T-Minus 10 Slice of Healthcare LLC

What you’ll get out of this episode
Listen in as host Tim Fitzpatrick chats with Jess Ackerman, VP of Strategic Partnerships and Impact at Responsum Health, about her experiences across healthcare and technology, including her path from Speech Language Pathology to patient-facing roles at health tech startups. Today, Jess leads partnerships for Responsum Health, a mission-driven digital health tech company that has built empowered, informed communities of patients with chronic health conditions to drive better outcomes and to strategically align them with resources, clinical trials and best options for their health. Responsum Health knows how to build communities, and fast.

In this episode you’ll discover:
How Jess and her team have launched and grown communities in as little as 3 weeks alongside their sponsor partners.Patient communities the Responsum Health team has helped so far, including menopause, chronic kidney disease (CKD), long-COVID, glaucoma, COPD, and even rare diseases like pulmonary fibrosis and Sanfilippo syndrome.How Responsum reduces clinical burden and improves communication, because patients can go to their doctor with a baseline level of education. Because of this, providers can perform at the top of their license and spend more time on treatment information rather than the basics.How Responsum engages patients with resources and education to help prepare a baseline for those initial conversations with their care team, and how this leads to better outcomes like recruitment, adherence, engagement, and reduced hospitalizations.Why the greatest barrier and competition to Responsum’s mission is the status quo, and what it will take to help patients, providers, and communities thrive if we can change it.
Final Frontier - 5 Questions in 50 Seconds
Top Challenge: Adoption of digital health tools Top Opportunity: Meeting patients where they areTech Trend You’re Following: Using our voices as diagnostic toolsPower of vocal quality as a health tracker (e.g. Sonde Health)Top Media Recs: The Humans by Matt HaigMad Honey by Jodi PicoultAuthor Elizabeth StroutThe Scent Keeper by Erica BauermeisteHealthcare / Tech Leader(s) You’re Following: T-Minus 10 guests are at the top of my list! 🚀🎉 
Quotables
“ Our Medicare community is quick to jump on the mobile apps and platforms. Our parent's generation between ages 70 - 80 – My mom is on her phone constantly researching and doing this and that – so I think people are judging a little bit quickly that the older population is not going to adopt the technology. I think it’s a huge opportunity because everyone has a smartphone. “
Recommended Resources
Responsum HealthResponsum Chronic Kidney Disease CommunityListen to Jess on the Empowered Patient Podcast Responsum Health Announces Partnership with Society for Women’s Health Research to Develop Unique Knowledge Resource for Women Living with MenopauseJoin the Conversation 

Jess Ackerman on LinkedIn

“ This is my mom TODAY...She is 2 years, 3 months since her Stage IV Lung Cancer diagnosis; an "incidental finding" with NO symptoms, non-smoker, EGFR+ mutation. She was on the golf course when she received the call with the dreaded "c-word" diagnosis. Her story is both unique and like so many others with a stage IV, no symptom dx. #lungcancerawarenessmonth There has been considerable progress in reducing the burden of #lungcancer through effective #earlydetection and #precisiononcology ... and we need more! More #patientvoice. More #patientadvocacy. More integrated solutions. More focus on #patientexperience. More #access to #clinicaltrials #decentralizedclinicaltrials. My mom is strong and vibrant, in a #clinicaltrial at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ... but DFCI cannot do it alone- in need of an ongoing holistic, personalized, integrated approach through #medtech #digitalhealth solutions.... Let's keep the momentum... Jasper Health Circuit Clinical

Episode 38: Using AI, Data, and Telepharmacy To Drive Medication Optimization with Jason Rose, CEO of AdhereHealth
What you’ll get out of this episode
Join host Tim Fitzpatrick as he chats with Jason Rose, CEO of AdhereHealth. In this voyage we learn more about AdhereHealth’s mission to deliver data-driven technology that improves medication optimization and quality measures to achieve value-based outcomes. We also hear how Jason’s 30 years of experience in this space shaped the company’s rebrand and transformation since he took over its helm in 2018. Today, AdhereHealth is the market leader using telepharmacy to overcome social determinants of health (SDOH) and improve the patient experience.
Disclaimer: In this video Jason incorrectly states Dr. John Halamka left Beth Israel and is now at Johns Hopkins but he is actually at Mayo Clinic.
In this episode you’ll discover:
How AdhereHealth delivers purpose-built, innovative technology solutions to improve the quality of care, medication adherence , and cost outcomes.Why AdhereHealth is still the only national telepharmacy solution operating at scale in the United States today, touching more than 30 million people through its technologies and at-risk engagement services.How their unique combination of analytics, clinical workflow software, and proactive telepharmacy outreach addresses an estimated half a trillion dollars of unnecessary annual medical costs attributed to medication adherence issues.Why AdhereHealth developed the first-of-its-kind PRM (patient relationship management) software to further their understanding of patients’ Social Determinants of Health (SDoH).How Jason and his team think about things like risk and data architecture for their PRM platform by leveraging claims data (mile wide), medical history (mile deep), and pharmacy records (updated daily).Final Frontier - 5 Questions in 50 Seconds
Top Challenge: Leveraging a combination of technology and clinician enablement that actually accelerates outcomes (hint -  not an EHR)Top Opportunity:  Medication adherenceTech Trend You’re Following: Public-Private PartnershipsTop Media Recs:  Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself: How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One by Dispenza, Joe. Modern Healthcare, Fierce Healthcare, Rama on Healthcare, WSJRockefeller, George LukasHealthcare / Tech Leader(s) You’re Following:Elon MuskDr. John Halamka, CIO at Mayo ClinicDr. David Brailer, First US Health IT Czar, Bush AdministrationSarah London, CEO of Centene CorporationDan Mendelson, CEO of Morgan HealthDavid Cordani, CEO of CignaGail Boudreaux, CEO of ElevanceQuotables
“The pandemic was a…wasted opportunity to tackle [medication adherence] in a really big way. Who were those most hurt in the pandemic? It was not about the genetic code, it was about the zip code. It was the same patients before we still see today who are not getting their drugs for the chronic conditions.”
“We’re using the data of yesterday to inform our decisions today, and artificial intelligence to drive our actions tomorrow.”
Recommended Resources
Medication Adherence Is a “Force Multiplier” for Medicare Advantage Profitability, Enrollment, Star Ratings (AJMC, 2023)The Quintuple Aim for Health Care Improvement: A New Imperative to Advance Health Equity - PubMed (nih.gov)Cost of Prescription Drug-Related Morbidity and Mortality - PubMed (nih.gov)Charting a New Path to At-Home Medication Adherence With Digital Pharmacy Support (AJMC, 2022)Join the Conversation 
Are you a healthcare innovator? Tell us what topics and people you’d like us to cover in future episodes:

Jason Rose on LinkedIn
AdhereHealth on LinkedIn
AdhereHealth on Twitter

““It’s a long-standing belief that star ratings are Darwinism in healthcare. If you don’t get the four stars, you’ve lost a percentage of your premium and lost funding to put into the product, and now because you’ve lost that, you’ve also lost membership enrollment,”

What you’ll get out of this episode
Listen in as host Tim Fitzpatrick chats with Hillary Lin about Hillary’s journey from launching Curio at the start of the pandemic to navigating their latest pivot into cancer care. Hillary’s training and clinical experience led her to founding a holistic wellness startup that evolved into psychedelic-assisted therapy to where it is now as a comprehensive care delivery and navigation company. While Curio’s vision has not wavered, the team’s resilience and continued focus on patients has guided the evolution and expansion of their care infrastructure platform. 

In this episode you’ll discover:
What led Curio to provide supportive care to patients who have recently been diagnosed with complex chronic illnesses like cancer.How Hillary and her team have adapted their ketamine-assisted therapy treatments in this new model, and the outcomes they’ve seen from PHQ-9 and GAD-7 in as little as one month for patients using the assisted therapy.Why Hillary is hopeful that generative AI will revolutionize patient education in healthcare and make managing diagnosis easier to navigate.Why New York City is the place to build your health tech startup – Spoiler Alert: a community of familiar faces and fearless friends!
Final Frontier - 5 Questions in 50 Seconds
Top Challenge: The recent company pivot. When Curio changed the company vision, Hillary worked on rebuilding the relationship with partners and gaining new patients. Also, becoming in-network providers with insuranceTop Opportunity: Building AI native care delivery.Tech Trend You’re Following: VR/AR - New Apple VR headsets.Top Media Recs: Outlive by Peter AttiaHealthcare / Tech Leader(s) You’re Following: Peter Attia Eric Topol Andrew YingQuotables

“In the beginning, I was so burnt out and frustrated with healthcare that I very much wanted to start a wellness company. What I mean by that, is we were coaching people to explore their emotions. From the basics of even labeling emotions and understanding mindfulness around your emotions to regulating them and to much more sophisticated ways of interacting using emotional language and expression. We even used to host improv classes to help people explore.” @HillaryLin #joinCurio on Ep37 @T-Minus10 w/ @trfitzpatrick. 

Recommended Resources
We're redefining comprehensive care.We Are Overmedicated. How Can We Use Psychedelics To Heal Not Just Individuals, But Entire Systems? DEA, SAMHSA Extend COVID-19 Telemedicine Flexibilities for Prescribing Controlled Medications for Six Months While Considering Comments from the Public Join the Conversation
Hillary Lin on LinkedIn
Hillary Lin on Twitter
Curio on Medium

“I am a physician and founder of a mental healthtech startup (Curio). So what are my thoughts on emotional chatbots? At the time of writing, I'm undecided because this realm is still developing as we speak. I think early versions of emotional support chatbots will not feel incredibly fulfilling or validating to most users. However, there is a world where people may be so socialized to AI entities that they will feel at home interacting with them. For now, I'm more interested in how AI can help us think and stay accountable to our own goals. More of a coach, perhaps, than a therapist. The New York Times published an article on Inflection AI's Pi companion, which seems to validate this feeling. "With a level of enthusiasm only a robot could muster before coffee, Pi pushed me to break down my to-do list to create a realistic plan. Like much of the bot’s advice, it was obvious and simple, the kind of thing you would read in a self-help article by a productivity guru. But it was tailored specifically to me — and it worked.

I'm curious to hear from people who have tried interacting with the latest emotional chatbots - what did you think about your experience?” (LinkedIn)
“ 🎉 Breaking News for Digital Health Companies 🌐💊 The DEA has decided to extend

What you’ll get out of this episode
Listen in as host Tim Fitzpatrick chats with Kanishka Rao about the unexpected loss of his grandfather, who passed away from kidney disease, and how he was not aware he had kidney disease until his kidneys had already failed. Because of this, Kanishka and his father, Bharat, co-founded Carenostics with the goal of tackling the underdiagnosis, undertreatment, and health inequities of chronic disease. Carenostics’ vision is to transform healthcare into a data-driven paradigm where readily-available patient data is leveraged to make personalized patient recommendations for diagnostic and therapy decisions.
In this episode you’ll discover:
Carenostics serves both physicians and patients by streamlining the diagnosis process for patients with chronic diseases and ensuring the patient is receiving proper diagnosis and more personalized treatment.How Kanishka and Bharat think about existing barriers to Carenostics short- and long-term success, including (1) provider friction; (2) changing workflows; and (3) cost.Technical questions that arise from using AI in these diagnostic settings, including around temporal stability, which refers to the question of keeping a model you’ve trained updated as you add new patients and guidelines to the data set. Questions also arise around bias adjustment and the cost of being wrong while using tools like generative AI to take on more and more of your administrative and decision making tasks.Carenostics just received the Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award in 2023 alongside their partners at Hackensack Meridian Health for their AI approach to identifying undiagnosed CKD and activating clinicians at the point of care. Past winners include Astrazeneca, Merck, Regeneron, and Duke University.Kanishka and his team strive to change the status quo by shifting the way practitioners diagnose and treat patients to a more data-driven model where readily-available patient data is leveraged to make personalized patient recommendations for diagnostic and therapy decisions. This could save millions of lives through early diagnosis and intervention, and appropriate long-term treatment and care.
Final Frontier - 5 Questions in 50 Seconds
Top Challenge: Talent / hiringTop Opportunity: Awareness / acceptance of AITech Trend You’re Following: Bias-adjusted AITop Media Recs: Shoe Dog, by Phil KnightHealthcare / Tech Leader(s) You’re Following: Aneesh ChopraQuotables
“When I reflect back to that first conversation with my dad, one of the first questions I asked was ‘You built these models 2 decades ago – the first FDA-approved way of diagnosing lung cancer from CT scans, it’s one of Baret’s patents – you know why isn’t AI used every day at the point of care. AI is not a new thing.’ The biggest reason was provider friction, and all these different models of charging providers morbid amounts of money for these operating systems, diverting them to a different workflow, providing black box recommendations or, fundamentally even trying to change the way they deliver care.” @KanishkaRao #Carenostics on Ep26 @t-minus10 w/ @trfitzpatrick 

Recommended Resources
Carenostics Debuts AI-Driven Tool to Diagnose Chronic Kidney Disease (Carenostics)Bio-IT World Names 2023 Innovative Practices Winners (Bio IT World)SBIR Phase I: Artificial intelligence platform for secure, collaborative learning across medical institutions (NSF Award Search)Is the Software Function Intended to Provide Clinical Decision Support? (FDA)Join the Conversation 
Kanishka Rao on LinkedIn
Bharat Rao on LinkedIn
Carenostics on LinkedIn

“Thrilled to have our partnership with Hackensack Meridian Health awarded the Bio-IT World Innovative Practices Award! Excited to have our work using AI for CKD recognized alongside other innovative recipients, including AbbVie, City of Hope, & Regeneron!
Thank you to Bayer G4A for the nomination - and looking forward to presenting with Bharat Rao & Kash

Episode 35: Harnessing The Power of Play For Adolescent Health with Dr. Lynn Fiellin, Founder of Playbl, Inc.
What you’ll get out of this episode
Listen in as host Tim Fitzpatrick chats with Dr. Lynn Fiellin about her path to founding Playbl, the Yale spin-out company harnessing the power of play to enable healthier and better lives for adolescents. We learn what tools, principles, and earned wisdom Dr. Fiellin and her teams have developed over the past 13 years building serious games. From 30-page playbooks to randomized controlled trial designs for hundreds of teens, this is a must-listen for anyone interested in the use of video games for health education and behavior change at scale. 
In this episode you’ll discover:
How Lynn landed her first grant from NIH in 2009 to begin building her first gamesPlaybl has now created games for ages 10 - 20 years old between topics ranging from health promotion, vaping and smoking awareness, and mental health awareness, to preventing opioid misuse and addiction.The importance of scientific process and study design in the development of Dr. Fiellin’s games, with 12-18 months from initial design through piloting and evaluation before its ready for randomized study.How an early partnership with Shell Games enabled Lynn and her team to combine best in class game development with academic research to get these games off the ground, and led to the creation of a “Games Playbook” to align gaming and research teams on a set of common goals, outcomes, and milestones.How Lynn and Playbl think about studying impact at various time points, and the durability of those results in the adolescent populationPlaySmart, Playbl’s latest game for kids ages 16 to 19, that was funded by NIH’s HEAL initiative and aims to address mental health and opioid misuse (see game).Playbl has long targeted K12 education settings due to the demand of parents and educators looking for these types of solutions, especially during the pandemic. Now, Playbl is exploring working with major children’s hospitals to provide health education content in clinical settings as kids are sitting in waiting rooms. Playbl has now recorded upwards of 420,000 logins for their educational games.
Final Frontier - 5 Questions in 50 Seconds
Top Challenge: System-level support and standardization in health education, School fundingTop Opportunity: Serious games for skills development in adolescent health and well-beingTech Trend You’re Following: ChatGPT, AITop Media Recs: “What's The Point of Your 20s?” By Emma Goldberg (New York Times)Healthcare / Tech Leader(s) You’re Following: Dr. Vivek Murthy, US Surgeon General
Quotables
“Finding Kids where they are, and where they wanna be is really the ticket.” @LFiellen #PlayBl on Ep 35 @T-Minus10 w/ @trfitzpatrick 

“We design our efficacy trials in the way that we would design any other efficacy trials. The only difference is that the delivery vehicle is a video game. So, our current study is enrolling 532 kids ages 16 - 19, at 10 schools around Connecticut. We will follow them for 12 months, and they are essentially assigned to play our Play Smart game, which again focuses on Mental Health and opioid misuse, or a set of control games. We then collect data from all of them and baseline them 6 weeks at the end of gameplay, and 3, 6, and 12 months. This allows us to really say that we have accomplished something and that we accomplished what we set out to accomplish.”  @LFiellen #PlayBl on Ep 35 @T-Minus10 w/ @trfitzpatrick 
Recommended Resources
PlayBlPlay2PREVENT Lab - YaleA Yale doctor is using a video game to fight the opioid crisis - WaPoSeriousGames@Google: PlayForward: Using Games to Improve Adolescent Health (YT)Protecting Youth Mental Health - US Surgeon GeneralJoin the Conversation 
Lynn Fiellen on LinkedIn
Lynn Fiellen on Twitter

“What an amazing celebration! Congratulations to the brilliant Bernice Pescosolido and the Indianapolis Colts 
for this gr

What you’ll get out of this episode:
Listen in as host Tim Fitzpatrick chats with Dr. Osman Khawar about the impact and benefits of home dialysis, and the potential of building a hemodialysis machine versatile enough for any care setting. Dr. Khawar describes feeling frustrated by not being able to offer flexible dialysis prescriptions to his patients. In today’s health system, nephrologists are often dialysis-centric and trying to get dialysis to fit into the patient's life, versus the other way around. Osman and his team want to change that. Today, he's leading Diality, a medical device company that aims to develop a hemodialysis system that will enable physicians to prioritize patients while also helping their practice thrive and grow. Their mission is to develop solutions that improve lives impacted by kidney disease.

In this episode you’ll discover:
Why early career mentorship was vital in Osman’s understanding and championing of home dialysis for his patientsWhere Osman learned to address key barriers in awareness and education around home dialysis in his practiceWhy Osman believes CKD should be patient-centric to determine each patient's needs and evaluate all possible methods of treatmentWhile patient education is highly important, sometimes we need to go back to the basics and ensure nephrologists are educated and confident in teaching patients the ins and outs of home dialysisWhat it takes to build a medical device company, especially as a first-time founder with a background in clinical medicine
Final Frontier - 5 Questions in 50 Seconds
Top Challenge: TimeTop Opportunity: Broadening the user base in dialysis and leveraging data to improve outcomesTech Trend You’re Following: Artificial IntelligenceTop Media Recs: Essentialism, Thinking Fast and SlowHealthcare / Tech Leader(s) You’re Following: Dr. Khawar’s mentors from medicine, technology and entrepreneurship
Quotables
“As Diality thinks about education – of course, as a device company we think about it in 2 ways – how do we ensure patients and care providers are comfortable using the device, but also as we move up the funnel, how do we make both patients, payers, and physicians understand the flexibility that they have in the choice of dialysis: modality, choice of machinery, choice of dialysis prescription, all of these pieces and I think we need to continue to leverage technology to do that.”

Recommended Resources
What is Chronic Kidney Disease and how does dialysis work? (Scientific American)Pam Wapnick Presents Diality at LSI USA ‘23 (YouTube)Diality Names Pamela Wapnick as Chief Financial Officer: Wapnick brings decades of financial experience to the company as it prepares for commercialization of its smart, mobile hemodialysis platform (Link)Hemodialysis Technology Company Diality Joins Innovative Kidney Care Campaign, Seeks to Improve Choice for Kidney Patients (Link)
Join the Conversation
Osman Khawar on LinkedIn

‘This weekend, Diality organized a kidney walk to raise proceeds for the National Kidney Foundation. It was a beautiful day in Laguna Niguel spent walking for a great cause to raise awareness and improve education for those impacted by kidney disease. #diality #kidneymonth #kidneydisease #patientsfirst” 
@Osman Khawar on LinkedIn

“In medical startups, particularly in the early days, a CEO should be accustomed to wearing many hats and making many decisions daily. As your company matures, as Diality has, you must consider how to target your time and effort to the essential things in today's distraction-filled world.

I recently read Greg McKeown's "Essentialism." This book teaches the systematic discipline of getting the right things done by asking what is essential and eliminating what is not to support more deliberate decision-making. Essentialism is more than a principle. It's a way of life and thinking that helps us operate at our highest point of contribution.

Becoming a true essentialist won't happen ov