Healthy Conversations CVS Health

In part two of our conversation about the Clinical Entrepreneur Programme from England’s National Health Service, our host, Dr. Daniel Kraft, continues his discussion with Dr. Tony Young, the program’s founder. They talk about a number of innovations brought about through the program, including two aimed at addressing health disparities. CardMedic uses a collection of “digital flashcards” to help improve communication between health care staff and patients across barriers ranging from physical impairment to language to PPE. And Written Medicine’s software uses human-generated translations to provide medication labels in 11 languages – and counting. To encourage innovations like these, the entrepreneur program is building a “health inequalities tool” to help potential entrepreneurs answer questions like, “Am I bringing in unconscious bias? Is this going to make health equity worse?”
 
In addition, Dr. Young offers a number of tips for potential physician entrepreneurs, including the importance of persistence and surrounding yourself with like-minded people. He encourages entrepreneurs to be open to change. “Don’t fall in love with your solution,” he says. “Too many people go, ‘I’ve got just the perfect answer for this,’ but it’s not. Actually, fall in love with the problem and really work that through. And then bring people onboard that share that problem and really want it solved.”

 
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NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme
Written Medicine
CardMedic

Clinicians are problem solvers by nature but taking an idea for a new innovation from concept to commercial market is not a skill widely taught in medical school. In 2015, England’s National Health Service (NHS) launched a Clinical Entrepreneur Programme to help provide just that type of knowledge and expertise. Our host, Dr. Daniel Kraft, speaks with Dr. Tony Young, the founder of that program who is an avid entrepreneur himself. Young is helping the NHS retain some of their brightest talent by fostering an entrepreneurial spirit in his colleagues and making connections where he can. The program has trained more than 1,000 clinical entrepreneurs, who’ve founded more than 350 startups, raised more than $500 million pounds, and impacted more than 100 million patients and professionals in the UK and beyond. You’ll hear all about Dr. Young’s career journey and the incredible innovations his colleagues are bringing to operating rooms as well as remote parts of the world. However, “the greatest medical innovation of all time,” says Young, “are the people who work in our Health Services, because they help put everything into action.” 
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NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme
 
 

One in four people in the U.S. has been diagnosed with a gastrointestinal (GI) condition, says the co-founder and CEO of Oshi Health, Sam Holliday. The patient journey to diagnosis is costly and long—often two to four years—and filled with tests, examinations and waiting rooms. Oshi Health is a startup and CVS Health Ventures partner that uses an integrated virtual care model to scale access to care and innovation for patients struggling with GI diseases such as irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. There’s an emerging understanding that the signaling between the gut and the brain can get dysregulated and trigger symptoms, notes Holliday. Oshi’s approach is to calm that signaling with a combination of FDA-approved digital therapeutics and a multidisciplinary care team that includes a dietician, psychologist, nurse practitioner and gastroenterologist.
 
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Oshi Health 
CVS Health Ventures

In Part 2 of the Healthy Conversations discussion with Dr. Brennan Spiegel, professor of medicine and public health at Cedar Sinai Health System, gastroenterologist, and VR pioneer, lets us peak into the future, and see some of the many ways VR is getting “real-er” – as he puts it: “You can experience life as someone with a disability, or as a different race, or with certain physical or visual handicaps. And that can give clinicians a bit of insight to what their patients are experiencing continuously.”

In the first of a 2-part episode on Healthy Conversations, Dr. Brennan Spiegel, a professor of medicine and public health at Cedars-Sinai Health System, gastroenterologist, and VR pioneer, discusses the exciting possibilities of virtual reality in terms of its affecting the human mind, as well as chronic diseases. As he puts it, "Rather than always bringing patients to the clinic, what if we can bring the clinic to the patient?"

In the second of a two-part episode about suicide, Dr. Seth Feuerstein, the CEO of Oui Therapeutics, discusses the exciting potential of digital therapeutics in preventing suicide. As he says, “So we can use software to tackle problems where we already have lots of prescription options, but -- the thing that really excites me is where can we use software to solve problems that were not previously solvable.