Welcome back, friends, to our podcast, The Patients Speak. We're the podcast where we try to capture both the business and scientific innovation that's going on in healthcare with the patient's voice and what we can learn when we really listen to the patient. 

My guest today is Dr. Peter Small. He's an acoustic epidemiologist by training and by trade, but he's also leading the efforts to understand and quantify what cough can mean in a patient's overall healthcare picture. His background includes global efforts in TB, he has also worked in international work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the Global Healthcare Initiative, and with other foundations and organizations in the area of lung and cough. 

Not only does he come from a professional background as a physician and a scientist and working in the field of philanthropy, but he is actually a patient who had a refractory chronic cough for about three decades.

He tells us that if you never cough, you'll probably die of aspiration pneumonia. On the other hand, it's a symptom of disease, if you're coughing a lot.

Hyfe.AI is trying to do for cough what the thermometer did for fever. It made it real and quantifiable and actionable. By the use of acoustic artificial intelligence to be able to recognize the sound of a cough.

 The app can be downloaded for free. Not only does it detect and quantify a cough but it's got a list of other advantages:

• It's very helpful for chronic coughers in terms of empowering them in their conversations with their providers
• Women who have stress incontinence, when they cough, it's super embarrassing, and so to be able to convey the magnitude of the problem to the provider 
•  Helps patients to take control of their own precipitators of their cough, change their lifestyle, and minimize their symptoms
• It should help drug companies start using it to accelerate the development of better technologies and drugs. 
• A patient selection tool for  recruitment and clinical trials

In summary, we see that technology has brought to the picture the central role that the patients themselves can play in selecting those innovations that make a difference. Those well-selected innovations have empowered patients to take whatever information they're acquiring, and bring it to their doctor, and insist that their doctor looks at it. 

Dr. Peter Small

Dr Peter Small, M.D., built and ran the tuberculosis program for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and conducted pioneering molecular epidemiologic research at Stanford University. He has spoken at the G3 Summit and long focused on the use of innovation to improve health care around the world. Dr Small founded the Global Health Institute and worked on the use of technology to improve health care delivery in remote Madagascar and Nepal. He is currently chief medical officer of Hyfe, the global leader in AI-powered cough detection and classification.

Dr. Peter's Website

@hyfeapp on Instagram

@hyfeapp on Twitter

Dr. Peter's Facebook page

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petermsmall/

If you’d like to read more about patient empowerment – along with the 83bar patient recruitment platform – go to www.83bar.com

BSB Media

BSB Media