Empowered Patient Podcast

Marcus Ionker, Product Line Manager and Messaging Evangelist at Retarus, which is a cloud-based transactional electronic messaging service provider offering fax, SMS, email, and logistics services to regulated industries like healthcare. By moving fax to the cloud, Retarus helps providers and payers reduce administrative costs, improve patient services, and comply with privacy regulations. The company is addressing the critical challenge of providing reliable, secure, and fast messaging to replace outdated physical fax machines and to eliminate paper-based processes in favor of digital workflows.

Marcus explains, "So Retarus is a cloud service provider of what I like to call transactional electronic messaging. So we are talking about fax services, SMS services, email services, as well as even further logistics services. And we do this in many countries, especially in the United States. And a number of those messaging services really play an important role in regulated industries, especially in the healthcare industry, for example."

"Email is just not accepted in many of these industries, and that's why fax is still there. And if I may take this opportunity, I think if you do faxing right and if you do it digitally, it makes no difference. It can be an enabler of automated processes, rather than a hindrance."

"The paper that we use in the office is when people print emails, not faxes. So no, definitely not. I mean, also, let's keep in mind, a lot of these customers that we offer our service for, they're sending millions and millions of pages every month, and there's no way that you could do that in paper form. So it's coming from an application in a digital form, and quite often on the recipient side is consumed as a digital document, as a PDF or a TIF image, and maybe fed into an AI IDP process immediately. So no, paper often doesn't play a part in this at all."

#Retarus #Digitaltransformation #HealthcareCommunications #HealthcareIT #DigitalHealth #CloudFax #HealthcareLeadership #HealthcareInnovation #AdminEfficiency #HealthcareOperations

retarus.com

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Marcus Ionker, Product Line Manager and Messaging Evangelist at Retarus, which is a cloud-based transactional electronic messaging service provider offering fax, SMS, email, and logistics services to regulated industries like healthcare. By moving fax to the cloud, Retarus helps providers and payers reduce administrative costs, improve patient services, and comply with privacy regulations. The company is addressing the critical challenge of providing reliable, secure, and fast messaging to replace outdated physical fax machines and to eliminate paper-based processes in favor of digital workflows.

Marcus explains, "So Retarus is a cloud service provider of what I like to call transactional electronic messaging. So we are talking about fax services, SMS services, email services, as well as even further logistics services. And we do this in many countries, especially in the United States. And a number of those messaging services really play an important role in regulated industries, especially in the healthcare industry, for example."

"Email is just not accepted in many of these industries, and that's why fax is still there. And if I may take this opportunity, I think if you do faxing right and if you do it digitally, it makes no difference. It can be an enabler of automated processes, rather than a hindrance."

"The paper that we use in the office is when people print emails, not faxes. So no, definitely not. I mean, also, let's keep in mind, a lot of these customers that we offer our service for, they're sending millions and millions of pages every month, and there's no way that you could do that in paper form. So it's coming from an application in a digital form, and quite often on the recipient side is consumed as a digital document, as a PDF or a TIF image, and maybe fed into an AI IDP process immediately. So no, paper often doesn't play a part in this at all."

#Retarus #Digitaltransformation #HealthcareCommunications #HealthcareIT #DigitalHealth #CloudFax #HealthcareLeadership #HealthcareInnovation #AdminEfficiency #HealthcareOperations

retarus.com

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Andrew Hall, CEO of Consano Bio, is developing an allogeneic approach to treat chronic sciatica by activating healing in damaged spinal nerves, emulating the natural healing properties of human platelets. This condition currently has no approved treatments and is managed through symptomatic approaches like opioids, muscle relaxers, or surgery. Consano Bio's lead candidate represents the first potential disease-modifying therapy for pain management and can be manufactured at scale to treat the estimated 10 million Americans affected by this condition.

Andrew explains, "We are developing a potentially disease-modifying treatment that would be given locally for orthopedic painful conditions. The concept is that human platelets are wonderful at eliciting healing in a normal physiological setting. Why can't we create a biologic product that, when given locally, emulates that same functionality where the imbalance has gone bad?"

"I'd call this version one of the first generation of platelet- and plasma-derived biologic therapy. So it runs in the same path. It goes to the same regulators, but it's not so much an evolution as it is a parallel path."

"So chronic sciatica, or when you get fancy with medical terminology, chronic lumbosacral radiculopathy, is basically, and we'll try to keep this PG. I'm a bit Australian and tend to get a little fruity with my language. When you do something silly- wake up, twist, lift the weight badly, bend over- you can pretty easily piss off your spinal nerves, which are the small nerves that come out of your spine and then innervate your extremities."

#ConsanoBIo #Sciatica #BackPain #ChronicPaint #PainTreatment #NonOpioids #LumbosacralRadiculopathy #LSR #ChronicPain #Biotech #ClinicalTrials #PainManagement #Orthobiologics #DrugDevelopment #HealthcareInnovation #Neurology #MedicalResearch

consanobio.com

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Andrew Hall, CEO of Consano Bio, is developing an allogeneic approach to treat chronic sciatica by activating healing in damaged spinal nerves, emulating the natural healing properties of human platelets. This condition currently has no approved treatments and is managed through symptomatic approaches like opioids, muscle relaxers, or surgery. Consano Bio's lead candidate represents the first potential disease-modifying therapy for pain management and can be manufactured at scale to treat the estimated 10 million Americans affected by this condition.

Andrew explains, "We are developing a potentially disease-modifying treatment that would be given locally for orthopedic painful conditions. The concept is that human platelets are wonderful at eliciting healing in a normal physiological setting. Why can't we create a biologic product that, when given locally, emulates that same functionality where the imbalance has gone bad?"

"I'd call this version one of the first generation of platelet- and plasma-derived biologic therapy. So it runs in the same path. It goes to the same regulators, but it's not so much an evolution as it is a parallel path."

"So chronic sciatica, or when you get fancy with medical terminology, chronic lumbosacral radiculopathy, is basically, and we'll try to keep this PG. I'm a bit Australian and tend to get a little fruity with my language. When you do something silly- wake up, twist, lift the weight badly, bend over- you can pretty easily piss off your spinal nerves, which are the small nerves that come out of your spine and then innervate your extremities."

#ConsanoBIo #Sciatica #BackPain #ChronicPaint #PainTreatment #NonOpioids #LumbosacralRadiculopathy #LSR #ChronicPain #Biotech #ClinicalTrials #PainManagement #Orthobiologics #DrugDevelopment #HealthcareInnovation #Neurology #MedicalResearch

consanobio.com

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Isobel Handler, Senior Director of Product Management at Kontakt.io addresses critical inefficiencies in clinical exam room utilization. By capturing data about staff-patient interactions and facility usage, the Kontakt.io platform incorporates real-time location data to optimize patient access, reduce waiting time, and improve staff safety. The solution helps healthcare organizations understand their current capacity utilization before investing in new facilities and supports integration of digital tools to include virtual visits and asychronous communication to better serve patients and reduce clinician burnout.

Isobel explains, "Kontakt.io uses real-time location data, often referred to as RTLS, to improve hospital and clinic operations. We'll talk a lot today about our ambulatory use cases focused on patient access. Still, we also have solutions for inpatient flow, length-of-stay reduction, staff safety, asset tracking, and much more that I won't list. But I think what's really exciting about Kontakt.io is you'll see a lot of RTLS companies in the industry who have built solutions that provide really beautiful blue dots on a map. But at Kontakt.io, we see the opportunity to leverage RTLS beyond that blue dot to produce a set of data that's really well trained and tuned to feed AI models. RTLS data is plentiful, it's machine-generated, it's unbiased, and it doesn't require a human being with a clinical license to enter it. So it produces a lot of really useful information for AI models that are solving some of the top health system problems out there today."

"I think it's an environment that's really ripe for some more data to help us understand what's going on in the exam room, as you pointed out. But a shocking statistic is that most exam rooms are only utilized 33% of the time during standard business hours, which feels incredibly low the first time you hear it. But if you think through the logic of how we get to that utilization rate, the performance actually seems quite intuitive."

#KontaktIO #IntelligentOrchestration #HospitalOperations #HealthcareAI #PatientAccess #DigitalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #RTLS #AmbulatoryCare #HealthIT #ClinicianBurnout #HealthcareLeadership

Kontakt.io

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Isobel Handler, Senior Director of Product Management at Kontakt.io addresses critical inefficiencies in clinical exam room utilization. By capturing data about staff-patient interactions and facility usage, the Kontakt.io platform incorporates real-time location data to optimize patient access, reduce waiting time, and improve staff safety. The solution helps healthcare organizations understand their current capacity utilization before investing in new facilities and supports integration of digital tools to include virtual visits and asychronous communication to better serve patients and reduce clinician burnout.

Isobel explains, "Kontakt.io uses real-time location data, often referred to as RTLS, to improve hospital and clinic operations. We'll talk a lot today about our ambulatory use cases focused on patient access. Still, we also have solutions for inpatient flow, length-of-stay reduction, staff safety, asset tracking, and much more that I won't list. But I think what's really exciting about Kontakt.io is you'll see a lot of RTLS companies in the industry who have built solutions that provide really beautiful blue dots on a map. But at Kontakt.io, we see the opportunity to leverage RTLS beyond that blue dot to produce a set of data that's really well trained and tuned to feed AI models. RTLS data is plentiful, it's machine-generated, it's unbiased, and it doesn't require a human being with a clinical license to enter it. So it produces a lot of really useful information for AI models that are solving some of the top health system problems out there today."

"I think it's an environment that's really ripe for some more data to help us understand what's going on in the exam room, as you pointed out. But a shocking statistic is that most exam rooms are only utilized 33% of the time during standard business hours, which feels incredibly low the first time you hear it. But if you think through the logic of how we get to that utilization rate, the performance actually seems quite intuitive."

#KontaktIO #IntelligentOrchestration #HospitalOperations #HealthcareAI #PatientAccess #DigitalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #RTLS #AmbulatoryCare #HealthIT #ClinicianBurnout #HealthcareLeadership

Kontakt.io

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Dr. Steffen-Sebastian Bolz, Founder of QanatPharma, emphasizes the critical role of resistance arteries, microscopic blood vessels that regulate blood flow and pressure throughout the body, in maintaining organ function. Due to their size, these resistance arteries have been overlooked but with new lab techniques, QP is discovering how their dysfunction contributes to heart failure, cognitive impairment and strokes. The company's lead candidate is a repurposed drug already approved for cystic fibrosis that shows promise in restoring brain blood flow and cognitive function in heart failure patients.

Steffen-Sebastian explains, "So what we would consider resistance arteries is anything between the capillary level, which would be 10 micrometers, up to, let's say, a few hundred micrometers. And 300 micrometers is the thickness of a blonde hair. That's kind of what we're talking about here. And everything else, and what I talk about in function is what I said before: they can change their diameter. They can open up or close, which large arteries can not do. They are stiff as a garden hose. They are conduits with arteries. They are made to conduct blood at the lowest resistance possible, whereas the small resistance arteries are made to change resistance and regulate flow and pressure."

"As I said, these small resistance arteries and capillaries are everywhere. Every organ has them. And if you compromise the function of those resistance arteries, you compromise blood flow to the capillaries, which actually means that the capillaries don't get enough oxygen. They cannot transport CO2 away from the tissues. They don't get enough nutrients and so on, which then leads to functional damage, which is number one."

"And if it persists, if the problem persists, it can also lead to structural damage, which we can actually see. You mentioned the heart. The heart can deal with it, and also the brain can deal with reductions in that flow to a certain extent. But if the reduction in blood flow exceeds a certain limit, you get structural damage. And we see that structural damage. And we call them infarctions in the heart, but also in the brain, which is a stroke."

#QanatPharma #VascularBiology #MicrovascularHealth #DrugDiscovery #HeartFailure #CognitiveImpairment #BiotechInnovation #PrecisionMedicine #AIinDrugDiscovery#Microvascular #Neurology #DrugRepurposing #Cardiology #MedicalResearch #ClinicalTrials #Hypertension

qanatpharma.com

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Dr. Steffen-Sebastian Bolz, Founder of QanatPharma, emphasizes the critical role of resistance arteries, microscopic blood vessels that regulate blood flow and pressure throughout the body, in maintaining organ function. Due to their size, these resistance arteries have been overlooked but with new lab techniques, QP is discovering how their dysfunction contributes to heart failure, cognitive impairment and strokes. The company's lead candidate is a repurposed drug already approved for cystic fibrosis that shows promise in restoring brain blood flow and cognitive function in heart failure patients.

Steffen-Sebastian explains, "So what we would consider resistance arteries is anything between the capillary level, which would be 10 micrometers, up to, let's say, a few hundred micrometers. And 300 micrometers is the thickness of a blonde hair. That's kind of what we're talking about here. And everything else, and what I talk about in function is what I said before: they can change their diameter. They can open up or close, which large arteries can not do. They are stiff as a garden hose. They are conduits with arteries. They are made to conduct blood at the lowest resistance possible, whereas the small resistance arteries are made to change resistance and regulate flow and pressure."

"As I said, these small resistance arteries and capillaries are everywhere. Every organ has them. And if you compromise the function of those resistance arteries, you compromise blood flow to the capillaries, which actually means that the capillaries don't get enough oxygen. They cannot transport CO2 away from the tissues. They don't get enough nutrients and so on, which then leads to functional damage, which is number one."

"And if it persists, if the problem persists, it can also lead to structural damage, which we can actually see. You mentioned the heart. The heart can deal with it, and also the brain can deal with reductions in that flow to a certain extent. But if the reduction in blood flow exceeds a certain limit, you get structural damage. And we see that structural damage. And we call them infarctions in the heart, but also in the brain, which is a stroke."

#QanatPharma #VascularBiology #MicrovascularHealth #DrugDiscovery #HeartFailure #CognitiveImpairment #BiotechInnovation #PrecisionMedicine #AIinDrugDiscovery#Microvascular #Neurology #DrugRepurposing #Cardiology #MedicalResearch #ClinicalTrials #Hypertension

qanatpharma.com

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Carlos Buesa, CEO of Oryzon Genomics, specializes in developing precision medicine based on epigenetics, the regulatory mechanisms that control gene expression without altering the DNA. A key target is the LSD1 enzyme which regulates cell differentiation and is a factor in acute myeloid leukemia and CNS disorders. LSD1 inhibition addresses a fundamental insight that the same dysregulated epigenetic genes implicated in leukemia also drive various neruopsychiatric and genetic syndromes suggesting a unified mechanistic understanding of diverse diseases.

Carlos explains, "Epigenetics has been the i specialization of Oryzon for many years already. We were, I mean, founded back in 2000, but in the last 12 years, we started to develop precision medicines for cancer, broad disorders, and CNS diseases based on epigenetics. And epigenetics, as the name suggests, is something that is above genetics. It's another supplementary level of control that our cells or our organisms have to basically adapt to the changing world. So, epigenetics is a very complex system comprised of many, many different proteins which control which genes are switched on or off without changing the underlying DNA sequence. What we have seen over the last few years is that in disease, those control mechanisms can become dysregulated. And importantly, many epigenetic changes are potentially reversible. So, our strategy here is to develop drugs that act on particular enzymes, epigenetic enzymes, controlling those changes and resetting our normal gene programs."

"A beautiful example of that is leukemia, where there is an extraordinarily complex genetic background, and different epigenetic enzymes offer the capacity to modulate and restore the physiological status to delay the disease, basically to modify the basis of oncological progression. But it's not the only one. We know that epigenetics is working on many other diseases in metabolism, in GI, and some others, but we are also focused on neuropsychiatric disorders. So, these are the two focuses of the company using epigenetics."

#OryzonGenomics #Epigenetics #Oncology #Hematology #Schizophrenia #AML #CNS #PrecisionMedicine #ClinicalTrials #HealthcareInnovation #Neuroscience #CNSdisorders #AcuteMyeloidLeukemia #SickleCellDisease

oryzon.com

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Carlos Buesa, CEO of Oryzon Genomics, specializes in developing precision medicine based on epigenetics, the regulatory mechanisms that control gene expression without altering the DNA. A key target is the LSD1 enzyme which regulates cell differentiation and is a factor in acute myeloid leukemia and CNS disorders. LSD1 inhibition addresses a fundamental insight that the same dysregulated epigenetic genes implicated in leukemia also drive various neruopsychiatric and genetic syndromes suggesting a unified mechanistic understanding of diverse diseases.

Carlos explains, "Epigenetics has been the i specialization of Oryzon for many years already. We were, I mean, founded back in 2000, but in the last 12 years, we started to develop precision medicines for cancer, broad disorders, and CNS diseases based on epigenetics. And epigenetics, as the name suggests, is something that is above genetics. It's another supplementary level of control that our cells or our organisms have to basically adapt to the changing world. So, epigenetics is a very complex system comprised of many, many different proteins which control which genes are switched on or off without changing the underlying DNA sequence. What we have seen over the last few years is that in disease, those control mechanisms can become dysregulated. And importantly, many epigenetic changes are potentially reversible. So, our strategy here is to develop drugs that act on particular enzymes, epigenetic enzymes, controlling those changes and resetting our normal gene programs."

"A beautiful example of that is leukemia, where there is an extraordinarily complex genetic background, and different epigenetic enzymes offer the capacity to modulate and restore the physiological status to delay the disease, basically to modify the basis of oncological progression. But it's not the only one. We know that epigenetics is working on many other diseases in metabolism, in GI, and some others, but we are also focused on neuropsychiatric disorders. So, these are the two focuses of the company using epigenetics."

#OryzonGenomics #Epigenetics #Oncology #Hematology #Schizophrenia #AML #CNS #PrecisionMedicine #ClinicalTrials #HealthcareInnovation #Neuroscience #CNSdisorders #AcuteMyeloidLeukemia #SickleCellDisease

oryzon.com

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