatment #DigitalHealth #PersonalizedMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #CancerResearch #HealthcareInnovation #RealWorldData OncoRxInsights.com Download the transcript here

Ian Crosbie, CEO of Sequana Medical, identifies the incidence of liver cirrhosis and the complication of liver ascites, which causes significant fluid buildup in the belly that severely impacts a patient's quality of life. Standard treatment requires repeated hospital visits to drain the fluid. The alfapump developed by Sequana is a fully implanted device that continuously drains ascites into the bladder for natural excretion, eliminating the need for drainage procedures. Ian explains, "Liver ascites is a complication of liver cirrhosis, a serious condition where the liver becomes badly scarred. As a result, the fluid accumulates in the belly, often five to ten liters of fluid. And as you can imagine, this causes huge swelling of the belly and major clinical problems, and obviously dramatically impacts the quality of life of these patients. Problems can include instability and falling. You can imagine with all that weight out front. The swelling of the belly causes difficulty eating, breathing, sleeping, and functioning."   "So we're in an era of AI and targeted cancer therapies, CAR-T, and things like that. But the standard of care for these patients is to let them build up five to ten liters of fluid in their bellies, then bring them into hospital, stick a big needle in them, drain them over the course of five to seven hours, send them away, and then the moment they leave hospital, they start to reaccumulate that fluid again, and the process starts all over. That is a procedure known as paracentesis. Not only is it, as you can imagine, a painful, burdensome, and traumatic procedure, but in the days leading up to the procedure, the days and weeks as the fluid starts to accumulate, all those impacts on quality of life and clinical complications occur. And so that is why we developed alfapump to stop the buildup of fluid in the belly and to stop all of those problems and to stop those regular visits to the hospital." #SequanaMedical #MedicalDevices #LiverDisease #HealthcareInnovation #PatientCare #MedTech #Alfapump #DigitalHealth #ChronicDisease #QualityOfLife #HealthTech #MedicalBreakthrough sequanamedical.com Download the transcript here

Andria Parks, Head of Commercial Operations at First Ascent Biomedical, highlights the value of using a biopsy to grow cancer cells in a lab to determine which drugs are most likely to be effective against a specific cancer. This functional medicine approach combines lab data, genomic data, and AI to produce a report that identifies which drugs might work and which are unlikely to be effective for that individual patient. This perspective is particularly effective for rare cancers, which often lack established treatment guidelines.  Andria explains, "First Ascent Biomedical is a functional precision medicine company. And what that means is we've put together three very unique and advanced technologies to produce something very specific, and I'll explain what that means. What we do is we take a fresh biopsy from a patient, and we will grow those cells in our lab in a medium very similar to the human body. We will test or validate more than 150 drugs and drug combinations on those cells to see what works on those cells and what kills them. We will combine that with a patient's genomic information using our advanced AI. And then a report is produced that stack ranks the drugs that work, but most importantly, the drugs that don't work for that patient's cancer. And when a physician sees that report, they know exactly what to start with before initiating treatment. So everything we do is outside the body."   "If you are testing 150 drugs and combinations on your unique cancer cells, you will be able to know what works and doesn't ahead of time. Usually, most patients who don't follow this approach go through a standard-of-care protocol. And what that means is these protocols or ways of treating patients are based on hundreds of thousands of patients that may look like you and me, but are not you and me. So it's based on evidence of many, many, many patients with a similar type of profile. But the uniqueness of getting a drug to work for your specific cancers is based on your unique cells. So that's what makes a big difference. You may see 20% - 40% that works, but without knowing if they were tested on your cancer cells, and that's what makes a big difference with what functional precision medicine in oncology delivers." #FirstAscentBiomedical #PrecisionMedicine #CancerResearch #Oncology #PersonalizedMedicine #HealthTech #RareCancer #Innovation #FunctionalMedicine #AI #Biotech #PatientCare firstascentbiomedical.com Download the transcript here

Dr. Steven St. Peter, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Vie Ventures, discusses his firm's unique hybrid model that combines venture capital with disease philanthropy to accelerate the development of new therapies for autoimmune diseases.  While philanthropies have excelled at funding basic research, a gap exists in translating those findings into FDA-approved drugs. Steven points out that the autoimmune field is entering a golden age, driven by insights from immuno-oncology and by AI's potential to analyze data across autoimmune diseases. Steven explains, "I've been doing venture capital for the last 30 years. I'm also a physician, but I'm very interested in how venture capital is helping bring new therapies to patients, and that's really the core of what venture capital does. So I've been doing that and am comfortable with that for a long time, as well as my co-founders. About five years ago, I joined an effort working with the disease philanthropy to help create a hybrid model. And I thought that was very interesting because these disease philanthropies are really the voice of the patient. So to the extent that you can bring disease, philanthropy, and venture capital to mix, I just think that's an incredible model, and that really is what Vie Ventures is all about." "The large disease-focused philanthropies have done a phenomenal job in funding basic science research coming out of academics and helping really define, well, what is autoimmune disease and what are the biological systems and why does that matter? And in fact, just taking the case of type 1 diabetes until the 1980s, we didn't even know that that was an autoimmune disease. And in an autoimmune disease, it's the body's immune system attacking a tissue that it shouldn't. And the consequence is that it manifests as a sort of disease. So a lot of the research foundation spent a good amount of time teasing out all that basic science, and that led to insights that then allow us to create new therapies to actually change the course of these diseases. And so as you roll the clock forward to where we are in 2026, that biology has been defined." "So what Vie Ventures does is it really allows a way for these disease foundations to reach into the translation of that fundamental discovery research to actually fund drugs that are going into patients to hopefully result in an FDA approval. And that just hasn't been done in the past because the science hadn't been defined yet, but now we're at this very exciting time, and that's the next frontier." #VieVentures #AutoimmuneDisease #VentureCapital #CARTTherapy #Immunology #PatientAdvocacy #Biotech #HealthcareInnovation #Type1Diabetes #MultipleSclerosis #Lupus #EmpoweredPatient #HealthcarePodcast #MedicalResearch #PatientCentricity #DiseasePhilanthropy #AutoimmuneDisorders #ImmuneOncology #VentureImpact vieventures.com Download the transcript here

Ed Ahn, CEO of MEDIPOST, is developing next-generation stem cell therapies for inflammation-driven degenerative diseases with a primary focus on knee osteoarthritis. Using umbilical cord-derived stem cells, which have higher proliferation capacity than adult-derived stem cells, allows MEDIPOST to scale cell manufacturing and provide broader access to care. The company's lead program, Cartistem, has been approved in Korea for over 10 years, and new funding will accelerate US clinical trials. Ed explains, "We are focused on treating inflammation-driven degenerative diseases. So all these diseases that you commonly associate with the aging process. Those are some of the things that we're very interested in slowing the progression of." "We're actually going back to the source for neonatal stem cells from the cord blood. One of the primary advantages of going for a neonatal source of stem cells versus an adult source is that these are the most naive stem cells that one can obtain. And what I mean by naive is that they've been in a protected environment in the mother's womb. They have not been exposed to a lot of the different antigens that adults have been exposed to. So they're very immune-privileged compared to adult stem cells." "I think this idea or the concern about cost can be applied to all sorts of regenerative medicines, whether or not they're gene therapies or cell therapies, they're amongst the most expensive therapies to manufacture for a company, primarily because we're building a process around an inherently biological process. One of the advantages we have at MEDIPOST is that this product has been approved in Korea for over 10 years. So we have a tremendous amount of manufacturing experience and know-how from our parent company in Korea that we're able to apply to our manufacturing process in North America. And that really advances and matures our program far beyond other people in the field."    #MEDIPOST #CARTISTEM #StemCellTherapy #KneeOsteoarthritis #RegenerativeMedicine #Innovation #Healthcare #Biotech #ClinicalTrials #JointHealth #AntiAging #MedicalBreakthrough #BiotechInnovation medipost.com Download the transcript here

Yael Elish, Founder of StuffThatWorks, was part of the Waze founding team that brought crowdsourcing to maps and traffic. She is now bringing her insights into the power of the crowd to build a patient-generated real-world database to support patients and medical research, accelerating drug development, and improving the efficiency of clinical trials. Their OpenStuff platform is an AI-powered search tool that makes patient experience data accessible to patients, doctors, and researchers, and validates the patient experience. Yael explains, "As background, I was part of the Waze founding team, and this is where I got acquainted firsthand with the power of crowdsourcing. Waze does crowdsourcing of traffic and the building of maps. And this is where people are joining based on a common vision that if everyone shares information in an organized form. If there's a platform that can collect all the data in a structured format, it can deliver everything in a way that's much more useful and solves a very big problem that otherwise couldn't be solved." "So the idea here is people have a ton of experience, especially when we're talking about a chronic condition someone has been living with for years and years and years. They've tried many things. Some went out and researched the information that everyone else has. How they experienced the condition, what they tried, what worked, what didn't work, what are the aggravating factors, what are the comorbidities? All this information that people have, if collected in an organized form as data at scale, can be transformed into very powerful data that doesn't exist today. That's the premise behind StuffThatWorks. And the way it works is that anyone can join their condition community. So if you have a chronic condition, you will search for your condition, you will join your condition, and you will share information that becomes data, consistent data across everyone who joins the platform. And today, with AI, it's really transformative. It's amazing, unique data that doesn't exist anywhere else." #StuffThatWorks #OpenStuff #HealthTech #PatientEmpowerment #AIHealthcare #CrowdsourcingHealth #DigitalHealth #ChronicDisease #HealthcareInnovation #PatientData #ClinicalTrials #PersonalizedMedicine #HealthAI #MedicalResearch #PatientVoice #HealthcareTransformation #RealWorldEvidence stuffthatworks.health Download the transcript here