DarshanTalks Podcast

Darshan

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Darshan talks. My name is Darshan Kulkarni. As you all know, the goal of this podcast has always been to talk about the life sciences to talk about things that impact the life sciences. And one of the things that keep popping up is the idea of privacy, the evolving and emerging role of privacy and the discussions around it, and how that impacts the life sciences. And if you're in clinical research, if you are in marketing, if you are in PR, if you have if you are a medical device that has patient data, every single one of you are probably impacted by the discussion around privacy. Along the way, I, I follow a lot of really interesting people on LinkedIn. And one of the most interesting people I follow is an Amish shy Austrian. And Avishai is the head of privacy at axon. He is both a qualified privacy solicitor in England and Wales and also in Israel with a strong background in corporate commercial law. And, and what we're discussing is really how this all comes together and have a shot. Before I jump into some questions. Is there anything I missed? Would you like to answer any questions? clarify something I said or didn't mention? No, I think that was, first of all, thank you very much Darshan, for having me having me on the podcast, the chat always, always great to chat to friends all around the world. And that's what's amazing about this, this time that we're in now is that it's so easy just to hop on virtual chat and just

Avishai

have a conversation. So I love it.

Darshan

You never he never quite got this chance before. I'm gonna try. Let me ask you, oh, let's put some things out of the way. Because as lawyers, we kind of have to worry about this. This isn't legal advice. So if you're interested, I need legal advice. I wish I Why should they contact you?

Avishai

LinkedIn is a great place to find me. I'm very, very active there. So just drop me a line. And we'll we'll get the conversation started from there.

Darshan

Perfect. Um, so let's start with a couple of different questions. So we had a very brief conversation, as you know, started before the, this this starting the interview, and you talk to me about how you were born in Harrisburg. And, and yet here you are a solicitor in in Wales and the UK and and well, in England, Wales, and also in Israel. How does that all come together? Why Why did you come Bring these pieces together from a global perspective? And Yet, You're both not only an expert in, in privacy, but also corporate and commercial. So how do you bring that all together?

Avishai

Yeah, so a bit of a you highlighted a bit of my split personality there. But yeah, born in the US grew up in Israel, trained as a corporate and commercial lawyer went to law school here in Israel, trained as a corporate and commercial lawyer worked at one of the big firms and like every good young corporate lawyer, I did really everything I did, you know, high tech mergers and acquisitions, bit of antitrust even which was fascinating, and really fell in love with the area with privacy and data protection, and how basically how technology and the law, interact and sometimes clash with each other. And realize I wanted to develop my to have a career in this fascinating field, looked around at the Israeli privacy regulations and realized they weren't really the gold standard of privacy around the world. And they were talking about this new emerging regulation called GDPR. your listeners may be familiar with it, which is the privacy regulation that applies in the EU, that was supposed to be this new gold standard of privacy. And I said, great, you know, let's let's do that. And so I found the, you know,

Darshan

Hey everyone, we have as you guys know, my podcast really deals with life sciences and pharmacy, and things that impact the engagement between the two, and things that impact just the care of patients. This specific podcast I thought was really interesting because

I think groups like ascp come out and actually connect with a unique set of patients, patients who, whose needs are often not being met. So if you are in the pharmacy in this pharmacy, if you are a pharmacist or pharmacy, you want to be talking to someone like Chad, because you might want to find out Well, can I learn from lessons that that ascp has, if you're in the pharmaceutical industry, you may want to talk to Chad because these are pharmacists were frontline workers who are actually learning from patients and they need education. They need to know what your drugs are doing, what your devices are doing. So that's why I thought today's podcast makes sense. My name is Darshan Kulkarni, this is Darshan talks, and we have Chad Morris. So Chad, welcome.

Chad

Happy to be here. A little bit about yourself and escp. Sure. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. Just from the audience perspective, I think the first time we met was a, a live stage podcasts. We were on stage in front of a group being recorded for a podcast and we had met I think, at lunch like 20 minutes before, and it's still one of the I had the best time. You know, obviously your personality lends to that. But just thanks for thanks for inviting me. Your show is fun. That's going to be a lot of fun today, you'll be good. Yeah. So um, yeah, to your point. asep is a is a unique organization. In pharmacy, we represent pharmacists, and pharmacies that take care of people in older adults setting. So traditionally, that's been skilled nursing facilities, assisted living facilities.

Some states have intermediate care facilities, our pharmacists take care of a lot of individuals that live in group home setting, so developmentally disabled individual, so generally patients with complex medical needs. And it started, you know, 50 years ago, probably because a corner drugstore pharmacist said, How can I better serve these nursing homes that are popping up in the community? And ultimately, what what happened was the pharmacist figured out that there's a lot of things that those kinds of buildings need from efficiencies, like, how do you package medications and nurses can pass them better to how do you manage patients clinically when they start to accumulate medications. So the last 50 years has been this sort of growth and experience in how to take care of older adults that are complex from a medication standpoint. And now we sit at this intersection of sort of the Golden Age of pharmaceutical companies where we've got a lot of options to treat patients. So you've got a lot of demand for medications, and a lot of use of medications. Plus, you've got a population that over the age of 65 is growing faster than any other segment of our population. And even within that the over 85 population is growing the fastest within that over 65 population. So you've got older adults, they're living longer, they're healthier, primarily because of medications, but they're also dealing with the fact that they're they have to take a lot of those medications. So how do we do that safely? And how do we do that with an eye on the fact that they're a very different person than a younger, healthier population? So our pharmacists do that. You'll see them again, in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and in the community. A lot of them are being embedded in in physicians, clinics and doctor's offices that take care of generally older adults. So let's start with the basics. Because when I talk to pharmacists,

Darshan

Hey, everyone. So we, as you guys know, on this podcast, we land up talking a lot about the life sciences. And we talk about things that impact on life sciences, including clinical trials. today's podcast is going to be talking about what is what are clinical trials, like, from the perspective of a site, who is doing oncology? It's a multi multi location site, if you will. And we have with us, Kathleen ritardo. Kathy, I believe I know you're a pharmacist, but is it PharmD or is it RPh?

Kathleen

RPh.

Darshan

Okay. So we have Kathleen with us and Kathleen is unusually a pharmacist, which I know for me at least that for something when I was going to pharmacy school, I always wanted to ask to talk to people who've done the goi ng down that pathway of being a pharmacist and clinical research. I've never found one. And the ones that I did find really ended up being more people who mix up the drugs as opposed to people who actually administer the site. So a Kathleen is what I think of as a unicorn. So welcome, thank you. And this is my name is Darshan Kulkarni, this is Darshan talks. This is Kathleen Hurtado. Happy to introduce yourself, please.

Kathleen

So thank you, Darshan. Really nice to be here with you today. So you kind of already did it. My name is Kathleen Hurtado, and I am the VP of research administration for Cancer Treatment Centers of America. And I've had a very, you know, blessed career very varied career, but started started out as a oncology pharmacist at MD Anderson, my first job out of pharmacy school. So, and I've had lots of different things all the way around and kind of ended up serendipitously here. So

Darshan

I'm not gonna let you go that or that easily. Okay, go from pharmacy school to run your clinical research site. Because, personally, like I said, You're the unicorn. How did you even think, did you think you'd land up here?

Kathleen

Oh, no, never. I love being a pharmacist and thought that's what you know, I would, I would, you know, do for the rest of my life, but it was just very serendipitous. So I am working at MD Anderson, we, I was worked in pediatrics, and we had a lot of, you know, sales reps come and call on us. And so one of them was we I got to be, you know, friends with her. And she kept saying, Oh, you should come into sales, you should come to sales. And I was like, no way. So I'm, I'm really pretty much an introvert by nature. And so it was something I could just never see myself doing. And so at the time, they were starting, that company was starting in oncology, Salesforce. And so they were looking for people that knew oncology, oncology, pharmacist, psychology nurses, because they knew that to go out to doctors, you had to be able to speak the science speak to the science. So I thought, Well, you know what, I'm going to go interview because what's the worst possible thing that can happen? The worst possible thing that can happen is I go, I tried to do it. I don't like it. I go back to being a pharmacist. You know, I knew I could I love that. I could always go back and do that. And as it turns out, I was actually good at it. Yeah, I wish I would never ever, ever have expected. And I think I was I started out as a surprise, I started out carrying the bag. So yeah, in fact, I had a five state territory. So I had Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, North and South Dakota and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. And so yeah, and so for somebody who had never driven in snow in their entire life, it was kind of a rude awakening. And I used to scare my district manager half to death. Because I was a little bit crazy, it was like, as a company car, let's, you know, spin it and see what happens. So but, um, but it was great,

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