Empowered Patient Podcast

Josh Hix, the CEO of Season Health, has developed a food as medicine platform that combines registered dietitian services, food delivery, and medical nutrition therapy. This makes it easier for patients to access food benefits and eat healthier. The rise of GLP-1 agonist medications for weight management has highlighted the need to develop personalized nutrition plans to help patients maintain a healthy lifestyle. There is growing interest in food as medicine as it is increasingly recognized that improving nutrition can help prevent and manage many chronic health conditions.

Josh explains, "I think many people, if not most, do better with a GLP-1 and some form of medical nutrition therapy, dietician services, etc. We hear from a lot of folks that GLP-1 helps turn down the cravings and the food noise. While they're on the drug, whether that's for a month or a year, that's the best time to start to figure out how to eat better and to form some new habits, to eat more whole foods, to find things that they like in the absence of some of the cravings for more processed foods or otherwise. And start building habits around these new choices."

"What we hear from a lot of people, both patients and doctors, is that many folks are not able to stay on GLP-1s for all that long. Sometimes, their insurance coverage is short, and the insurance company will only pay for a certain period of time. Sometimes, folks are non-responders. I'm not sure that there are more studies on seniors than others that don't respond to the drugs. Some people have side effects, and some don't want to be on them forever. So, the number that I've heard most frequently cited is that only about 25% of people who start on a GLP-1 are still on it a year later. So I think that it may turn out that these are very, very powerful interventions for a quarter of patients or so, but that many people need more. It's either GLP-1 and a lifestyle intervention, some other form of therapy, or just something altogether different."

#SeasonHealth #FoodasMedicine #ChronicDiseases #Nutrition #NutritionTherapy #GLP1 #GLP1Agonist

seasonhealth.com

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Josh Hix, the CEO of Season Health, has developed a food as medicine platform that combines registered dietitian services, food delivery, and medical nutrition therapy. This makes it easier for patients to access food benefits and eat healthier. The rise of GLP-1 agonist medications for weight management has highlighted the need to develop personalized nutrition plans to help patients maintain a healthy lifestyle. There is growing interest in food as medicine as it is increasingly recognized that improving nutrition can help prevent and manage many chronic health conditions.

Josh explains, "I think many people, if not most, do better with a GLP-1 and some form of medical nutrition therapy, dietician services, etc. We hear from a lot of folks that GLP-1 helps turn down the cravings and the food noise. While they're on the drug, whether that's for a month or a year, that's the best time to start to figure out how to eat better and to form some new habits, to eat more whole foods, to find things that they like in the absence of some of the cravings for more processed foods or otherwise. And start building habits around these new choices."

"What we hear from a lot of people, both patients and doctors, is that many folks are not able to stay on GLP-1s for all that long. Sometimes, their insurance coverage is short, and the insurance company will only pay for a certain period of time. Sometimes, folks are non-responders. I'm not sure that there are more studies on seniors than others that don't respond to the drugs. Some people have side effects, and some don't want to be on them forever. So, the number that I've heard most frequently cited is that only about 25% of people who start on a GLP-1 are still on it a year later. So I think that it may turn out that these are very, very powerful interventions for a quarter of patients or so, but that many people need more. It's either GLP-1 and a lifestyle intervention, some other form of therapy, or just something altogether different."

#SeasonHealth #FoodasMedicine #ChronicDiseases #Nutrition #NutritionTherapy #GLP1 #GLP1Agonist

seasonhealth.com

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Dr. Philip Räth, Managing Director at Palleos, discusses the advantages of a mid-size contract research organization compared to a large CRO. Customized solutions, strong cross-departmental cooperation, and fast decision-making are key to addressing the most significant unmet needs of clinical trial sponsors. This nimble clinical trial model, supported by machine learning, emphasizes collaboration and transparency.

Philip explains, "In the end, we are a service industry, so it's always about time, costs, and quality. So, certain structures have been established in terms of project management and how you set up trials. We have regulations in place that are very clear on how things should get done. So, I think what collaboration enables is getting something done together. Collaboration between sponsors and CROs can transform the landscape and situation where collaboration enables trust and, therefore, change is possible."

"I think that's always the biggest challenge for collaboration. You have change in the project, you have change in the clinical trial landscape in terms of maybe IT or information systems which become more prominent, or there are changes in regulation. So tackling these changes is mostly done through collaboration with a big foundation and trust so people can make bigger jumps and quicker decisions instead of just looking at what's on the contract regarding the deliverables."

#Palleos #ClinicalTrials #CRO #ContractResearchOrganization

palleos.com

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Dr. Philip Räth, Managing Director at Palleos, discusses the advantages of a mid-size contract research organization compared to a large CRO. Customized solutions, strong cross-departmental cooperation, and fast decision-making are key to addressing the most significant unmet needs of clinical trial sponsors. This nimble clinical trial model, supported by machine learning, emphasizes collaboration and transparency.

Philip explains, "In the end, we are a service industry, so it's always about time, costs, and quality. So, certain structures have been established in terms of project management and how you set up trials. We have regulations in place that are very clear on how things should get done. So, I think what collaboration enables is getting something done together. Collaboration between sponsors and CROs can transform the landscape and situation where collaboration enables trust and, therefore, change is possible."

"I think that's always the biggest challenge for collaboration. You have change in the project, you have change in the clinical trial landscape in terms of maybe IT or information systems which become more prominent, or there are changes in regulation. So tackling these changes is mostly done through collaboration with a big foundation and trust so people can make bigger jumps and quicker decisions instead of just looking at what's on the contract regarding the deliverables."

#Palleos #ClinicalTrials #CRO #ContractResearchOrganization

palleos.com

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Dr. Kristin MacGregor, a clinical psychologist and senior clinical director of Integrated Behavioral Health at LifeStance Health, the largest outpatient mental health practice in the U.S., employing nearly 7,000 clinicians across 33 states to provide therapy, psychiatry, and psychological/neuropsychological services both in-person and virtually. They work with large medical practices and health systems to help build integrated behavioral health programs using the collaborative care model. Integrating mental health into primary care settings can help address early warning signs of cognitive decline, reduce stigma, and improve collaboration between providers to address both mental and physical health needs better and manage chronic diseases.

Kristin explains, "I think anything that removes barriers to people accessing mental health care when they actually need it is a positive thing. The research shows that it takes 11 years, on average, between the time someone experiences a mental health symptom and the time that they get connected to care. And that is just far, far too long. There are, of course, many reasons for this. Still, one of them is that the longer time a person has to wait between the time they get referred to a mental health provider to the time that they have an appointment, the longer that time, the more likely it is the patient might actually talk themselves out of the appointment."

"It's very challenging to do that in the way that the physical healthcare system and the mental healthcare system are currently set up. We're very siloed. There's not a lot of shared data that goes back and forth between PCP and mental health providers. However, in these integrated care settings, which I feel very strongly about, collaboration is incredibly important because there is something to learn. There's something to learn as a mental health provider about how physical symptoms can manifest themselves and about how chronic conditions can impact a patient."

"But, bi-directionally, PCPs also really need to understand how mental health symptoms can present in different age groups and different cultures and ethnicities, and things like that. And when you're working side by side together on shared treatment plans, it's just so much easier to learn those things from one another as opposed to continuing to perpetuate these sorts of silos that we currently operate in with very little to no collaboration between the two parties."

#LifeStanceHealth #MentalHealthMatters #LFST #MentalHealth

lifestance.com

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Dr. Kristin MacGregor, a clinical psychologist and senior clinical director of Integrated Behavioral Health at LifeStance Health, the largest outpatient mental health practice in the U.S., employing nearly 7,000 clinicians across 33 states to provide therapy, psychiatry, and psychological/neuropsychological services both in-person and virtually. They work with large medical practices and health systems to help build integrated behavioral health programs using the collaborative care model. Integrating mental health into primary care settings can help address early warning signs of cognitive decline, reduce stigma, and improve collaboration between providers to address both mental and physical health needs better and manage chronic diseases.

Kristin explains, "I think anything that removes barriers to people accessing mental health care when they actually need it is a positive thing. The research shows that it takes 11 years, on average, between the time someone experiences a mental health symptom and the time that they get connected to care. And that is just far, far too long. There are, of course, many reasons for this. Still, one of them is that the longer time a person has to wait between the time they get referred to a mental health provider to the time that they have an appointment, the longer that time, the more likely it is the patient might actually talk themselves out of the appointment."

"It's very challenging to do that in the way that the physical healthcare system and the mental healthcare system are currently set up. We're very siloed. There's not a lot of shared data that goes back and forth between PCP and mental health providers. However, in these integrated care settings, which I feel very strongly about, collaboration is incredibly important because there is something to learn. There's something to learn as a mental health provider about how physical symptoms can manifest themselves and about how chronic conditions can impact a patient."

"But, bi-directionally, PCPs also really need to understand how mental health symptoms can present in different age groups and different cultures and ethnicities, and things like that. And when you're working side by side together on shared treatment plans, it's just so much easier to learn those things from one another as opposed to continuing to perpetuate these sorts of silos that we currently operate in with very little to no collaboration between the two parties."

#LifeStanceHealth #MentalHealthMatters #LFST #MentalHealth

lifestance.com

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Meri Beckwith, Co-Founder of Lindus Health, aims to transform clinical trials by changing the CRO model to leverage technology to improve patient recruitment, retention, and the experience of the sponsors and trial participants. While the compensation model for contract research organizations is often not aligned with trial outcomes, Lindus ties compensation to hitting milestones and outcomes. They emphasize the need for more flexible trial design and a decentralized and hybrid approach to reduce participant burden and bring drugs to market sooner.

Meri explains, "This comes back to how contract research organizations are paid and compensated where they're typically paid per hour of input, and it's not at all tied to the outputs being speed, patient experience, or quality of data. And so we've created this monster over the last 10 or 20 years where the cost of clinical trials keeps going up. Patient experience certainly seems to be getting worse. Above all, patients suffer because the direct experience in clinical trials is worse. Still, they have to wait longer and ultimately pay more for new treatments as the cost of those clinical trials is ultimately passed on to patients."

"So essentially, we're responsible for running the entire clinical trial end to end, but we do that in a very different way and with a very different business model from that of industry incumbents. On the business model front, we provide completely fixed costs for everything and our customers, the companies developing the drugs, only pay us when we hit milestones. In other words, our compensation is tied to the actual trial outcomes, moving the trial along, et cetera. The second difference is under the hood, we have the same level of concierge service - folks who oversee and design the clinical trials, medics and clinicians who are looking after patients. We also have our technology platform to help us find the right patients, get them enrolled in the right trial quickly, and monitor and capture the data as we go – leading to higher quality data."

#LindusHealth #ClinicalResearch #CRO #ClinicalTrialRecruitment #DrugDevelopment

lindushealth.com

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Meri Beckwith, Co-Founder of Lindus Health, aims to transform clinical trials by changing the CRO model to leverage technology to improve patient recruitment, retention, and the experience of the sponsors and trial participants. While the compensation model for contract research organizations is often not aligned with trial outcomes, Lindus ties compensation to hitting milestones and outcomes. They emphasize the need for more flexible trial design and a decentralized and hybrid approach to reduce participant burden and bring drugs to market sooner.

Meri explains, "This comes back to how contract research organizations are paid and compensated where they're typically paid per hour of input, and it's not at all tied to the outputs being speed, patient experience, or quality of data. And so we've created this monster over the last 10 or 20 years where the cost of clinical trials keeps going up. Patient experience certainly seems to be getting worse. Above all, patients suffer because the direct experience in clinical trials is worse. Still, they have to wait longer and ultimately pay more for new treatments as the cost of those clinical trials is ultimately passed on to patients."

"So essentially, we're responsible for running the entire clinical trial end to end, but we do that in a very different way and with a very different business model from that of industry incumbents. On the business model front, we provide completely fixed costs for everything and our customers, the companies developing the drugs, only pay us when we hit milestones. In other words, our compensation is tied to the actual trial outcomes, moving the trial along, et cetera. The second difference is under the hood, we have the same level of concierge service - folks who oversee and design the clinical trials, medics and clinicians who are looking after patients. We also have our technology platform to help us find the right patients, get them enrolled in the right trial quickly, and monitor and capture the data as we go – leading to higher quality data."

#LindusHealth #ClinicalResearch #CRO #ClinicalTrialRecruitment #DrugDevelopment

lindushealth.com

Download the transcript here

Greg explains, "For many of these cancers, determining the right cancer treatment is the difference between life and death. When we look at how we treat cancer today, what hasn't changed is that there'll be a biopsy. So, they take a piece of the tumor out and send that tumor to a pathologist. Pathologists will take that tumor and put it in a glass slide. They usually use what's called H&E, they kind of stain it to read it better. But basically, a pathologist is looking under a microscope at the cells, and that's how we diagnose cancer. That's the formal way that we diagnose cancer. And so the pathologist will send a report back to the oncologist at that point saying, yes, your patient has cancer."

"Now, once the pathologist has diagnosed the cancer, they can just scan that slide or take a picture of the slide and upload it to our cloud-based software. They get an immediate result on the presence or absence of the particular biomarker."

"For instance, like ovarian cancer in the guidelines in ovarian cancer, if the patient is positive for ovarian cancer, she's supposed to get a biomarker test for a biomarker called HRD. Now, we can do that immediately. When that pathologist gives the report back to the oncologist, now it can say your patient has ovarian cancer, she's stage three, and she's positive or negative for HRD. And the oncologist, on the day they tell the patient that they have cancer, can also tell them, you have this biomarker, and based on the guidelines, here's the treatment we're going to start you on tomorrow. In essence, we can get the patient on the appropriate frontline therapy weeks ahead of time. And at the end of the day, cancer is a race against time."

#PrecisionOncology #PrecisionMedicine #AI #Cancer #BioMarker #Pathologists #Oncologists #Tumors

io9.ai

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Greg Hamilton, CEO of io9, aims to enable precision oncology treatments for patients globally. The company has developed an AI-powered biomarker analysis platform called OncoGaze that can rapidly analyze digital pathology images to identify cancer biomarkers. This enables pathologists to efficiently and quickly digitize and analyze tumor samples and oncologists to start patients on the appropriate targeted therapy much faster.

Greg explains, "For many of these cancers, determining the right cancer treatment is the difference between life and death. When we look at how we treat cancer today, what hasn't changed is that there'll be a biopsy. So, they take a piece of the tumor out and send that tumor to a pathologist. Pathologists will take that tumor and put it in a glass slide. They usually use what's called H&E, they kind of stain it to read it better. But basically, a pathologist is looking under a microscope at the cells, and that's how we diagnose cancer. That's the formal way that we diagnose cancer. And so the pathologist will send a report back to the oncologist at that point saying, yes, your patient has cancer."

"Now, once the pathologist has diagnosed the cancer, they can just scan that slide or take a picture of the slide and upload it to our cloud-based software. They get an immediate result on the presence or absence of the particular biomarker."

"For instance, like ovarian cancer in the guidelines in ovarian cancer, if the patient is positive for ovarian cancer, she's supposed to get a biomarker test for a biomarker called HRD. Now, we can do that immediately. When that pathologist gives the report back to the oncologist, now it can say your patient has ovarian cancer, she's stage three, and she's positive or negative for HRD. And the oncologist, on the day they tell the patient that they have cancer, can also tell them, you have this biomarker, and based on the guidelines, here's the treatment we're going to start you on tomorrow. In essence, we can get the patient on the appropriate frontline therapy weeks ahead of time. And at the end of the day, cancer is a race against time."

#PrecisionOncology #PrecisionMedicine #AI #Cancer #BioMarker #Pathologists #Oncologists #Tumors

io9.ai

Download the transcript here