Tom Looby, CEO of Conavi, is focused on developing hybrid intravascular imaging technology that combines two established modalities into a single imaging catheter to provide a comprehensive view of the coronary arteries. This eliminates blind spots when using either intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) or optical coherence tomography (OCT) alone and is driving a shift away from relying solely on traditional angiography toward the use of advanced intravascular imaging to guide coronary procedures. Using AI to analyze dual-stream co-registered data allows interventional cardiologists to more accurately assess lesions, determine the appropriate stent size, and ensure proper placement, thereby reducing cardiac death and blood clots around stents.

Tim explains, "So our technology is an imaging catheter. We're unique in that we combine two imaging modalities that are already well established in the market. But because each of them has blind spots, by combining them into a single catheter, we remove those blind spots, and we think we produce the best imaging catheter to help guide coronary interventions."

"It is well known that these strengths and weaknesses occur in both ultrasound and optical imaging. But to set the stage, this is a trend happening in the marketplace. There are four million angioplasty stenting procedures performed each year, and most of them rely solely on traditional angiography. Most of your audience probably knows that angiography is an X-ray that uses a contrast agent, so you're seeing the vasculature around the heart through a secondary image. The detailed view inside the blood vessels is limited when using only angiography, which has restricted the types of procedures doctors have been able to perform over time. Recognizing that intravascular ultrasound, sometimes called IVUS, and separately, OCT—short for optical coherence tomography—were developed independently to examine inside the blood vessel."

#Conavi #CardiovascularImaging #InterventionalCardiology #MedicalDevice #HeartHealth #Innovation #IVUS #OCT #AIinHealthcare #CardiacIntervention #HealthTech #Medtech #Cardiology #HybridImaging

Conavi.com

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Theresa Lyons, CEO and Founder of Navigating AWEtism, is providing parents with current, accurate information about autism to help them focus on manageable issues for their child. She strongly cautions about information about autism from social media, which is often over-generalized and incorrect. Autism spectrum disorder presents a wide range of behaviors from mild communication difficulties to complex challenges requiring lifelong care, and Theresa advocates for an individual approach, including lab testing, before choosing a treatment plan.

Theresa explains, "What we strive to do is educate parents on the cutting-edge information of autism so that they can make the best decisions for their kids. All too often, parents and I, including myself, are autism parents. We get information that is 20 to 30 years old. So it's really important to make decisions for your child's future based on quality information."

"So autism is a spectrum, and we can talk about one end of the spectrum. A child might be speaking, but they might have difficulty having a back-and-forth conversation. They might be very limited in what they're talking about. Let's say maybe they have a huge interest in trains, and you can talk to this child about trains, but then if you try to have a conversation about the weather, your sneakers, or the beach, something you like to do, then that's where conversation doesn't happen at all. Kids on that end of the spectrum can dress themselves, and they can feed themselves. And when they get older, they will go across the street and potentially drive a car. So that's one end of the spectrum. And then on the other end is more profound autism. And those are kids who might not ever dress themselves or might not have the ability to cut their food ever."

#NavigatingAWEtism #AWEtism #Autism #AutismSpectrum #Pediatrics #Healthcare #EvidenceBasedMedicine #Neurodevelopment #FamilyCenteredCare #HealthcareProviders #Misinformation #QualityCare

AWEtism.net

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Lori Runion, a director at Resultant, identifies inadequate scheduling and related staffing unpredictability as a central cause of clinician burnout. Healthcare organizations traditionally rely on historical averages for scheduling, often resulting in a mismatch between patient demand and clinician capacity. Breaking down data silos and using analytics and AI to create predictive staffing models can help forecast demand, anticipate seasonal spikes, and enable proactive staffing to reduce clinician burnout.

Lori explains, " From my perspective, burnout is driven at the operational level. To say it most simply, I think that burnout is driven by unpredictability, specifically, what I want to talk a little bit about, predictive staffing. And so, when we think about staffing, the unpredictability and misalignment between patient demand and staffing capacity are really what's driving it. So I don't think it's a lack of resilience. I don't think it's necessarily that there are gaps in care, but there are constant coverage gaps and volatility in the workload. And so I think it's ultimately driven by that mismatch when patient demand and clinician capacity are misaligned. I think that healthcare is traditionally staffed based on historical averages rather than dynamic demand or patterns, and that's what creates the unpredictable shifts and last-minute schedule changes that lead to overextension and exhaustion, which drive burnout."

"So, for example, you think about your EHR, which includes your demand, your patient medical record, and you have a scheduling system that shows available capacity, and you may have claims data that shows utilization patterns or other things. So when they are only looking at one system, they have some blind spots. And so I think that if they're looking at connected systems and pulling all that data together to identify patterns and really see the full picture, that's where they can align patient demand with staffing capacity."

#Resultant #HealthcareBurnout #PatientSafety #HealthcareLeadership #PredictiveAnalytics #HealthcareData #WorkforceOptimization#ClinicianBurnout #HealthcareAnalytics #PredictiveStaffing #HealthcareIT #DataDriven #PatientCare #HealthcareLeadership #AIinHealthcare #WorkforceOptimization #HealthcareInnovation

resultant.com

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Bill Heller, Chief Operating Officer at CHG Healthcare, is focused on the significant and growing demand for physicians across numerous specialties and on providing a flexible solution for healthcare facilities to maintain services with temporary physician staffing. Rural healthcare facilities are especially dependent on temporary staffing to overcome challenges in attracting and keeping permanent medical professionals. Physicians at all career stages are drawn to locum tenens work, and it has evolved from a niche practice to a mainstream strategy for healthcare facilities and physicians.

Bill explains, "CHG Healthcare is a physician workforce solutions company, which means our primary business is physician staffing. So we're the largest physician staffing company in the country. We staff primarily on a part-time temporary basis, but we also do perm and a whole bunch of other stuff. We also do allied staffing, so we have a big staffing arm."

"In addition to that, we have an advisory services arm where we advise clients on how to run more effective client solutions through a ton of different advisory opportunities. We also have a tech solutions arm, and so that's what makes up our workforce solutions. On the primary business, our locum tenant business, which is our temporary physician business, we connect healthcare providers with hospitals, clinics, and communities across the country where there are significant gaps in healthcare delivery, and we help them fill those gaps."

#CHGHealthcare #HealthcareStaffing #LocumTenens #PhysicianJobs #HealthcareWorkforce #RuralHealthcare #MedicalStaffing #HealthcareSolutions #PhysicianRecruitment #HealthcareCareers

CHGhealthcare.com

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Jean-Philippe Vert, the Co-Founder and CEO of Bioptimus, is building a foundational AI model for biology to solve the problem of siloed biomedical research. Key goals are to bridge the translational gaps between drug discovery and development, and between clinical research and real-world patient outcomes, and to redesign clinical trials for greater efficiency and improved results. Creating digital twins of patients is a way to simulate treatment outcomes and create synthetic control arms for clinical trials, ultimately lowering the risk and cost of drug development and enabling the creation of new medicines for a broader range of conditions, including rare diseases.

Jean-Philippe explains, "So at its core, what we try to build at Bioptimus is the foundational AI infrastructure for biology. The problem we're trying to solve is that biology is complex and operates across different scales, from genes and proteins to cells, organs, patients, etc. And historically, lots of research, lots of biological, biomedical research has been very siloed, has been focusing on specific aspects of biology, like studying only genes or studying only cells. What we are building at Bioptimus is an AI-intelligent system that can see across all these layers, all of these cases, to get a holistic picture of biology. And it's not only a scientific endeavor, but the reason why it's hard to make a drug today, why so many diseases remain untreated, is that the siloed nature of biomedical research has created difficulties in how we move from research in discovery, like understanding a disease, to making a treatment for the patients."

"So we have indeed a model called H-Optimus, which is a foundation model for one type of modality, which is one thing you see in an image. It's for histopathology slides. This is when someone has, for example, a cancer, you take a biopsy and then typically a pathologist looks at the biopsy under the microscope to characterize the disease, to see if there are cancer cells, to see the shape, to see the organization, and so to pose a diagnostic and suggest a treatment. We have trained an AI system that helps pathologists be better because our systems have been trained by looking at billions of such images, and so have a very detailed understanding of the subtle variations that can be observed in images."

#Bioptimus #ArtificialIntelligence #DrugDiscovery #Biotechnology #PrecisionMedicine #FoundationModels #BiologyAI #ClinicalTrials #CancerResearch #RareDiseases #DigitalHealth #Innovation

bioptimus.com

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David Stamler, CEO of Alterity Therapeutics, is developing a drug to treat multiple system atrophy (MSA), a rare and rapidly progressing neurodegenerative disease that often presents as Parkinson's disease but is distinct and more aggressive. There is no single genetic cause or specific biomarker, making accurate diagnosis a significant challenge. The lead drug is a novel small molecule designed to manage excess reactive iron in the brain, which drives the disease, and may be effective for other neurodegenerative diseases involving iron dysregulation.

David explains, "Multiple system atrophy is a rare disease, and that's part of the reason people may not know so much about it. It is a neurodegenerative disease, and as the name implies, there are multiple regions of the brain that are affected, hence the term multiple systems that are governed by those regions of the brain. And as the disease progresses, some of these regions degenerate, and you get abnormal function in various areas."

"Now, we like to characterize the disease as a Parkinsonian disorder, which means early on, it can look like Parkinson's disease. And that's kind of a good descriptor to help people understand what it might look like, but it's distinct from Parkinson's disease, and it progresses a lot faster, a lot more rapidly. So it's a disease that people don't know about, probably because no one famous has been diagnosed with MSA, although I'm sure various famous people have probably had the disease and maybe didn't know it."

#AlterityTherapeutics #MultipleSystemAtrophy #MSAAwareness #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Biotech #Phase3 #Neurology #MSA #ClinicalTrials #AlterityTherapeutics #ATH434 #Biotech #RareDisease #Neurodegeneration #DrugDevelopment #MedicalBreakthrough #IronChaperone

Alteritytx.com

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Greg Mayes, President and CEO of Reunion Neuroscience, and Dr. Manish Agrawal, the Co-Founder and CEO of Sunstone Therapies, shine a light on adjustment disorder, a disproportionate emotional or behavioral reaction to a significant life stressor such as a cancer diagnosis. This under-recognized condition lacks FDA-approved treatments and is often managed with SSRIs or talk therapy. The REKINDLE study evaluated the use of a psilocybin analog drug in development for treating adjustment disorder and has shown positive results by integrating emotional treatment into the standard of care for serious illnesses.

Greg explains, "In fact, there are no approved investigational assets that had been approved by the FDA for adjustment disorder. But it was an area of exploration that the FDA encouraged us to move into in light of people's disproportionate and really unfortunate reactions in terms of a depressive or anxiolytic reaction to cancer diagnosis or other major medical illness like Parkinson's disease, MS, ALS, or pulmonary fibrosis."

Manish elaborates, "Well, usually you have to have had some stress-related event. For example, it could be things like divorce or job loss. But here, specifically, this study is targeting an illness, and the ones that Greg had just listed out, the neurologic conditions, as well as the cancer diagnosis. And then usually it leads to symptoms, intense feelings of sadness or anxiety or hopelessness. You can have a depressed mood with its subtypes with depressed mood. Some people have more anxiety. And so both a stressor and the symptoms that present are associated directly with that. So, for example, for the study, the symptoms of sadness need to be tied to the illness, such as cancer or MS."

#ReunionNeuroscience #SunstoneTherapies #AdjustmentDisorder #MentalHealth #REKINDLEStudy #Psychedelics #PsychedelicMedicine #CancerCare #MentalHealth #ClinicalTrials #Psilocybin #Oncology #PatientCare #MedicalInnovation #Neuroscience

reunionneuro.com

sunstonetherapies.com

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Russ Nix, Consulting Associate Director, and Dr. Stacey McCoy, Pharmacy Clinical Program Manager for the Clinical Surveillance and Compliance business at Wolters Kluwer Health, highlight the problem of drug diversion in healthcare environments and the shared responsibility to prevent this breach. AI-enabled software is becoming crucial in detecting suspicious patterns, the types of individuals most likely to steal drugs, and gaps in the supply chain from ordering to delivering drugs to the patient. While opioids are the most commonly diverted drugs, motivated by substance abuse and addiction, other medications, including non-controlled substances, insulin, and high-cost cancer drugs, are also at risk. Effective prevention programs focus on a culture in which staff feel safe reporting concerns and seeking help.

Russ explains, "Drug diversion is basically when you're in a healthcare system where the medications in that facility are not going to their intended destination. And that's typically what we see most of, a deliberate taking of those medications, whether it was a substance abuse issue or your healthcare practitioners or staff outside of the facility, are taking those medications and basically denying your patients that medication. And it is a pretty significant issue since the opioid crisis, again in the early 2000s or late 1990s."

Stacey elaborates, "So ideally, we want to be in a position where we're able to utilize software applications or a mixture of software applications to have oversight of what's being ordered, what's coming in, and what's going on inside our pharmacies, what's inside the machines on each hospital floor. Just imagine you have such a varied audience. Every single hospital floor has 15 or so nurses working. Those nurses need to grab medications from machines, like a vending machine. So the pharmacist is responsible for making sure that's taking place properly."

"Then that same team or person was also responsible for making sure that what's removed from the machines truly makes it to the patients in a safe and sound manner. So there are a number of breakpoints within the process that someone has to oversee. Ideally, we'd like to make sure that drug diversion prevention takes place using the most up-to-date software applications that are AI-enabled, and that we have multidisciplinary governance on these teams."

#WoltersKluwerHealh #AISurveillance #DrugDiversionPrevention #Sentri7DrugDiverison #PatientSafety #DrugDiversion #HealthcareSecurity #OpioidCrisis #PharmacySafety #HealthcareCompliance #PatientCare #MedicationSafety #HealthcareLeadership #AIinHealthcare

wolterskluwer.com

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