Empowered Patient Podcast

Dr. Waqaas Al-Siddiq is the Founder and CEO of Biotricity and a leader in the development of mobile cardiac telemetry, MCT, devices to provide real-time, continuous monitoring of at-risk patients. Waqaas explains, "One of the core areas that we strongly focus on is long-term data collection in this real-time intelligent monitoring. When you talk about our core product, which is Bioflux, which is used for diagnostics, we are talking about a device that has built-in algorithms, that's FDA cleared, as well as the algorithms to collect data from a patient, determine if there is an emergency or an anomaly, and then alert somebody for emergency response. "Most importantly, we have three channels of data. Three channels of data means that we have three different views of the heart. What that does is that it creates more data. More data means better accuracy and a better diagnosis. The standard in the MCT space is actually two channels. With three contact points, two channels. To get three contact points, you need fi

Dr. Jennifer Jones-McMeans is the Divisional Vice President of Global Clinical Affairs at Abbott's Vascular Business. She talks about recently released data from their Beyond Intervention Survey of 1800 stakeholders including 1289 vascular disease patients, 408 healthcare physicians, and 173 healthcare leaders from across 13 countries. The study looked particularly at Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) and Coronary Artery Disease (CAD) which revealed these diseases disproportionately affect Black, Latino, and Native Americans. Jennifer reports, "I think what Beyond Intervention allowed us to do is to see what the patient is feeling, experiencing, and how does that differ from what your healthcare provider or your healthcare leader is saying? Because one of the key findings that we found was that patient experience is maybe not as good as the healthcare provider may be thinking it is." "And we know that when you look at these social determinants, and they can be anything from socioeconomic status, availability to

Lauren Walrath is Vice President of Public Affairs in North America, and Susan Thiele is Director of Advocacy and Brand Communications at Kyowa Kirin, a Japan-based global specialty pharmaceutical company known for its cutting-edge scientific discoveries in four therapeutic areas including neurology, nephrology, hematological cancers, and immunology. Lauren explains their approach to patient-centric discovery, "In advocacy, we're really trying to find where the gaps are and how we can best work with partners to make long-term and sustainable improvements for patients. So that can be in the form of starting new research, funding new grants, addressing disparities, working on developing new education programs. Generally, we're looking for meaningful opportunities to help patients and their families on their journey from diagnosis to treatment. We work closely with the advocates, and we bring all of that understanding back to our teams here at Kyowa Kirin so that we really can engage our cross-functional partner

Dr. Colin Banas is the Chief Medical Officer at DrFirst a health IT company that's been around for over 21 years. Started as an e-prescribing platform and developed expertise in medication management.  Colin explains, "What we as a company are hoping to do is empower patients by connecting the dots to help them get on therapy and stay on therapy. And so, one of the core things that we do as a company is around price transparency." "And when I say price transparency, what I'm really talking about is serving up data to the multiple parties involved in prescribing decisions. When I mention price transparency for a provider, for example, what I'm saying is at the moment of making that decision to write that prescription, ostensibly with the patient in front of me, or the encounter happening, so much of it now is virtual via telehealth. But at the moment of making that prescription decision, I can see what the patient's copay will be, what they're out of pocket will be. And that really lends itself to having a con

Bob Connelly is the CEO of Elicio Therapeutics which has figured out how to deliver immunotherapies from vaccines into the lymph nodes where they are activated to defeat cancer and infectious diseases. Bob says, "Our overall mission is to treat many different types of cancers primarily, but even to bring our technology into other areas like infectious diseases by engaging the lymph nodes, which are really the command center for the immune response in our body." "And to date, they really have not been a part of the cancer immunotherapy revolution that's really started over the last ten years and is very exciting. We're using a technology that initially is focused on KRAS mutation-driven cancers, which comprise 25% of all solid tumors. So we're in a trial right now where we have colorectal cancer patients, we have pancreatic cancer patients, but our lead program can apply in lung cancer, ovarian cancer, bile duct cancer." "In our bodies, albumin is a very large protein that is constantly circulating throughout

Dr. Peter Altman is the President and CEO of BioCardia and emphasizes that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the Western world. BioCardia is developing technologies to treat cardiovascular diseases with cell and cell-derived therapies which allow for precise cell delivery in the heart and technologies associated with optimizing the selection of patients to find those most likely to respond to the therapy.  Peter explains, "In this setting, I think what's unique is there's a technology around that cell processing and around the cell delivery. I think what's most unique is these are autologous cells, as we've said, and because of how we're doing this, we can achieve, in appropriate patients with this point-of-care processing and the efficient delivery, we can deliver and create dosage forms that are not only more significant than others historically but are very inexpensive to provide for the patients. And that means it can have a real boon to the healthcare system." "Most autologous therapies they

Walter Wolf is the author of The Right Rehab: A Guide to Addiction and Mental Illness Recovery When Crisis Hits Your Family and also an interventionist.  He has written this book to highlight options for those with addictions and family members and friends who want to help find an effective treatment. Walter explains, "There are lots of books about addiction, about the clinical aspect of it, but there were no books whatsoever, there were no guides about how you get the right treatment for the right individual. So a few years go by, and ironically I'm now an interventionist and a treatment placement specialist. People come to me not only to intervene with loved ones because they need to go to treatment but also I match people up with the right treatment facility for them." "Until just recently, the conventional wisdom was that if somebody had an addiction, well, that was because that was a choice on that individual's part, and that choice meant that person had very low morals, had very low character. But in fa

Boro Dropulić is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Caring Cross, a 501 (c)(3) non-profit dedicated to accelerating the development and manufacturing of advanced medicines to improve access to cures for all patients independent of where they live. Boro explains, "One way to reduce the cost is by manufacturing the product locally at, what we call, the clinical place-of-care rather than using a centralized manufacturing model that has traditionally been used for drug distribution. By using automated devices to ensure the consistency of the products while they're being made, for example, CAR-T cell products, they can be produced at a fraction of the cost than when they're made centrally, even a 10th of the cost with current cost and materials." "Once the CAR-T cell product is made, it is then reinfused back to the patient to have its anti-tumor effects. The most effective CAR-T cell products so far are autologous, meaning that they are from the patient's own cells and return back to the patient. There have

Amir Raza is the Vice President, Strategic Services at Encora and is working with technology-enabled companies to design and support patient engagement, telehealth, remote patient monitoring, digital clinical trials, and connected care solutions. Amir explains, "So, if you peel back the onion on the statement, we are a product engineering services company. I think what it unveils is four core capabilities that support that assertion. The first is the ability to build underlying digital platforms. The second is having mastery of data because data is increasingly crucial and critical, certainly within the empowered patient, consumer engagement, patient engagement space. I mean, data is the oil of that industry. So, all things data." "Then, of course, I think the other key capability that comes into play when you're designing these kinds of platforms is CX, or what is known in the industry as CX/UX, which is consumer experience and user experience. How do you design delightful, intuitive products? Finally, I thi

Khalid Al-Maskari is the CEO of Health Information Management Systems (HiMS) and a thought leader in healthcare informatics. Behavioral healthcare is an area that Khalid has identified as ripe for innovation and where integration of systems needs to be better focused on transparency and the coordination of the care of patients. Khalid says, "So in behavioral healthcare, a lot of the communication is between care coordinators and case managers. And most of it traditionally has been on the side of the healthcare providers having a lot of information, and then patients communicate with them. But the communication typically is long-term communication. It's not instantaneous. A lot of times, the patients have to request that information rather than them having access to it directly. So it's a longer process, unlike going to a PCP for a specific issue, behavioral health typically is a long-term process." "One of the things that COVID made clear is that behavioral health patients are ready to be more active and part

Dr. Paul Peter Tak is the President and CEO of Candel Therapeutics which is focused on educating the immune system to recognize and kill tumor cells in patients with a solid tumor. Candel is developing immunotherapies using engineered oncolytic viruses for prostate cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer, pancreatic cancer, and eye cancer. Paul Peter explains, "Viruses probably got a bad reputation during the pandemic, but you can actually use them to do something beneficial to a patient, and that's what we are doing. So, using molecular engineering, we change the viruses in such a way that they infect the tumor cells and that they induce cell death. They kill the tumor cells in a way that activates the patient's own immune system, which is basically a very natural way to fight cancer." "So, at the same time, we change the so-called tumor microenvironment from a cold tumor, a tumor that is not very active in terms of immune activity, into a hot tumor where we activate a whole variety of immune cells. And that's an

Bronwyn Spira is the CEO of Force Therapeutics which is supplying tools to manage procedure-based care. CMS  created CMMI, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation to evaluate new alternate payment models and service delivery models that were designed to reward high-value, high-quality care while also reducing payments. They would reduce the payments to clinicians who were not meeting the performance standards but preferentially reimburse high-quality and high-value providers. And these were called alternate payment models or APMs.  Bronwyn explains, "I think the important key here is that in order to reward quality, you first have to be able to measure quality and collect quality measures. So this is where patient-reported outcome measures and performance measures become so key. You actually now need those measures to submit for reimbursement based upon the services you're providing." "And this has changed provided behavior in a big way because before these APMS were implemented, a lot of providers a

Matt Walz is the CEO of Trialbee which is empowering patients through a more inclusive trial process. The Trialbee Honey product provides three user experiences on top of one common data architecture linking the patient, the test sites, and the sponsors providing real-time information about enrollment and how a study is performing. The Trialbee Hive product uses real-world data to model outreach to a hyper-targeted audience. Matt explains, "In terms of remote participation for studies, COVID brought to light the fact that there are tools and methods that have been available to allow patients to participate more and collect data more during clinical research without having to have frequent visits to a site. Not in all cases, but in a number of cases. And that also accelerated timelines to get to the point where you can seek a regulatory authority approval." "One of the things we've done in some of our studies, and this really comes down to how you do outreach for recruitment, is we've started to look at rare d

Sheeza Hussain is the Chief Commercial Officer of Biofourmis which is developing a hospital-at-home model for health systems that is even more in demand due to the stress of COVID-19 patients.  In addition to acute care, Biofourmis is also applying its remote monitoring technology to post-acute and chronic care. Sheeza explains, "When we think about hospital-at-home, we think about acute level type care-at-home. It's not about being cared for exactly as you would be in a hospital. But it's for those patients who still, for all intents and purposes, need to be monitored and need to be admitted to a hospital. But instead, they get to go home. They get monitoring equipment, they get to go to the comfort of their own bed, and they're still visited by clinicians or physicians every day in person as is a requirement for some of the reimbursement." "So when it comes to hospital-at-home, it's about in our case, a patch and we're device agnostic. We offer a patch that the patient wears on their chest, and it is contin

Tomer Shussman is CEO and Hila Glick, VP of Physical Therapy and Customer Experience of OneStep and we talk about the ways OneStep is set to augment PT for both patients and their physical therapists using the patient's smartphone.  OneStep is a smartphone-based digital physical therapy service that provides around-the-clock dedicated physical therapy courses, clinical-grade motion analysis, and real-time feedback and progress reports of patients. Using the smartphone as the gait lab equivalent, OneStep is able to measure walking in all kinds of environments and when performing day-to-day activities. Tomer explains, "What we are doing, and in that way, we are changing physical therapies substantially, in that we are enabling physical therapy to continue outside of the clinic. So, we augment the physical therapists, allowing them to treat more patients from the convenience of home, for both the PT and the patient. And that way, we enable the patients to, for example, exercise five minutes a day, their own time

Mike Gladstone is the Global President of Inflammation & Immunology at Pfizer.  We talk about conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and atopic dermatitis (AD) and how minority patients with these conditions are often misdiagnosed. Mike explains, "Well, it turns out that a lot of these diseases are completely unseen, or those diseases that are seen are just not well understood. And the reason why is, for instance, if I look at someone suffering from atopic dermatitis, for example, you may see some of the symptoms that they have, and those are bad enough, some of the redness and scratching and so forth. But what you don't know and what you don't see is how the patients suffer sometimes. They have the stares from others, they feel those stares, they feel the distance. They feel the judgment from others who see their condition, but it also goes much deeper than that. What you don't see for those patients is the constant itching." "Now, Black and Hispanic children are also mo

Kleanthis Xanthopoulos is Co-Founder and CEO of Shoreline Biosciences. He talks about the Shoreline cell therapy platform that uses standardized manufacturing of allogeneic induced pluripotent stem cells to create an effective treatment to kill tumor cells with multiple advantages over autologous T-cell therapies. Kleanthis explains, "We are focusing specifically on two different effector cells, Natural Killers and Macrophages, and we derive them from a platform which is induced pluripotent stem cells. This gives us the ability to really engineer the NK cells and Macrophages that we derive from iPSC, so they become allogeneic standardized, meaning they can be introduced to any patient and then are targeted and specific." "Initial clinical results are showing us that iPSC derived NK cells don't appear to have the kind of side effects that you see with T-cells. So we are very, very excited about that. And we are seeing that there's a different dimension in cell therapies that can be served very, very nicely thr

Francois Michelon is the CEO of ENDRA Life Sciences and describes the thermoacoustic enhanced ultrasound -TAEUS-technology ENDRA is developing to provide a safe and cost-effective way to measure the fat in the liver and diagnose non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). NAFLD is overtaking hepatitis as the world's leading root cause of the need for liver transplants. Current diagnostic options are using expensive MRI machines or performing a liver biopsy. Francois says, "There are no blood tests that currently we're aware of that can measure fat in your liver. It's not like cholesterol that floats around in your bloodstream. You have to measure it directly, and it doesn't even deposit uniformly in your liver." "ENDRA's technology uses a combination of radiofrequency pulses, which are akin to an MRI going in. Those radiofrequency pulses get absorbed differently into tissues. And we've been able to decode the sonic sound waves that come back out of tissues from that absorption of radiofrequency." "As a result,

Amy Fan is Co-Founder of Twentyeight Health a telemedicine startup successfully expanding its model to provide affordable reproductive healthcare to women in underserved communities. Amy explains, "For example, many people coming from underserved communities, especially ones 30 years old or below, are living in multi-generational households, so privacy can be really difficult to come across. So being able to message your doctor directly is actually a more flexible model for them than, for example, doing a video consultation with the doctor." "The other piece we focus on is affordability. We are one of the only telehealth companies that accept Medicaid, and unfortunately for individuals with Medicaid, it's very difficult to see a doctor in person. One in three doctors do not accept new Medicaid patients, and 45% of women between 20-30 years old do not have a primary care provider. So when you have those two combined, it ends up being very difficult for someone with Medicaid to see any healthcare professionals.

Karen Zaderej is the President, CEO, and Chairman of Axogen Inc. leader in the science of peripheral nerve regeneration and repair. Surgeons have always been challenged to restore feeling in damaged peripheral nerves due to accidents and surgical procedures. Karen says, "Traditionally, they've removed the nerves that give you sensation for your foot to allow you, for example, to move your hand or have sensation in your fingers. Obviously, there are downsides to that, but moving your hand is probably more important for the patient. So that would have been the gold standard." "So, you'd have two procedures, one to remove the nerve and another to fix the injury site. Today, what we're doing is providing surgeons an off-the-shelf opportunity to be able to do that same repair of the cut nerve and bridging of the gap, but to do it without taking another nerve from out of your body." @Axogen #RegenerativeMedicine #NerveDamage #NerveRepair #PeripheralNerves #Nerves AxogenInc.com Download the transcript here