Empowered Patient Podcast

Natasha Drapeau is the Executive Vice President of BioSig Technologies, pioneers in advanced biomedical signal processing solutions that will unlock the future of bioelectronic medicine, starting with the PURE EP™ System and their work on common and complex cardiac arrhythmia. Approximately more than half of patients diagnosed with this heart rhythm disorder have AFib. The BioSig noninvasive technology works with all the systems generating data to get an entire cardiac picture for diagnosis and performing a cardiac ablation procedure. Natasha explains, "What we're focusing on with our technology is really to prevent that signal distortion. That's happening both through our different hardware architecture and the software algorithms. We focus on delivering a much cleaner, more detailed cardiac picture displayed to the physician in real-time." "But also, we're uncovering a lot of diagnostic data that was simply not there before. We have side-by-side comparisons because we have other technology in support at the

Sylvia Hastanan is the CEO and Founder of Greater Good Health and shines a light on the experience and new skills that nurse practitioners have developed as a result of the demand for virtual care during the pandemic. Sylvia wants to empower and train NPs as primary care providers to provide more access to underserved communities and to promote a stronger partnership between nurse practitioners and physicians to handle the ever-increasing demand for chronic and senior healthcare.  Sylvia explains, "Greater Good Health is building a medical group of nurse practitioners simply with a mission to expand more access to care to people who need it. We believe in supporting nurse practitioners, who we think have been an overlooked and maybe underutilized resource in healthcare, and nurse practitioners specifically as primary care providers." "Well, my background has always been in healthcare and provider services. I worked for organizations across the United States that supported physician groups, primary care physic

Dr. Adam Kaplin is the Chief Scientific Officer of MyMD Pharmaceuticals which is developing a drug that gets to the cause of inflammation. Since chronic inflammation is a factor in pathological aging, managing inflammation shows opportunities for slowing aging. Their lead drug MyMD-1 is a TNF-a inhibitor that can cross the blood-brain barrier and treat the brain where other anti-TNF-a treatments do not.    Adam explains, "By delaying aging, what I mean is they not only lived longer, but they didn't lose their function. So, they retained their strength and their cognition. Because if we were only developing a drug that would just allow us all to get older and demented, that wouldn't be good for the economy, good for our personal health, good for anybody. So really, what we're excited about is the prospect of actually slowing the aging process and extending the healthy portion of our lifespans." "So, aging probably is going to end up being the result of two primary processes. One is inflammation, and that is th

Dr. Jens Bjørheim is the Chief Medical Officer at Ultimovacs which is taking advantage of the environment for R&D in the science around cancer vaccines in the Oslo region of Norway. Ultimovacs is working with peptide vaccines and long peptides. These peptides will drive for a specific subgroup of immune cells called the CD4 cells, or the helper cells, which coordinate the immune attack against infection and cancer. Jens explains, "In some patients, they do not have the sufficient number or repertoire of immune cells that are needed to kill off the whole tumor. And we believe that adding T-cells or immune cells that can recognize specific things in the tumors, like in our case, an enzyme called telomerase, can benefit the patients in the future. So the checkpoint inhibitors on one side, they allow the immune system to kill off the cancer. On the other side, the immune system sometimes needs more help. There need to be more T-cells and more differentiation among the T-cells to really cure people from cancer

Anthony Capone is President of DocGo and brings his background in computational learning theory and artificial intelligence to the world of mobile medical solutions. By creating a robust routing and dispatch system integrated with first responders and up-trained lower-cost healthcare providers, DocGo is able to treat patients in emergency situations as well as provide on-site and at-home comprehensive healthcare. Anthony explains, "Just in the past couple of years, the acceptance in a community for point-of-care tests for COVID really changed the landscape. However, COVID is one thing. The key component is that now people are more receptive to that idea, and there's a lot more investment from them going in. So things where you normally would have to drive to a lab and have to wait a couple of days to get your results, you can now do a point-of-care test right then and there. So if you combine that together with a remote diagnostic system, then what you end up getting is care that might have taken three episod

Anish Sebastian is the CEO and Co-Founder of Babyscripts, which is focused on improving prenatal and postpartum care for mothers and their newborns.  Using remote monitoring and a robust digital environment, low and high-risk pregnancies are supported with virtual care as well as in-office appointments.  Babyscripts works with care teams, providers, healthcare providers, OBGYNs, nurse midwives, nurses, and the whole care continuum to improve access to and quality of care. Anish explains, "So this was sort of our moment to provide the market with tools that could really help improve access. One of the things that we do is remote patient monitoring for blood pressure for high and low-risk moms. And that is such an important and pivotal thing in prenatal and postpartum care. So providers across the nation, a lot of our practices that we work with said, Hey, Babyscripts, how can we work together to still give good quality care and maintain access, but handle some of the shortages that we knew were going to come."

Lynn Carroll is the Chief Operating Officer at HSBlox and is in the business of helping payers and providers move from a fee-for-service to a value-based model. One of the critical challenges in scaling these solutions so that they can work with legacy systems and provide data and performance metrics to determine and improve outcomes in the value-based arena. Lynn explains, "So, as we think about the overall landscape of healthcare that traditionally has been on a fee-for-service basis, the legacy systems on both the payer and provider sides have been geared toward billing and transactional mechanisms. Submitting claims and getting paid based upon those claims is a very fragmented approach." "And what we have noticed is that the ability to operationalize these value-based programs with the legacy system is a challenge. Both hierarchically in terms of which providers are participating, what population is assigned, but also in the funding pool management, whether they're from employers, from commercial payers,

Craig Parker is the CEO of Surrozen, experts in the Wnt pathway, which is one of the fundamental pathways that help to establish the structure of organs, renewal of stem cells, and recovery from injury. This is a story of discovering the right combination of their tissue-specific approach and the right molecules to enhance or activate the Wnt pathway. Craig elaborates, "So, in the liver, for example, when we injure our liver by drinking too much alcohol, the Wnt pathway is activated and is really the key pathway that's responsible for the regeneration that we're all able to stimulate in our liver." "There are many, many other organs where the Wnt pathway is known to play a role in how that particular organ is maintained and responds to injury. So, what we're trying to do is take advantage of that biology that's so important in all of us during development and in adulthood and to stimulate it in a very selective way to get organs like the liver or the intestine or the retina to regenerate in response to the in

George Georgallides is the Founder of Basis, a start-up that is taking an advanced view of helping patients achieve better health and reach health and fitness goals.  Integrating data from a wide range of sources, Basis is striving for a real-time approach to engaging patients in making small but significant adjustments as they go through their day. George explains, "So, what we've essentially built is the unique integrative approach to help them that combines all this information that we're getting. We're actually addressing and combining it with workout, nutrition, mindfulness, and sleep in one platform. Those are things that exist in silos. The data exists in unstructured and incomprehensible ways for the person." "We've structured all those things around specific health goals. My background is in bioinformatics. My team is data scientists and health experts from universities and programs. So, we have an amazing team, and we've been able to build very interesting models around data that most people don't r

Dr. Jim Feng is the CEO and Founder of Phyxable which is serving up curated content specific to an injury or chronic condition to help patients overcome physical pain.  Using a virtual approach, Phyxable is engaging patients with gamification and social media type notifications to keep people on a plan and encourage them to not drop off. Jim elaborates, "We actually combine it with some machine learning algorithms to personalize the solution for you. And along the way, we also found that good guidance and coaching still play a good part in recovery, so we provide that service as well." "And the last point, we're actually building on the high technology side in the augmented reality part. So, there's one side to understanding where you're at and what you need to do. But the other aspect of it is checking in to make sure you're actually doing it right on a daily basis. We're utilizing augmented reality technology just on your phone camera in order to provide the feedback in real-time." @Phyxable #Health #Pain #

Dr. Ketan Patel is the Chief Medical Officer at SyTrue which has taken on the challenge of modernizing the exchange of information between providers and insurance companies. Transitioning from a traditional system designed for reactive healthcare to one of preventative care means information flow and analysis need to change as well.   Ketan explains, "As we start thinking about healthcare in the next few decades, it's really about receiving value back from the money we see spent. It's about getting involved earlier, looking at those risk factors at a really early stage when the intervention can cost a 10th or a 20th of what it might cost later in life. And that's a paradigm shift, and our systems aren't really created for that. They were never designed for that kind of thinking. And we now realize this is important, and we have to do this. This is where there's a need for technology to get to that information, but there's also a need to look at that information differently." "So, structured data, I'll start w

Dr. Josh Liu is the CEO and Co-Founder of SeamlessMD is working with care providers to safely discharge patients home sooner by at-home monitoring to track progress and reduce readmission rates. This allows hospitals to free up beds so they can actually see more patients, get more surgeries and other inpatient care done sooner. Josh elaborates, "Where SeamlessMD is differentiated from other patient engagement solutions is that we think of ourselves as more of a digital care journey platform. So the idea is that we work with hospitals and health systems to engage, monitor, and stay connected with patients across this entire healthcare journey when you're going through something like a surgery, a cancer journey, or chronic care journey." "The funny thing is when we first started SeamlessMD about nine years ago, just by chance, we focused initially on the older, higher risk, the complex patient population in their sixties, seventies, or eighties. So from day one, we had chosen to design this for the most challen

Dr. Brian Roberts is a Senior VP and Head of Clinical Development at Rezolute which is developing first in class therapies in the treatment of metabolic diseases. In addition to working on a therapeutic for congenital hyperinsulinism, a rare disease, Rezolute is also in clinical trials with RZ402, an oral small molecule to treat diabetic macular edema which is showing an increase in prevalence due to the increase in the number of people suffering from diabetes. Brian explains, "DME or diabetic macular edema is a complication of diabetes. It's a subset of diabetic retinopathy. And like other complications of diabetes, the blood vessels in the eye become injured or corrupted. And this leads to inflammation in the leakage of fluid across the blood vessel into the eye. And in this case, into the macula of the retina, which is responsible for high-resolution vision. If that continues, it can result in progressive visual loss and even blindness." "Another problem with these therapies is that in some patients, they

Paul Cataford is the Interim CEO and President of Titan Medical Inc. which is bringing advancements to single-port or single incision robotic-assisted surgery. This differs from multiple ports where a number of incisions are made, and different tools are inserted into the different ports. Titan is moving all of the tools like the camera, a needle driver, grasper, and shearers through a single access point thanks to innovations in robotics, miniaturization, computing power, and visualization techniques. Paul elaborates, "Well, as you can well imagine, what multiport means, you have multiple incisions around the abdomen or around the surgical work area. Every time you create a new point of entry, you create a new opportunity for infection. So, you have a new wound that needs to heal. You have a new scar, there's further risk of hitting something without intention, as you have multiple incisions. Less sites mean less pain, so a single incision has big benefits to the patient." "So the patient is the real benefic

Sheetal Parmar is the Head of Clinical Services at Natera, a clinical genetic testing company. She draws on her experience as a prenatal genetic counselor to address the need for more accurate and available non-invasive prenatal genetic testing.  This kind of information can guide women and their care teams and can also help emotionally prepare families. Sheetal looks forward to seeing more genetic markers being used to identify other types of pregnancy health. Sheetal explains, "People want to know, what are all the different options of testing? You can want to know as little information as possible or no information, all the way to "I want all the testing that could possibly be available for me or for the pregnancy." I think those are the type of questions that come up. Or "I have this in my family history. Will this test help me with that?" We want to make sure the right test is ordered based on the information that's needed for that patient based on their values and their beliefs, and what they want to kn

Dr. David Dyer is the Chief Retina Specialist for Alimera Sciences, a publicly-traded company specializing in the development and commercialization of prescription ophthalmology treatments for the management of retinal diseases. Having high blood sugar over time can damage the retinal blood vessels that bring nutrients to the retina, creating diabetic retinopathy. Alimera has developed a delivery platform to inject their drug Iluvien into the eye to treat the resulting diabetic macular edema. David explains, "So with retinal diseases, you're usually talking about diseases within the nerve fiber layer of the retina, the retinal vessels, or in the tissue that is underneath the retina that supports some of the retinal function. And that includes diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, vein occlusions, sometimes you can get detachments of the retina, and there are many other disorders, but those are the most common." "The treatment for diabetic macular edema typically involves injecting medications into the e

Dr. Justin Norden is a Partner at GSR Ventures, a healthcare technology-focused venture fund investing in early-stage companies that are leveraging emerging technology to drive transformative changes in healthcare for all patients.   Justin explains, "Digital health has been, I think, a long journey for companies really trying to find things that we know should work, that we've seen work in other aspects of business where technologies really transformed how we do things. Even though that technology has been possible, it really hasn't touched healthcare until many would argue, very recently." "Many companies that came in, either starting around 2010 or even through 2015, were a lot of the similar ideas that we're seeing today, there just wasn't the adoption. We didn't see patients being ready to adopt these technologies. Largely, even though some patients tried to adopt them, the providers weren't ready, providers weren't ready to deal with that data or willing to connect or spend time with the patients using

Micha Breakstone is the CEO and Co-Founder of NeuraLight and points out the lack of objective and sensitive evaluation measures available to diagnose neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.  Currently, evaluations using short questionnaires, visual observations, and self-reported behavior are further influenced by biases of the physician. NeuraLight is developing an approach that focuses on using images of the eye to produce objective, repeatable measures of disease progression. Micha elaborates, "We look at over 100 parameters at once, and we capture these by standard videos or anything from a webcam to a mobile phone. And we've developed a quite unique technology that marries, on the one hand, a kind of standard machine learning. But on the other hand, something that is entirely unique to us which is signal processing. So the ability to basically bring technologies that are available for satellites, in super-resolution, bring them down to earth into mobile phones in orde

Jesús Martin-Garcia is the CEO of GeNeuro, a Swiss-based clinical stage company focused on novel approaches for treating autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases.  While previously considered junk DNA, human endogenous retroviruses are now being seen in a new light as they represent 8% of human DNA and play a role in locking viral reproduction. Jesús explains, "Our mission is really to focus on and to defeat neurodegenerative diseases. We have an original approach, and we believe because we are based on leveraging the biology of human endogenous retroviruses, which are the traces that are left in our DNA by the virus contaminations that affected our ancestors. We believe they play a major role in neurodegenerative diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, ALS, and now recent data has shown, long-COVID." "Yes, that was frankly a surprise for us. It was a discovery led by some academic groups in the US and Europe that showed that SARS-CoV-2, remember I told you at the beginning, this interaction between exogenous

Steve Palma is the President of Medical Cost Solutions at Goodroot and we talk about what medical billing errors have to do with increasing healthcare costs. Steve also shines a light on hospital financial assistance programs and how they are not being used enough to help patients pay high medical bills. Steve provides some details, "Well, the billing errors include the cost of payers overpaying or underpaying claims, and the cost to the providers in billing correctly and then dealing with all the administrative headaches around audits by payers, and getting that claim ultimately right. These add a tremendous amount of administrative cost on both sides. It ends up getting passed to the consumer." "You'll hear some people on the health plan side say it's all abusive provider billing practices, whether it's fraud or potentially maximizing coding in a complex coding environment. On the provider side, often, they'll say it's health plans intentionally underpaying or playing their own types of games." "I think, ov