Empowered Patient Podcast

Len Liptak is the Co-Founder and CEO of ProSomnus Sleep Technologies, which is providing new options for patients suffering from the chronic disease obstructive sleep apnea. This condition means that the airways are blocked while people are sleeping. The most common treatment is a CPAP device that pushes air through the blockage and down the throat to ensure the sleeper has access to oxygen. ProSomnus has designed a personalized noninvasive oral device that holds the jaw forward to create a precision jaw position and stabilization to aid in better breathing and improved sleep quality. Len explains, "It's serious but funny, but one of the most common ways it's diagnosed is what we call the elbow test. This is where someone's bed partner notices that their bed partner is having this pause in breathing at night, and they literally elbow the bed partner and say, "Hey, wake up. You're not breathing." At first, it can be cute, but then it becomes serious." "Oral devices for treating such sleep apnea have been on th

Inessa Lurye is the Senior Director of Consumer Product at Hinge Health, a digital musculoskeletal clinic with accessible digital physical therapy and whole-body care. Recently, Hinge has launched a Women's Pelvic Health program to personalize treatments for pelvic floor disorder and to expand access to pelvic floor physical therapy for underserved communities. Inessa explains, "We span that entire continuum, and we offer individuals access to a personalized care team, which is in-house physical therapists and Board-certified coaches, and a digital product that includes exercise therapy and education to help free people from pain." "We have personalized the experience to women and those with vaginal anatomy. One in four women has a pelvic floor disorder, and pelvic health is musculoskeletal health, but for so long, we haven't treated it as such. And so what we've done is, knowing that our clinic is a digital clinic that serves the whole person, we have personalized the experience for pelvic floor disorders."

Jonathan Baktari MD is the Founder and CEO of e7 Health which specializes in seven areas of healthcare.  The common theme is that adult vaccinations can have a significant impact on reducing vaccine-preventable deaths in these areas. Leveraging digital technology, e7 is reducing friction in the healthcare system and allowing patients to draw on a repository of their vaccine records to quickly get appropriate, quality care. Jonathan explains, "A lot of times, for example, we see people who aren't sure if they had all their childhood vaccines. What we can offer people is to see if they have immunity to chicken pox varicella or if they have immunity to MMR or hepatitis B. And so, instead of just randomly getting the vaccines or not getting the vaccine, finding the people's status is helpful in making a determination of what they need. So we've offered that." "We also offer STD testing. And the reason we do is that we offer several STD vaccines. And so if we're going to offer the vaccine, we're going to offer tes

Ram Sahasranam is the Co-Founder and President of Fold Health and building primary care delivery systems that focus on the experience of the physician and the patient. Fold has designed an operating system that works for primary care providers and their patients and folds all of the existing healthcare elements around these two individuals and their care delivery concerns. Sitting on top of existing electronic health record systems, Fold integrates legacy systems to bring real innovation to an environment originally built as a billing solution. Ram explains, "What we saw during the pandemic was the lack of primary care being at the center of care where America is concerned. If you look at how we designed our system, primary care was supposed to be the hub around which the spokes of healthcare were supposed to function." "But unfortunately, primary care was being looked at as traffic cops for specialty care. So we want to solve for that because about 80% of all care can actually be delivered at the primary car

Jill Pellegrino is the VP of Recruitment and RWE at CVS Health Clinical Trial Services. Real-world evidence uses data collected in a real-world setting and can supplement data collected in the controlled setting of a clinical trial. It could be used to measure safety outcomes, the efficacy of treatments, or behaviors that impact the quality of life. Jill explains, "Most parties that are relying on real-world data are pulling it from claims or medical records. And this data is often de-identified, but it can be patchy because it needs to be pulled from multiple sources. At CVS, we have access to clinical data that's more cohesive because it spans across our different businesses and brings in data from payer, pharmacy, and provider in one set." "But we don't just rely on clinical data when we're thinking about real-world evidence. We invite our customer community to participate directly in research opportunities, which allows us to gather insights directly from the patients. That patient voice is really helpful

Dr. Mukul Mehra is the Chief Medical Officer and Co-Founder of IllumiCare and firmly believes that cost transparency should be given to physicians so that hard clinical decisions can put the cost of treatment into perspective. By providing real-time data, IllumiCare is influencing clinician behavior to reduce waste, lower costs and improve decisions about appropriate treatments. Mukul explains, "So IllumiCare is essentially bringing in all of these constructs of different points in a patient's care journey in the inpatient setting, giving a cost definition to what that treatment is costing, and getting down to a real true cost. Then understanding that at different points in a treatment plan, that certainly there may not be proper adjudication. But if we don't start off with cost transparency, then we're not going to really get to define the cost of waste." "When you aggregate data and make it retrospect, it tends to have very little influence or impact on physician practice patterns. And in the end, IllumiCar

Matty Culbreth-Notaro is the Chief Operations Officer at ObvioHealth and developing a new model for virtual decentralized clinical trials. Accelerated by the pandemic, there is widespread global acceptance of DCT. This digital solution and mobile app are an efficient approach to identifying and recruiting trial participants and significantly increasing trial completion rates. Matty elaborates, "When I joined ObvioHealth, I had been in the industry for almost 30 years, I didn't know that it would actually work as well as it has. And now, being with Obvio for five years, I've seen the huge impact it's made, the technology has made to our patients, to our industry in general. And it's just been a great way for us to marry the tech and the service and leverage all the technological innovations that we have to tackle those inefficiencies in our industry." "Our technology has built-in intelligence that it's able to say, well, you qualify, or you don't qualify, at least from the pre-screening questionnaire. And then

Dr. Paul Sherman is the Chief Medical Officer of the Community Health Plan of Washington, the only nonprofit managed care organization for Medicaid in Washington state. They have also expanded into offering Medicare Advantage plans and providing a public/private low-cost insurance option for low-income people who do not qualify for Medicaid. Paul is enthusiastic about the new benefits that have been added to provide alternative approaches to healthcare that are less invasive and have better options than opioids for pain management. Paul explains, "Treatments that we're offering with this new benefit are a package of chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage therapy. So those traditional plans have offered services on a medical necessity or another basis. Still, we're trying to offer them in a much more patient-centered way where it's much easier for them to access it, to access the treatments that are important to them." "We're starting with those three benefits, but as we work with our members across the state

Dr. Alison Darcy is the President and Founder of Woebot Health, an engaging method of delivering self-guided cognitive behavioral therapy on a mobile device. Using only text, Woebot allows the user to interact with a fully automated system with no human intervention but using smart technology that is infinitely patient and never sleeps. Alison explains, "That also makes it really flexible and flexibly delivered through the health system because it's kind of complimentary to traditional therapy. It can also be and has been used as a very easy on-ramp into the experience of working on one's mental health. It's also been used by people who have already been through therapy and looking for a refresher. It's also been used as a way to just engage with solid mental health-promoting ideas and skills prior to any diagnosable issue." "What's interesting, actually, from our data, we see that the longest conversations people have with Woebot occur between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. I think that's so interesting because these

Paula Brown Stafford is the President, CEO, and Chairman of Novan, which is focused on the research, development, and commercialization of therapies for skin diseases using a novel chemical entity.  The first target indication is molluscum contagiosum, a highly contagious viral skin infection caused by molluscipoxvirus with no current FDA-approved treatment. Paula explains, "The prevalence in the U.S. is around 6 million people, in terms of who gets it. In our clinical trials, which seem to be indicative of the normal population, the average age of the patient is about six and a half, primarily children, one year of age to 14, are the ones who get or are susceptible to this virus." "Our product candidate is Berdazimer gel 10.3%. It's a topical gel under investigation here at Novan to be a first-in-class therapy for the treatment of molluscum. The active ingredient is Berdazimer sodium, which is a nitric oxide- releasing agent. Our other products potentially for acne, potentially for other areas like psoriasis

Jordan Mauriello is the Chief Security Officer at Critical Start and points out the cybersecurity challenges that healthcare organizations, hospitals, individual doctors' offices, and private practices face to protect against cyberattacks. With an eye to how data is stored, Critical Start is looking to reduce opportunities for cybercriminals while, at the same time, planning for a response to a cyberattack. Jordan explains, "The amount of change that is happening in healthcare actually needs a little bit of a boost. There are changes that have been made, but most healthcare is governed when it comes to cybersecurity by HIPAA. Most of your listeners are familiar with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which was formed in 1996. And the last time we had a significant change to HIPAA was in 2013. And so when we see the regulatory requirements lagging almost a decade behind what we see here, there's actually quite a bit of change that needs to happen still in healthcare." "I think the biggest bli

Yishai Knobel is the Co-Founder and CEO of HelpAround, which is focused on the interoperability of data from providers, payers, vendors, and pharmacies that are part of the specialty patient journey. The HelpAround gateway enables patients to quickly get appropriate drugs with all necessary support to ensure patients can fill specialty prescriptions and stay on their therapy. Yishai explains, "What we did is basically connect all these silos and create a gateway in the middle that basically gets the right information from all the vendors and makes sure that it is served to the patient in a way that is appropriate and manageable and consumable and actionable. For example, if the patient leaves the office, some of these vendors are not allowed to reach out to the patient until they have a consent signature from the patient that says, "Yes, I'm willing for the pharma company and their proxies to reach out to me." Collecting that consent at the right time is a critical step." "Just really automating and digitizin

Joe Hernandez is the Chairman and CEO of Blue Water Vaccines, a spinoff deploying technology from Oxford University. The original focus was on creating a universal flu vaccine that, with one shot, would provide immunity for all the known variations of influenza throughout an individual's lifetime. While continuing vaccine development with partners such as St. Jude's Children's Hospital, Blue Water has expanded its portfolio by identifying transformative vaccines in academic and research labs that can be preventative and prevent long-term diseases. Joe elaborates, "Where we come in as corporate entities is that we take those technologies and really move them to the next level of development. We find out how we can manufacture them in a way that allows us to create enough material for broad distribution. We design clinical trials, we execute clinical trials, and we deal with the regulatory agencies to get the product approved. Then ultimately, we commercialize with commercial partners. That's kind of the modali

Dr. Bill Williams is the President and CEO of BriaCell, which is bringing a cellular approach to cancer immunotherapy. Building on their knowledge about HLA molecules, BriaCell is genetically engineering multiple HLA types of therapy to match the HLA types of cancer patients. Breast cancer and other cancers like prostate cancer, lung cancer, and melanoma are being explored for treatment with this approach. Individuals have up to 14 different HLA molecules, and BriaCell has seen that a single match is a strong predictor of the success of treatment. Bill elaborates, "So, what we notice is that with our cellular therapy, we can predict patients that are very likely to respond based on the HLA type of a patient matching the HLA type of our cellular therapy  The way that we do this, practically speaking, is we take our cells, grow them under GMP conditions, good manufacturing practice conditions  Then after we harvest them, we irradiate them so they can't grow anymore, but they're still alive  They are viable, but

Tom Gibbs is the Director of Debiopharm's Innovation Fund, which is focused on in-licensing early-stage assets to help innovators bridge the gap between invention and bringing solutions to market. Investments are being made in technology that might help in drug development and digital technology that is enhancing the patient treatment pathway. Tom elaborates, "Debiopharm is actually a quite successful pharma company that most people haven't heard of. And this is really down to the business model. We were set up more than 40 years ago with the idea of taking molecules that have been dropped in development, bringing them into the clinic, proving that they really worked, and then getting them out to as many patients as possible. And so, the business model then is an in-licensing model where we go around the world looking for new compounds, typically at a pre-clinical stage, then we in-license them and develop them with our own money." "We invested in a company based out of California called VeriSIM Life, and the

Trisha Bordelon is a patient advocate and active participant with the PatientsLikeMe organization. Trisha talks about her journey from when the doctors first diagnosed multiple sclerosis through her attempts to find an effective medication.  Along the way, she discovered some genetic and environmental factors in developing this disease.  She also found a community of patients and advocates on PatientsLikeMe, where she found guidance and where she shares resources and advocacy support. Trisha explains, "I found PatientsLikeMe just by surfing the internet, and I didn't want somebody else to go through what I went through when I was first diagnosed. My doctor, when I was diagnosed with MS, handed me two brochures. One was for Copaxone, and the other one was for, I believe, Avonex. And he said, "Take these home, take a look at them, come back next week, and we'll decide which medicine you're going to start on." I didn't know anything about MS, in my mind's eye, since I had a relative that had it, I'm thinking, "O

Stan Abel is the Chief Executive Officer of ProJenX, working on developing therapeutics to get into the brain to access the motor neurons that are dying in ALS and other brain and neurological diseases. Their drug prosetin is optimized to be bioavailable and administered in a small amount of liquid which is an advantage to someone living with ALS. Research is showing promise in increasing motor neuron survival in other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and perhaps Alzheimer's. Stan explains, "In ALS, we need the therapeutics to get into the brain to access the motor neurons where the pathology is taking place and where those motor neurons are dying. The team at Columbia actually optimized a family of compounds. Not only were they screening these drugs to see that they were neuroprotective, and in these ALS models, they could see that we were actually really improving the survival of motor neurons in vitro, which means basically in a Petri dish. They optimized the compound so that it would easily cro

Dr. Stacia Woodcock is Clinical Cannabis Pharmacist at Curaleaf, which is bringing medical and adult use of cannabis to several states throughout the country.  Their model is to include a pharmacist in their dispensaries to educate practitioners and patients on the ways to use and manage cannabis products to address their concerns.  Curaleaf is also developing products that take a more nuanced view of the elements of the plant to explore how the use of minor cannabinoids can support everyday wellness and pain management without undesirable effects. Stacia explains, "So the Plant Precision line is five different formulations of the minor cannabinoids. The first one is CBG, which is cannabigerol, and CBG is a soothing anti-inflammatory. It can be really beneficial for people that have stomach issues, gut issues, and people that work out and want faster recovery from working out. It can help soothe all of that inflammation. It's for the active, involved person or someone who maybe has some stomach troubles, whic

Jason Matuszewski, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board, and Andrew Van Vurst, Chief Operating Officer of BioStem Technologies have a vision to change the paradigm on the use of perinatal tissue for advanced wound care. Their initial target is complex wounds in the lower extremity region, specifically focusing on diabetic foot ulcers, venous ulcers, and pressure ulcers using a perinatal tissue allograft to promote healing. Jason explains, "In general, non-healing and complex wounds share similar characteristics, high levels of protease, elevated inflammatory markers, low growth factor activity, and reduced cellular proliferation." "Chronic non-healing wounds are wounds that have failed to progress through a timely sequence of repair or proceed through the wound healing process without restoring anatomic or functional results. A large amount of these wounds add a huge burden on cost. Specifically, our initial market, Medicare patients, things of that nature, add up to the tune of almost $25 billio

Sharon L. Rogers Ph.D. is the CEO of AmyriAD Therapeutics and has a deep understanding of the development of drugs to address the impact of Alzheimer's disease. Currently, the most common treatment is Aricept which Sharon developed and brought to market in 1996. Based on recent research, it does not appear that disease modification leads to clinical benefit or reduction in the progression of the disease. Sharon explains, "We're not doing anything that's going to modify the underlying progression of the disease, at least that we know of. This is a relentless disease, and sooner or later, it will run its course, and the outcome is ultimately fatal. But, we can buy time for people. Whenever you can improve function, you can reduce reliance on skilled nursing care. You can reduce reliance on the caregiver and the burden that it brings to the loved ones of the patients. You can prolong the time to nursing home placement, which is just really horrible for everyone involved, the families and the patients." "It is a