Podcasts about digital medicine society

In this conversation, Dr. Ryan Vega, Chief Health Officer for Vantiq, discusses the transformative role of AI in healthcare, the innovative capabilities of the Vantiq platform, and the importance of personalized healthcare solutions. He shares insights on the transition from the Veterans Health Administration to Vantiq, the use cases for their technology, and how generative AI is enhancing clinical decision-making. Dr. Vega emphasizes the need for transparency, safety, and effective orchestration of AI systems in healthcare, as well as the importance of collaboration with systems integrators and startups to drive innovation.In this episode , they discuss: Dr. Vega emphasizes the importance of workflow customization in healthcare.Vantiq's platform allows for low-code, no-code application development.Real-time orchestration of complex healthcare systems is crucial.Generative AI can significantly enhance clinical decision-making.Vantiq focuses on creating transparency and safety in AI workflows.The platform is designed to operate securely within healthcare environments.AI can augment human capabilities in critical care settings. A Little about Dr Ryan Vega: Dr. Ryan Vega serves as the Chief Health Officer for Vantiq and is the former Chief Innovation Officer for the Veterans Health Administration where he led enterprise innovation efforts across the largest integrated health system in the United States.His work has spanned large-scale digital modernization efforts, design and deployment of innovative care and payment models, and early design and development of healthcare software focused on improving health care delivery and experience for patients and providers.Dr. Vega also currently sits as the Physician in Residence for the Digital Medicine Society and holds academic appointments as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Administration at Georgetown University as well as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at George Washington University. He is the recipient of many awards for his work in healthcare innovation and has published numerous articles on the topic.

The Advances in Artificial Intelligence for Mental Health: An interview with Dr. Alyssa Dietz Curt and Katie chat with Dr. Alyssa Dietz, a clinical psychologist and digital mental health expert, about the evolving role of AI in therapy. Dr. Dietz discusses how AI can enhance therapy by delivering evidence-based care, particularly in structured approaches like CBT, while acknowledging its limitations with complex, multi-diagnosis cases. She emphasizes the need for collaboration between therapists and AI developers to ensure ethical, patient-centered innovation in digital mental health. Transcripts for this episode will be available at mtsgpodcast.com! In this podcast episode, we talk with Dr. Alyssa Dietz about Advances in AI for Therapy Artificial Intelligence has already come for mental healthcare. The question is, what should therapists be doing about it? We dig into what AI therapy looks like from the inside, from a clinician's perspective. AI's Growing Role in Therapy AI can enhance therapy but won't replace human therapists soon. AI is particularly effective in skills-based therapies like CBT. AI currently struggles with complex diagnoses and comorbidities. The most active users of digital mental health tools are 50-60 years old, surprising many industry experts. How AI is Changing the Therapist's Role AI can automate administrative tasks and support therapists in data-driven decision-making. Although tech and insurance folks say we can use AI to work at the "top of our license," this approach could lead to therapist burnout. Clinicians should work alongside AI developers to ensure ethical, patient-centered care. AI's judgment and decision-making remain limited, requiring human oversight. Evaluating AI's Effectiveness & Ethical Considerations The tension between innovation, regulation, and evaluation in AI-driven therapy. Importance of clear safety protocols and escalation (emergency) measures for client care. AI must be rigorously tested for safety and effectiveness. Understanding how AI products are trained and evaluated is critical for therapists before incorporating these clinical tools into your practice. AI and Complex Diagnoses Current AI models struggle to address comorbidities effectively. Need for personalization and context-driven interventions. Future AI tools must move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach. How Therapists Can Adapt to AI in Mental Health Educate yourself on AI's capabilities and limitations. Stay informed through online courses, conferences, and tech-focused therapist groups. Engage with organizations like the Digital Medicine Society to understand responsible AI use. Connect with the "Therapists in Tech" Slack group to network with others in the space. Stay in Touch with Curt, Katie, and the whole Therapy Reimagined #TherapyMovement: Our Linktree: https://linktr.ee/therapyreimagined Modern Therapist's Survival Guide Creative Credits: Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/ Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

The DiMe Seal is a new initiative designed to help healthcare systems and consumers identify high-quality, trustworthy digital health software products. In this episode, Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), and Kimberly McManus, Deputy Chief AI Officer at the Department of Veteran Affairs, discuss the DiMe Seal, a new program designed to evaluate and recognize trustworthy digital health software. They explain the challenges healthcare systems face in evaluating the vast market of digital health products, the criteria used by the DiMe Seal, and the benefits for both developers and end-users. Both Jen and Kim highlight the importance of evidence-based claims, robust privacy and security measures, and user-friendly design in digital health. They also believe in the potential for the DiMe Seal to improve the quality of digital health products and streamline the adoption process for healthcare systems and consumers.  Tune in and learn how the DiMe Seal is working to bring order and trust to the digital health market! Resources: Connect with and follow Jennifer Goldsack on LinkedIn. Connect with and follow Kimberly McManus on LinkedIn. Learn more about Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) on their LinkedIn. Start with the DiMe Seal program today. Use the code “OutRock25“ to save 25% today. Find out more about the Dime Seal Governance Committee here.

In this episode, Ayesha spoke with Sarah Averill Lott, MPH, CPH, Research Lead at Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) and Diane Stephenson, PhD, Executive Director at the Critical Path for Parkinson (CPP) at the Critical Path Institute. DiMe is a global non-profit and a professional home for digital medicine that aims to drive the broad adoption of digital approaches to advance medicine and public health. DiMe convened a working group to identify barriers to greater utilization of digital measures in Alzheimer's research and subsequently developed resources to help researchers and clinicians more quickly adopt digital measures in this area. Sarah Averill Lott is a program lead at DiMe where she supports programs and resources that promote the safe, effective and equitable use of digital health technologies to advance clinical research and improve outcomes for patients. She has degrees in neuroscience and public health. Diane Stephenson is a neuroscientist by training with 35 years combined experience in academic neuroscience and drug discovery. Dr Stephenson joined Critical Path Institute in 2011 and presently leads the Neurology programs centered around Critical Path for Parkinson's (CPP) and Critical Path for Alzheimer's Disease (CPAD), with the goal of accelerating drug development tools for neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Stephenson received her PhD in Medical Neurobiology from Indiana University. Tune into the episode to hear about the adoption of digital measures in Alzheimer's research and care, including the collaboration between DiMe and the Critical Path Institute. For more life science and medical device content, visit the Xtalks Vitals homepage. https://xtalks.com/vitals/ Follow Us on Social Media Twitter: https://twitter.com/Xtalks Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/xtalks/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Xtalks.Webinars/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xtalks-webconferences YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/XtalksWebinars/featured

In this episode of the Scope of Things, host Deborah Borfitz delivers the news on an investigation into data reporting problems in major Ticagrelor clinical trial PLATO, the need for more sex-aware cancer research, Alzheimer's studies looking at brain shrinkage associated with immunotherapies (and repurposing drugs as potential new treatments), and a large, decentralized trial that successfully uncovered disease-causing genetic variants in hundreds of participants. Benjamin Vandendriessche, chief delivery officer of Digital Medicine Society, also joins in to talk about a newly completed project with the FDA that is providing guidance and resources on how to validate novel digital clinical measures.  News Roundup PLATO trial investigation Findings published in The BMJ “OncoSexome” project Paper in Nucleic Acids Research Brain shrinkage with Alzheimer's treatment Research in The Lancet Neurology  Repurposing drugs for Alzheimer's Study in Alzheimer's & Dementia  Mayo Clinic Tapestry study Article in Mayo Clinic Proceedings Guest  Benjamin Vandendriessche, chief delivery officer, Digital Medicine Society The Scope of Things podcast explores clinical research and its possibilities, promise, and pitfalls. Clinical Research News senior writer, Deborah Borfitz, welcomes guests who are visionaries closest to the topics, but who can still see past their piece of the puzzle. Focusing on game-changing trends and out-of-the-box operational approaches in the clinical research field, the Scope of Things podcast is your no-nonsense, insider's look at clinical research today.

Five Good Things with Janae Sharp and Megan Antonelli: A rapid-fire segment highlighting positive developments in digital health. Janae and Megan share insights on recent innovations, successful implementations, and emerging trends that are driving progress in healthcare technology.Learn about cutting-edge solutions improving patient outcomesDiscover how technology is enhancing healthcare accessibilityGain insight into successful digital health implementationsStay informed about positive industry trends shaping the future of careMegan Antonelli, Chief Executive Officer, HealthIMPACTJanae Sharp, Founder The Sharp Index 

This episode features two guests, Jennifer Goldsack and Yashoda Sharma, of the Digital Medicine Society, or DiMe. We're going to get into the nitty gritty of healthcare disparities in terms of access and outcomes, and how digital solutions are a big part of the overall solution.  Episode 36 links: ⁠⁠⁠TPM E36⁠⁠⁠ for highlights and links from this episode > Genialis' Upcoming Events Genialis™ krasID

Join us on the latest episode! Our Guest: Jen Goldsack, CEO of The Digital Medicine SocietyWhat you'll get out of this episode:- Jen's Background- Overview of DiMe Society- The challenges that still exist in advancing digital medicine- CancerX Collaboration- What Jen loves most about what she's doing at DiMe.To learn more about DiMe Society: https://dimesociety.org/Full Episode and more info here: https://sliceofhealthcare.com/378-jen-goldsack-ceo-of-the-digital-medicine-societyOur sponsors for this episode are:Sage Growth Partners https://sage-growth.com/FlipMD by GoodRX https://www.goodrx.com/Quantum Health https://quantum-health.com/

Digital medicine is essential for improving healthcare and addressing issues related to access and equity. In the latest episode, learn about the importance of digital medicine, the challenges and opportunities in the industry and the importance of an integrated evidence plan. Plus, CEO and Co-Founder of the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), Jennifer Goldsack, shares her thoughts on generative AI and advice for young professionals in healthcare. As part of DiMe's upcoming Integrated Evidence Plans for Digital Health Products (IEP) project, leaders in digital health product development, regulation, reimbursement and commercial strategy will partner with payers, purchasers, policymakers, clinicians and patient groups to identify core components of an integrated evidence plan. If you would like to engage in this project and help streamline the path to regulatory and commercial success to optimize health outcomes for the greatest number of patients, learn more and share your interest to join (https://dimesociety.org/access-resources/evidence-defined/#iep-form).

Jennifer Goldsack is CEO of Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), the professional home for digital medicine. It is a global nonprofit with a mission to advance the ethical, effective, equitable, and safe use of digital technology to redefine healthcare and improve lives. Victoria talks to Jennifer about using new products and solutions to solve some of the most pressing and persistent challenges in healthcare, measuring success by how well they are caring for people every day and not by how good their products or how many they use on any given day, and how DiME can improve the way that we identify, manage, cure, and support people in a lifetime journey of health and disease. Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) (https://dimesociety.org/) Follow Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/dime-society/about/?viewAsMember=true) or Twitter (https://twitter.com/_DiMeSociety). Follow Jennifer Goldsack on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgoldsack/). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of Digital Medicine Society, the professional home for digital medicine. Jennifer, thank you for joining me. JENNIFER: Thank you so much for having me; excited for our conversation today. VICTORIA: Wonderful, me too. And we have our Program Manager for DEI Geronda with us today. Hello. GERONDA: Hey, how's it going? I'm super excited to be on here as well. VICTORIA: Yes, me too. It's going to be a great conversation. So, Jennifer, why don't you just tell me a little bit more about the Digital Medicine Society? JENNIFER: Happy to, one of my favorite topics, Victoria. So the Digital Medicine Society, or as we affectionately refer to it as DiMe, is a global nonprofit, and our mission is to advance the ethical, effective, equitable, and safe use of digital technology to redefine healthcare and improve lives. And I think one point I'd like to make right off the bat is while we are tech and digital enthusiasts here at DiMe, we are not tech determinists. What we think about is how can we harness the promise of these new digital tools in the toolbox, these new products, these new solutions, and how can we use them to solve some of the most pressing and persistent challenges in healthcare, an industry that exists to care for people? That's what we think about all day. That's our measure of success: how well are we caring for people every day, not how good are our products or how many products can we use on any given day. VICTORIA: Right. So what did you see in the digital health space that led you to believe that something like DiMe needed to exist in the world? JENNIFER: So it's interesting. When we take a step back and think about all the experts that need to be at the table to ensure that we build a field of digital health that is worthy of our trust, in our opinion here at DiMe, we think this is the most interdisciplinary field you can imagine, and that's a bold claim. But let me play it out for you. And maybe we can think about some other interdisciplinary fields during the course of our discussion. For digital medicine to work, we need citizen scientists and cyber security experts. We need physicists, engineers, product folks, data scientists, clinical scientists, clinical care providers, healthcare executives, regulators, payors, investors, funders all to sit at the table together, all to speak a common unifying language, all to have a shared idea of what our North Star is. What are we trying to do here as we digitize healthcare, and what does good look like and for whom as we do it? And so that's the gap that the Digital Medicine Society was introduced to fill. That water cooler, if you like, where the leaders in our field can share their expertise and where we can very intentionally build a much better future for healthcare using the new digital tools in our toolbox. VICTORIA: Interesting. And I like how you pointed out for whom. [laughs] And I see digital equity is a big topic that you're focused on with the organization. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? JENNIFER: I'm happy to, and in our opinion here at DiMe, equity has to be front and center of everything we do. I think too many times we look across and considerations around diversity, equity, and inclusion; they're part of a rubric. They're a vertical. That's not what we think here at DiMe. We have to think about diversity, equity, and inclusion in everything that we do as we work to digitize healthcare. We know that there are pressing, persistent, and absolutely inexcusable inequities that exist across the burden of disease, across access to care, across the quality of care you're able to access, the care that you can afford. We know that all of those things introduce a long-standing history of inequities in health and healthcare. As we digitize the healthcare industry, it's unacceptable for us just to be thinking about, hey, as long as we don't make things worse, that's not acceptable to us. We are thinking at every turn about how can we improve the way that we identify disease, the way that we manage disease, the way we cure disease, the way that we support people in a lifetime journey of health and disease? And how can we make sure that we do that for everyone in a way we've never been able to before? So while I could talk about some of the projects that we've done that exclusively focus on advancing health equity through the use of digital tools, it's actually something we keep front and center in everything we do, in everything we talk about here at DiMe and something that we try and compel every single person in the field to think about to make sure that we seize this opportunity. GERONDA: I think that's fantastic. And something that you hit on that it's really important for us at thoughtbot is continuous improvement. And that intentionality is incredibly important when it comes to DEI efforts. And so one thing that we do have at thoughtbot is we have trainings, and we try to work toward a shared language. But we do understand that everyone is at a different point in a different journey towards DEI to be able to build and design the best products and provide businesses to our clientele. So I'd love to hear more about how your organization does consider that continuous improvement for all employees across the organization in terms of ensuring that you're enforcing shared language across the organization to be able to continue to have really great care for your people. JENNIFER: Geronda, I love this. And I think that you've touched on something that's really important, which is while we can be collectively frustrated, perhaps even angry, about the health inequity that we see on a daily basis and that we frankly have not addressed as an industry for decades and decades...and quite frankly, I think we should be frustrated; we should be angry. Not taking the time to meet people where they are as they make a commitment to designing, developing, and thinking about the business incentives that they need in order to do this work well and to be intentional is actually incredibly counterproductive. So we always start with that shared language. When we talk about inclusion in digital health, we need to not just think about all of the different vectors of inclusion and domains of diversity that we've developed as a healthcare industry, but we need to think about those vectors and domains at the intersection between healthcare and digital. And if we do nothing else beyond educate the field on what those domains and vectors are so they can be intentional, is they think about, gosh, what's the healthcare problem I want to solve for, for whom? How do I need to consider the needs of our intended users as I do that? That in and of itself is going to take us so much further than we are today. But I'd also love to learn from you guys. I love the three-part way you describe your work, that you think about designing, and then developing, and then getting the business of great product development right. How do you guys think about it? I'd love to be able to learn from you too. VICTORIA: One thing I know, speaking specifically to the intentionality that you mentioned, so if you're building an AI product and you're not intentionally thinking about DEI, you can actually build bias and problems into the code itself. So for us, and, Geronda, I want to hear your perspective here too, consulting with experts in the field, especially in DEI early and making a culture where we do have a program manager of DEI. So I've really pinged Geronda several times already this year about, like, I have this question about this. And I think having access to an expert and having access to knowledge that you should go back and check yourself is part of it. But do you have anything you want to add there, Geronda? GERONDA: I definitely agree with everything that you had said, Victoria. And also what I'll add too is that it is really thinking about in everything that we do, how do we bring DEI at the forefront? And recognizing, as I mentioned before, that everyone's in a different place. So it's not to say that if you mess up or if you didn't consider something that, you can't continuously improve. And we have this culture where I'm not going to come in as the DEI police to say, "How come you didn't consider that?" Or "Why didn't you think of that earlier?" It's more to say, "Oh, okay, well, here's how we can approach this differently." And everyone's pretty open to the feedback and the learning. And so one example that I'll give is that our website, thoughtbot.com, we're right now working towards accessibility for our website so that we can offer it more to those with disabilities, or those that are visually impaired, or hard of hearing, and offer it to be more accessible for anyone who goes to our website. And it's a learning curve for quite a few of our folks. But the learning library that's offered in there to say, okay, I may not know everything about how things impact those that may be visually impaired, but let me educate and help to develop this website in a way that's going to support them. So to Victoria's point, it's infusing DEI in every way that we can. And what I love as well is that we do have a DEI Council, and we do have a shared platform to bring about issues or have those discussions and ask the questions so that you can continuously improve yourself to make sure that you're developing and infusing DEI across the work that you do. So great question and I really feel like it's, of course, a work in progress. But we're in a really good place where we can continue to have that continuous improvement through education, and learning, and feedback to correct ourselves. VICTORIA: Yeah, I love that. I think that having the culture at least puts you in a good starting place. [laughs] I'd love to hear more about what projects you've worked on in that space, specifically, Jennifer. JENNIFER: So, first of all, I love how you talk about this idea of you need to have a culture in place that allows us to assess opportunities, that allows us to identify the kind of work we need to do based on where we are today. And then once we've assessed those opportunities, once we've identified potential pathways, we actually then have the support and the right environment to be able to implement these best practices. And there are two things that I'd love to highlight. The first is actually education resources and specifically education resources on applied digital health ethics. I think creating this culture of ethics which is absolutely inextricable from a culture of equity, is critically important. You need to have those folks on staff just like you guys do. You need to be able to go to potential end users and communities and have line items in your budget to reimburse them for their time and their expertise. You need to be able to have goals and performance metrics that actually reflect the success you're having or where you're struggling when we think about building a more inclusive environment. So that's a lot of what we try and fuel through our applied digital health ethics education. That's something that's a direct-to-learner option for folks; we're very proud of. We've had fantastic reviews and testimonials. We had tremendous faculty help us with that curriculum, and it's been really well received. And we are confident in the change that that education resource is driving in the field. The second is actually a suite of resources that we launched more recently, and this is where I can start to get really tangible. So as an organization, we convened a broad and diverse group of experts to really tackle the issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion in digitized clinical trials. And I use action-oriented words like tackle very intentionally. Unfortunately, what we see an awful lot of the time is people admiring the problem, for want of a better expression, that we'll see endless panels at conferences and op-eds, and these sorts of things being written about the current state. But what we were determined to do is own the fact that there is nothing technically prohibiting us today from deploying these digital tools and resources in the service of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion while simultaneously addressing some of the long-standing clinical issues, while simultaneously addressing some of the regulatory science issues, while promoting access, while making sure we generate better data for better clinical decision making. This is not an either-or. This is not a trade-off. We are not limited by the technology; we are powered by the technology. It requires our intent and our commitment to actually doing this work. So I'm going to pause there to see if Geronda or Victoria you have questions on any of that. And then I can certainly go into more detail about those tools if that's interesting. GERONDA: It's super interesting. And I do have a question. But I'll kind of recap and understand that by having those different broadened expertise, you're having multiple people come together with this expertise so that you can ensure you're providing the best data to help you make those equitable decisions. Does that sound about right? JENNIFER: That's exactly right. I think that as fantastic and expert as our team are, we are merely representative of a broader community that is doing this excellent work out every single day, trying to improve the way we care for people, representing different communities, building tools. And unless we bring not only those innovators from different backgrounds to the table but also representatives of the communities we're actually working hard to serve to the table, our efforts will be inadequate. And that's why we're so committed to this multidisciplinary, pre-competitive, and collaborative work as we build our tools and resources here at DiMe. GERONDA: Yeah, and that's amazing. The question that I have for you, the follow-up question to that, is we try to look across...our company is global. We do have employees in many different countries across the globe. So trying to ensure that we have an understanding of the needs on a global scale can sometimes be challenging. Can you speak more to this multidisciplinary broadened expertise and how they might bring in perspective that can help shape your technologies or even clinical trial project in a way that supports different ethnicities across the globe and how they identify and even intersectionality of folks as well, so not just race but also LGBTQ or other races as well like socioeconomic status? JENNIFER: It's such a good question, and it's so important. And I think one of the things that I have frankly learned an enormous amount and really taken to heart are these many different domains and these many different vectors of inclusion. Now, first of all, if we start saying, look, we have to consider these 50 (I'm being facetious, intentionally so.) different considerations, then we're going to become so overwhelmed so quickly that we become absolutely ineffectual as we try and think about serving all of these different individuals. But, Geronda, you gave fantastic examples around the hard work that you've been doing even in your own website environment to make sure people who are differently abled...they might have certain vision or hearing impairments or whatever that might look like, and they can access your resources. They can interact with your team just as easily as anyone else. So I'll give you an example of something that had never occurred to me until we actually started working with a member of a community who represented this particular part of the workforce. We were talking about actually how we can use a variety of different tools to monitor respiratory illnesses and diseases. You can think about things like asthma. You can think about things like cough was an important symptom of COVID, for example. How can we use the microphones that you might find in your smartwatch or your smartphone? How might we use these to be able to monitor, predict and track disease? We'd gone through how does different socioeconomic status, how does place, how does race, or ethnicity perhaps play into your access to these different tools, your tech literacy, your trust in these different tools and products? What had not occurred to me at all...and I'm so embarrassed to say this, but you think about you can have a tool where you do all of the work around inclusive design. You can think about all of the different needs to earn the trust of the communities that you're asking to use these tools. But we hadn't contemplated how you might use these tools if someone, for example, worked in a work environment where it was incredibly loud. If you're on a building site, if you're in a warehouse, if you're working on a checkout, it doesn't matter how good the sensor is in your smartwatch that you may have been provided with because that work environment is going to absolutely drown out any signal from that stream of data. And so we need to think about all of the different ways that someone's life, and career, and their background, and social determinants affect our ability to develop and deploy tools that really can help them manage their health, improve their health, have better health outcomes. GERONDA: That's amazing. VICTORIA: That's amazing. And I wonder if you've encountered too an issue with if you're designing these applications...like I know when I was living in Washington, D.C., there were 3,000 people who don't have internet at home, don't have a computer, don't have a phone. So how would your team approach that kind of problem? JENNIFER: [laughs] I think this is the theme of our conversation. VICTORIA: [laughs] JENNIFER: With intentionality, which is, is the goal here simply to provision tools and technologies, or is our goal here to be more thoughtful about the tools that exist, that we can use? Is our goal here to think about digital infrastructure and how we should be thinking about that not just to power healthcare but also perhaps access to education, access to safe and secure bank accounts, all of these different sorts of things? We cannot assume that every single person has top-of-the-range technology, unlimited data plans; we are foolish to do so. But the first thing we need to do is actually ask and understand what access to technology looks like and not just assume it's an affordability issue. Maybe it's a trust issue. You have to understand the root cause before you can work to solve something. I'd also offer up some other data that I always find compelling and important as we have these conversations. While we know there are large portions of the population who don't have access to what some of us, unfortunately, when we're moving quickly, just assume that everyone has, there are also horribly underrepresented populations, represented populations that do have access to these technologies. Some recent data actually showed that one-third of homeless individuals in California do have a smartphone. Let's actually just pause and think about that for a moment. You can't get access to benefits or brick-and-mortar healthcare because you have to go and fill in all of your information if you don't have a home. But if you have a smartphone, which presumably many of these folks have realized that even at some of the hardest times in their life, they actually need that to stay connected in today's digital economy, that this is actually a way and a vector for us to reach them, for us to capture information and data about what it is they need, not just to improve their healthcare but to get supported into a more safe and sustainable environment with more security where we can actually support their health in a much more holistic way. It also can connect them with care, whether that's mental healthcare or whatever their needs are in any given moment, that if we were relying on the traditional brick and mortar system, we'd be unable to capture. So this goes back to two things. First of all, don't assume. Don't assume that people do or don't have technology, and if they don't, don't assume you understand what the root cause actually is. The second point is don't think about these digital tools as limiting factors; think about the ways that we can use them to overcome so many of the challenges that we've faced in the way we care for people for decades and decades. VICTORIA: I love that you bring that point up. I volunteered for many years with an application called HopeOneSource, which is a mobile app for people who are experiencing homelessness to get access to services that they need. And I know it might have changed over time, but it was like 80% of people who are experiencing homelessness do have a cell phone. And partly in the United States, there is a subsidy. If you're under a certain income level, you can get a free cell phone. But it's very easy to have your cell phone stolen or to get lost. And the impermanency of the device is also an issue. So I think it's actually, like you said, you don't want to make assumptions about what people have and what they don't. And you do want to bring the intention and understand what it's really like because that will change how you build in things like security and two-factor authentication and things like that. So... JENNIFER: That's exactly right. And also, what are some of the infrastructure things we can do? You mentioned the subsidies for folks who are low-income. But then we want people to start transmitting confidential and private information about their health in order to access the highest quality care possible. Are we creating environments where there is access to secure connection environment? So they're not using public Wi-Fi where they actually might be more susceptible to harm due to sort of misuse of that data if it falls into the hands of the wrong folks. These are all of the different things we need to be thinking about. That's not to slow us down or to dampen our enthusiasm for the opportunities that digitization provides to improve the way we care for people. But again, it comes back to...I think what's emerging is almost a theme of our discussion, which is the need to be intentional. GERONDA: I love what you said about not making assumptions because I'm a DEI practitioner, but I always tell people I'm not perfect. [laughs] And so my bias comes in sometimes. I sometimes will assume that I might know the answer to something or what somebody may be experiencing because I may be incredibly passionate about the LGBTQ+ community, which I'm a part of. And it's reminding myself that I can't assume or let my own biases or own feelings towards certain things to steer my decision-making. I really have to be super open and objective to what the facts are telling and get those other experiences from other people. So I continuously check my bias, and I continuously try not to make those assumptions which can be hard at times. And while I know everyone at thoughtbot thinks I'm perfect, I'm the best, [laughter] it's just not true. VICTORIA: I think it is true. [laughter] GERONDA: There you go. JENNIFER: Geronda, I so appreciate you sharing that, and I think it probably is giving everyone listening the same experience that I am having right now, which is you owning that and being willing to share that. Immediately cascading through my mind...and now all of the assumptions that I come to the table with, and all of the ways that I think about things and those hot topics that are unique to me and my lived experience, and what I've been exposed to. And on the one hand, we should never dismiss that. On the other hand, the definition of being inclusive is to go out to folks with those different viewpoints. And one of the things I see increasingly featuring in these sorts of domains of diversity is political views. And you think, gosh, how has this even become a thing in the way that we consider caring for people? But it's so divisive. And I come to the table with all of my thoughts about these kinds of things. But what's serving us about our lived experience and about the passions that drive us all to try and create better products and a better and more inclusive future, and what's not? And how can we humbly acknowledge that and really listen and hear what others are telling us? GERONDA: Right. Exactly, exactly. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don't have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. VICTORIA: If I'm a clinical researcher and I'm about to design an experiment, let's say, how can I use the resources at DiMe to help inform my opinion and help bring in that inclusivity, which I want? JENNIFER: So, Victoria, great question. [laughter] I'm teed up to answer this one. So I think the first thing is, and, Geronda, this is something that you mentioned earlier, which is you don't do a 45-minute brainstorm before you get going, check a box, and say you did it. It's a continual process, and it's a process of continual improvement. So when we describe this, we would discuss the entire clinical trials lifecycle. So, first of all, there are DEI considerations, even in the kind of question you want to answer. If you are doing clinical research because you want to develop a new molecule, a new pill, or something, for example, what community will you be serving? What's the problem we're trying to solve for? Are we trying to add a me-too drug to a population that's already well-served? Or are we actually thinking about, gosh, there's this underrepresented population? There's a disease state where we've struggled to break through. We believe that we can deploy these digital tools in order to really effect change here. So it starts as early as what is the problem you're trying to solve for? What is your research question? Then each stage as you think about, gosh, what are the tools that I might want to use in order to answer this question? Who are the people that we could possibly serve through the development of this new drug, for example? Great, then we take seriously our responsibility of making sure that every single individual who participates in our trial reflects and represents that broader population, that we are going to take inclusivity seriously so that when we have an answer to our research question, we know that what we know about the safety of a new drug and what we know about the effectiveness of a new drug applies equally well to every member of the population. At that point, we're asking ourselves questions about as we think about parts of the clinical protocol, so the different steps that we work through in order to safely administer a new therapy that's part of the trial, as we think about capturing the information we need in order to determine whether it's safe and effective, are we setting that up to be as safe as effective for everyone? Are we able to design the trial in such a way that the burden of participation isn't a barrier for certain members of the community? If we're picking digital tools to do things like remote patient monitoring...so imagine for anyone who has a smartwatch the green light on the back of your watch that's measuring your heart rate. Unfortunately, some of those products work differently across different skin tones. Have you done the work to make sure that you're selecting a tool that is going to give you equally trustworthy information for every single person? These are all of the things step by step that you should think about as you are developing a clinical trial. We have tool after resource after checklist to help you do this in a really accessible way. We organize them so you can find them really easily based on either what stage am I at and what can I do today to be more diverse, and more equitable, and more inclusive in the way that I'm developing new medicines? We also allow you to find these tools and resources based on a particular digital product. So if, for example, you think that you might be able to use, and we haven't said the words yet, so it's probably time, AI or machine learning to better identify a more diverse patient population that you could enroll into your trial, how are you thinking about catching potential bias that might take your good intentions and actually render them almost useless because you didn't identify bias in the algorithm, for example? So all of those tools and resources, and there are over 60 of them available, are open access. They're free to download, use them, interactive checklists, considerations documents, tools, and resources that help you act today as soon as you make a decision about doing clinical research that benefits all people. GERONDA: And it almost sounds like, in a way, that this resource could be helpful for many other industries as well because although it's tied to clinical trials, the considerations and process that you're taking to start to think through those DEI elements that checklist can be helpful across many different disciplines. Would you say that's correct? JENNIFER: I would. Now, Geronda, our superpower, is getting the digitization of healthcare right. And that's a big enough task that while there are other pressing areas, we will not stray into those. But I think you've hit the nail on the head. When we think about getting access to education, for example, or access to safe housing, or any other kinds of benefits, and we can think about how some of these digital tools can overcome many of the different barriers to access that different communities face. Absolutely, all of these different principles can apply. And in fact, we actually think that's really important. We talk a lot about harmonization in the work that we do. There are folks who have product portfolios that span different industries. When we think about really trying to hammer home the need to be intentional, to make sure that as we digitize the healthcare industry, we are bringing everyone with us, we should avoid, wherever possible, having unique or special considerations. Ultimately, these are all the same humans that we serve in other industries. We are trying more than ever to meet people where they are than insisting they come to us or come to the clinic, for example. All of these principles apply equally well. And if we do that harmonization well...and this comes back to the idea of culture that we were talking about. This just gets embedded into the culture of developing products for every single person, regardless of whether that's an educational product, or a healthcare product, or a financial product. We should be thinking about these things regardless of how we're striving to help and support people. GERONDA: I love that. VICTORIA: I love that. And I wonder, when you were developing these products for clinicians or for healthcare providers, was there anything surprising in your initial research and discovery when building these things? JENNIFER: Yes. And I would say that technology is no longer the barrier. There is nothing that we need a product to do, whether that's the way we account for, right? You're not always going to eliminate it. But the way that we account for, for example, bias in the way that we capture and process data, if you acknowledge it, you can do the necessary statistical interpretation. And then you can actually be well-informed in your decision-making. There's nothing either about the data, about the form factors, about battery life, about the performance of these tools that is stopping us from building and deploying solutions that work for everyone starting today, starting immediately. So then, what is the barrier? The barrier is a knowledge gap, a skills gap, an incentives gap. And that's really what we've been hammering to address. And if you do look at our DEI resources, especially for digitized clinical trials, we try and think about all of those gaps and support people, whether it's through, here, let us educate you on actually where some of the risks are, some of the new vectors of inclusion or domains of diversity, especially at the intersection of digital and health. Let us support you with tools and resources, and guides for how to do this. And then let us give you data and let us give you things like a market opportunity calculator, which is something else that we've created that will actually give you the business case to be more inclusive in the way that you develop digital products for use in clinical trials and the way you deploy them to support better research. That's really what we're focused on. And so the surprise almost is that the tech isn't limiting us in any way. The flip side of that being we are not going to tech our way out of this. It comes down to humans and our decisions and how we develop and deploy these tools in the service of better health. VICTORIA: That makes sense to me, and it makes me think about there's like a moral obligation or value that you can apply to DEI, but there's also a financial aspect. [laughs] And if you put a lot of effort into building an app, for example, and don't think about inclusivity, and you get to the end and think, oh, now I have to go back and make it accessible, that can be a lot of rework. It can be a lot of cost, if not even a legal liability and financial liability, I would imagine, in the healthtech sector. JENNIFER: That's exactly right. I couldn't have said any better, Victoria. [laughs] VICTORIA: [laughs] It's like, you are morally and legally obligated in many cases to include people. And it's better to just start from the beginning and start from the beginning and knowing what we're trying to do. JENNIFER: 100%. And I was trying not to pile on because I think the statement just stands alone. We are morally obligated. In some cases, we are legally obligated. There are emerging regulations certainly in the clinical trials environment about having more representative samples in order for you to get regulatory approval, for example. One of those regulations is moving slowly, which is always frustrating and disappointing. But given the moral imperative, given the emerging regulations, given that finally, this is more at the forefront of conversations, you've got to think about the gymnastics that are happening to continue to avoid doing this. And that's a little bit of the pressure that we want to apply. And so when we talk about the fact that there's no technological reason for not doing this, and when we have tried to provide the tools and resources to actually put these tools into practice, the only remaining question is, are you going to do it? And that's a big question. And as a field, we've not been terribly good at leaning into that previously. We'll talk about it all day. We'll admire the problem of inequity all day. We haven't been good enough at acting. And I'm hoping we're at a tipping point. VICTORIA: Great. And it sounds like now with DiMe, there's no excuse. All the information is there for you. [laughter] JENNIFER: That was exactly what we tried to do. That was the challenge that we gave ourselves and this extraordinary team. And the different individuals and organizations that came to the table to do this they set the standard high. And I'm so proud of their sort of possession, of their courage, and their tenacity in saying, "We are going to serve up absolutely everything that's needed. We're going to present it in a way that it's almost impossible not to find what you need for every person who's coming with this question." We set the standard high, and I'm incredibly proud of how well we delivered on that. VICTORIA: What does success look like for DiMe in the next six months or in the next five years? JENNIFER: What is it? Is it a Bill Gates quote? Is it...you sort of overestimate what you can do in 6 months and underestimate what you'll do in 10 years, something along those lines. And the intention is there, though. Anyone who knows me well will probably say I've never underestimated anything in my life. I'm always pushing for the next thing. Let's come back to this notion that the tech is not the limiting factor. And we're facing a really interesting moment in healthcare where the current environment is simply not sustainable. There are not enough clinicians to provide care or conduct research. We've had an expensive healthcare system for a long time. But the prices are not sustainable when you think about how much health insurance is going up relative to inflation, when you think about the out-of-pocket costs that people are facing when you think about the fact that there's not a single healthcare executive who's sleeping well at night because they can't staff their units, and their supply chain costs are incredibly high. And they're worried about the sustainability of their hospital, especially in rural and underserved areas. Business, as usual, is not an option. So in the next six months, I think we're going to keep pushing along. But in that five-year window, I think we are going to see a fundamentally different way that we care for people in the healthcare environment and that we conduct clinical trials. No longer is healthcare going to be built around the clinic. That's not to say they're going to go away. There are, of course, going to be times where you need to see a clinician in person, where you need to have a procedure, where you need to have some lab work or imaging done. But so much of this can be translated into the home, can use tools to extend the knowledge and expertise of clinicians so that we can better care for people, all people, by meeting them where they are. I think we're going to see a fundamentally different kind of healthcare, different kinds of clinical research built around the patient, not the clinic. And part of that is going to be redefining what good healthcare even is. Currently, good healthcare is once you turn up at the clinic already sick, sometimes really sick, facing a catastrophic and likely very expensive outcome, we do our best. That's good healthcare. I really think we're going to drive towards a future where these new flows of data and these new technologies are going to actually allow us to try and mitigate disease earlier, to intervene earlier, to catch all people who are at risk earlier in their health journey. And the great thing about that is it offers the opportunity to define healthcare differently. All of a sudden, good healthcare isn't; how good are we at intervening when you're sick? But how good are we at keeping you well and keeping you out of the healthcare system? I also feel strongly that it is no longer going to be enough to just raise the top end of healthcare and provide the best care to the people who are able to afford it, that we are going to start to embed metrics around equity into our evaluation of good healthcare. And the sooner we do that, the better because every time we look at those numbers now, they are astonishingly bad. VICTORIA: Yeah. And it's making me think about, you know, in five years, if we continue with the trend of global warming, they're also predicting more pandemics, more disease. And it seems like we are going to have to reimagine how we do healthcare because the current path isn't sustainable. JENNIFER: Exactly right. Exactly right. And the sad thing about all of this is that the burden of things like climate change, the burden of pandemics falls on those communities and those individuals who have been underrepresented and underserved in healthcare for the longest. It increases the burden of disease and health stress on folks who have consistently carried the highest burden of disease, been part of the highest risk categories. Not only do we have to get better at delivering care to all people reducing the burden of disease, we have to do it where actually those challenges through all of those external pressures, Victoria, are going to be becoming worse. VICTORIA: And it reminds me of another term I've heard for underrepresented, which is historically excluded, which I think really applies here. So that's fascinating. JENNIFER: Because it is what it is. VICTORIA: Yeah, right? Like, that's what it is. So I think it's wonderful that's what you're working on. And let's see if you could go back in time to when you first started DiMe Society; what advice would you give yourself now that it's been three years and you've come a long way? JENNIFER: [laughs] Sleep more. [laughter] I don't know, when I look in the mirror these days, there's an old lady that I'm sure wasn't there at the beginning of all this. But I think that's not the spirit of the question you were asking, Victoria. I wish we'd been bolder sooner. And we've never shied away from tackling the hardest problems. We started with this bold mission and vision. People would ask us when we launched DiMe, you know, "Gosh, are you really focused across individual health promotion, across healthcare delivery, across public health, and across clinical research?" And we said, "Absolutely," because if we don't tackle it all together, we're simply going to create new silos in the digital era. And we're never going to move towards this reimagined healthcare system, a new healthcare system, one that cares for everyone and where access to research is even harder than access to care. With these new flows of data in the digital era, we want to do it together. So it's not that we weren't bold, but the way now we make strong statements that we've always believed and that we've always been proud of around the imperative to be inclusive around the demand for high-quality evidence to drive trust around the fact that none of this is a tech issue. It's a human issue. I wish we had gone there sooner. I think it is serving us well. I think that the professionals that we work with across industry respond to it. They want to be part of this journey. They want to build a better healthcare system. And so, while we've always been, I think, bold and courageous in the vision that we've held and the work we've done, giving voice to it in a way that really reflects our vision and our passion has been so well received by our community. And they have stepped up to do this work incredibly well. I just wish we'd gone there sooner. That's the only thing I would have done differently. VICTORIA: I think that's great advice, especially for founders who are starting out in a space like this, to really stand by their convictions and be bold about it. [chuckles] Like, this is what you believe in, and other people will connect to it if it's right, so I love that. And we're getting towards the end of our time here too. So I want to make sure I can pass it to Geronda if you have any other final questions for our guest here today. GERONDA: More a comment in that I think that learning more about your organization and perusing some of the tools that you offer and the checklist that you offer...and it's such great work. And in some ways...and I'm trying to get the best way to say this. But in some ways, it's so clear of, like, this is what you can consider. This is what you should do. Although the work is not easy to do, it's really a helpful guideline for how you can start to think differently. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that was put into a lot of these resources that you're giving out and just where you are in your trajectory as well because DEI work is not easy work. And you sometimes...it can impact you emotionally. It can impact you mentally sometimes. But when you're continuing to go after what you know is needed and the intentionality of things, it really is super helpful. So although I said I didn't have a question, and I just had a comment, I lied. I do have a question. [laughter] My question to you is, in doing a lot of this work, ensuring that DEI is infused in healthtech, all the work that you do and that your team does, how do you just navigate and manage your well-being, your mental health, your emotional health as you continue to do all this work? JENNIFER: It's such a great question. And when you said, Geronda, that this can sometimes be really emotional, I heard a statistic actually from a colleague of mine, Ricki Fairley, who's the CEO of Touch, Breast Cancer, and she was telling me that cancer affecting women under 35, Black women under 35 are diagnosed with cancer at a rate twice that of White women and die at a rate three times higher than White women. And, I mean, you hear that statistic, and it just takes the wind out of you. And it would be really easy to hide from that because it's hard to hear, sometimes too hard. The way that we handle sort of all of this as a team is we square up to these data, and then we celebrate one another. We celebrate our community when we are able to make positive change, even if it's incremental change. Even if sometimes you have those moments where you really move the needle, you have those other days or those other initiatives where you feel like you're crawling on your hands and knees to gain inches. But to celebrate that every moment and to remind ourselves the work is returning value to those people that we all get up every morning to try and serve, that it might be hard, but we're making progress. And that is, I think, the way that, as a team, we stay positive, we stay productive, and that we're able to balance, frankly, the exposure to the reality of some of these issues. GERONDA: I think that's great, having a community even within the workplace. It's so crucial because you spend most of your time at work, as we all know. [laughs] And there's a lot that just goes on across the world all the time, and being able to just talk it out. We have employee resource groups for people to come together with common identities and just talk through things that are impacting them. And so I really think that's great that you're able to just be honest with how you're feeling but also celebrating those important positive moments because sometimes we can focus a lot on the negative. So I really love that you bring the positive aspects of that as well. VICTORIA: Yes, thank you for sharing, and it comes back to the intention. Like, we're all on the same page. We all have this intention of solving this problem. So we're in it together in a way. So, Jennifer, are there any final thoughts or takeaways you want to leave our listeners with today? JENNIFER: No, this was a fantastic conversation. I think we've drawn out this theme of intentionality that will serve all of us very well. Geronda, I love the final question about how do we keep our own sort of emotional state and mental health solid as we do this hard work? It's the perfect note to end on. So Victoria, Geronda, thank you so much for having me on. This has been just a wonderful conversation. I've really enjoyed it. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining and spending time with us today. JENNIFER: Yes, I very much appreciate it. This was an awesome conversation. VICTORIA: All right. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Jennifer Goldsack.

The Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) and Moffitt Cancer Center have announced they are co-hosting CancerX, a new public-private partnership effort to rapidly accelerate the pace of cancer innovation in the U.S. Alongside the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH), Moffitt Cancer Center and DiMe are urging the healthcare and digital health sectors to boost technology-driven initiatives to combat cancer. The two groups are working together to accelerate cancer research advancements, and they invite other organizations to do the same. The Biden administration's revived Cancer Moonshot includes the new CancerX public-private partnership. According to officials, the goal is to use industry collaboration and disruptive innovation to lessen the burden of cancer on everyone. The CancerX program will focus on using digital innovation to reduce disparities and financial toxicity in cancer care and research, working with government organizations, and will enlist industry parties to help with the mammoth undertaking. CancerX uniquely blends DiMe's expertise in convening cross-disciplinary groups to develop clinical-quality resources on a tech timeline with Moffitt's top research and care experts working side-by-side to revolutionize cancer treatment, extend access to the highest-quality care, and save more lives. The initiative is open to all those working in the field who are committed to working collaboratively and share a vision of unleashing the power of innovation to design and create a future that's free of the burden of cancer. Topics include: What is the Digital Medicine Society? Announcing CancerX, key initiatives and membership structure Improving the global ecosystem Guest & Host Links Connect with Dan Kendall | LinkedIn Connect with Jennifer Goldsack | LinkedIn and listen to her episode from May 2019 CancerX Digital Medicine Society Dime Academy DiMe Society Slack Digital Health Today would not be possible without the support of leading organizations. Thank you to: > Presenting Partner: Amalgam Rx > Contributing Partners and Sponsors: Akili | Lindus Health | Bayer G4A Connect on Digital Health Today: Browse Episodes | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram Connect on Health Podcast Network: Browse Shows | Linkedin | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram

What you'll get out of this episodeListen in as host Tim Fitzpatrick chats with Smit Patel about how the Digital Medicine Society, better known as “DiMe”, is building the professional home for digital medicine. Smit shares how DiMe and its partners are tackling the toughest digital medicine challenges, developing clinical-quality resources on a tech timeline, and delivering actionable resources to the field via open-source channels and educational programs. DiMe serves professionals at the intersection of the global healthcare and technology communities. BONUS: Smit is our very first T10 Alum to go through the Final Frontier, Tim's 50-second gauntlet to finish all future Voyages. Enjoy! In this episode you'll discover: Smit's path to clinical medicine and his decision to pursue a career in service to patients as a PharmD Why Smit is passionate about advancing digital medicine and his work at DiMe The power of connectedness and treating digital health as a team sport How Smit and his team are supporting the adoption and deployment of digital medicine in large integrated care organizations like the Department of Veteran Affairs How DiMe led its 8-month collaboration called the Digital Health Regulatory Pathways Project that brought together stakeholders from Medtech, academia, trade associations, and digital health innovators to create free, interactive resources for the community How DiMe's Reg Path Tool helps innovators from square one as they begin to navigate the landscape of digital health regulation and the FDA. How many different stakeholders have a hard time navigating regulations and laws for publishing the devices that are being built, and how often that leads to products not reaching their full potential in the marketplace. Final Frontier - 5 Questions in 50 Seconds Top Challenge: Building trust across stakeholders Top Opportunity: Ethics, equity, and accessibility Tech Trend You're Following: AI/ML in oncology Top Media Recs: Exits & Outcomes (Link→); DTx Podcast (Link→) Healthcare / Tech Leader(s) You're Following:  Jennifer Goldsack (LinkedIn →) Ben Schwartz (LinkedIn →) Ami Bhatt (LinkedIn  →)  Grace Cordovano ( LinkedIn →) Joe Connolly (LinkedIn →) Quotables“ Digital health is a team sport, at the end of the day we are driving towards that one common goal. I call it in Hindi, seva, which means serving patients or serving individuals who are in need. “ @smitpats #DiMe on Ep31 @T-Minus10 w/ @trfitzpatrickRecommended Resources Seek Not Sleep: Navigate health choices with technology (TEDx) Catalog of Regulatory Pathway Resources (DiMe) Join the Conversation Are you a healthcare innovator? Tell us what topics and people you'd like us to cover in future episodes:Smit Patel on LinkedInDiMe on Twitter“DTA partnered with the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) community and Smit Patel to develop resources that will help any company looking to engage with the FDA. This page is a great place to start on that journey.” @Smit Patel on LinkedIn“Excited to share: Answering the call of The White House, DiMe and Moffitt Cancer Center will co-host #CancerX, a new public-private partnership effort to rapidly accelerate the pace of cancer innovation in the U.S., alongside the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health.” @Smit Patel on LinkedinAbout Your HostTim Fitzpatrick is the CEO of IKONA Health, a company using neurobiology and immersive technology to improve how patients learn about their care and treatment options. Tim co-founded IKONA based on his own patient experiences while serving in the US Navy and now in the VA health system. He has served as Principal Investigator on multiple federal research grants, has co-authored papers on learning science, VR, and mental health in the age of COVID-19, and has partnered with top healthcare investors and institutions including the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, National Artificial Intelligence Institute, StartUp Health, On Deck, FundRx, MATTER and NVIDIA.T-Minus 10 is a part of the Slice of Healthcare podcast network. 

This month on Episode 46 of Discover CircRes, host Cynthia St. Hilaire highlights four original research articles featured in the March 3 and March 17th issues of Circulation Research. This episode also features an interview with Dr Andrew Hughes and Dr Jessilyn Dunn about their review, Wearable Devices in Cardiovascular Medicine.   Article highlights:   Delgobo, et al. Deep Phenotyping Heart-Specific Tregs   Sun, et al. Inhibition of Fap Promotes Cardiac Repair After MI   Sun, et al. Endosomal PI3Kγ Regulates Hypoxia Sensing   Johnson, et al. Hypoxemia Induces Minimal Cardiomyocyte Division   Cindy St. Hilaire:        Hi, and welcome to Discover CircRes, the podcast of the American Heart Association's Journal, Circulation Research. I'm your host, Dr Cindy St. Hilaire from the Vascular Medicine Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and today I'm going to share four articles selected from the March 3rd and March 17th issues of CircRes. I'm also going to have a discussion with Dr Andrew Hughes and Dr Jessilyn Dunn about their review, Wearable Devices in Cardiovascular Medicine. And the Review is also featured in our March 3rd issue.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        First, the highlights. The first article I'm going to present is Myocardial Milieu Favors Local Differentiation of Regulatory T-Cells. The first author is Murilo Delgobo and the corresponding author is Gustavo Campos Ramos. After myocardial infarction, the release of autoantigens from the damaged heart cells activates local and infiltrating immune cells such as the T-cell. Studies in mice have shown that fragments of the muscle protein myosin can act as autoantigens, and these myosin fragments are the dominant driver of the T-cell response.   But how do these myosin specific T-cells behave in the damaged heart to drive inflammation and repair is unknown. To find out, Delgobo and colleagues studied endogenous myosin specific T-cells, as well as those transferred into recipient mice. They found, whether exogenously supplied or endogenously created, the myosin specific T-cells that accumulated in the animals' infarcted hearts tended to adopt an immunosuppressive T-regulatory phenotype.   Strikingly, even if the exogenous cells were differentiated into inflammatory TH-17 cells prior to transfer, a significant proportion of them were still reprogrammed into T-regs within the heart. Although cells pre-differentiated into an inflammatory TH-17 phenotype were less inclined to change after the transfer, the results nevertheless indicate that, by and large, the infarcted heart promotes T-cell reprogramming to quell inflammation and drive repair. Yet exactly how the heart does this is a question for future studies.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        The next article I'm going to present is titled Inhibition of FAP Promotes Cardiac Repair by Stabilizing BNP. The first authors of the study are Yuxi Sun and Mengqiu Ma, and the corresponding author is Rui Yue, and they are from Tongji University. After myocardial infarction, there needs to be a balance of recovery processes to protect the tissue. Fibrosis, for example, acts like an immediate bandaid to hold the damaged heart muscle together, but fibrosis can limit contractile function.   Similarly, angiogenesis and sufficient revascularization is required to promote survival of cardiomyocytes within the ischemic tissue and protect heart function. To better understand the balance between fibrotic and angiogenic responses, Sun and colleagues examined the role of fibroblasts activated protein, or FAP, which is dramatically upregulated in damaged hearts, and brain natriuretic peptide, or BNP, which promotes angiogenesis in the heart.   In this study, they found that genetic deletion or pharmacological inhibition of FAP in mice reduces cardiac fibrosis and improves angiogenesis and heart function after MI. Such benefits are not seen if BNP or its receptor, NRP-1, are lacking. The in vitro experiments revealed that FAP's protease activity degrades BNP, thus inhibiting the latter's angiogenic activity. Interestingly, while FAP is upregulated in the heart, its levels drop in the blood, showing that BNP inhibition is localized. Together, these results suggest that blocking FAP's activity in the heart after MI could be a possible strategy for protecting the muscle's function.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        The next article I want to present is Hypoxia Sensing of Beta-Adrenergic Receptor is Regulated by Endosomal PI-3 Kinase Gamma. The first author of this study is Yu Sun, and the corresponding author is Sathyamangla Naga Prasad. Hypoxia is the most proximate acute stress encountered by the heart during an ischemic event. Hypoxia triggers dysfunction of the beta-adrenergic receptors, beta-1AR and beta-2AR, which are critical regulators of cardiac function.   Under normoxic conditions, activation of PI3K-gamma by beta-adrenergic receptors leads to feedback regulation of the receptor by hindering its dephosphorylation through inhibition of protein phosphatase 2A or PP2A. Although it is known that ischemia reduces beta-adrenergic receptor function, the impact of hypoxia on interfering with this PI3K feedback loop was unknown.   Using in vitro and in vivo techniques, this group found that activation of PI3K-gamma underlies hypoxia sensing mechanisms in the heart. Exposing PI3K-gamma knockout mice to acute hypoxia resulted in preserved cardiac function and reduced beta-adrenergic receptor phosphorylation. And this was due to a normalized beta-2AR associated PP2A activity, thus uncovering a unique role for PI3K-gamma in hypoxia sensing and cardiac function.   Similarly, challenging wild-type mice post hypoxia with dobutamine resulted in an impaired cardiac response that was normalized in the PI3K-gamma knockout mice. These data suggests that preserving beta-adrenergic resensitization by targeting the PI3K-gamma pathway would maintain beta-adrenergic signaling and cardiac function, thereby permitting the heart to meet the metabolic demands of the body following ischemia.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        The last article I want to highlight is Systemic Hypoxia Induces Cardiomyocyte Hypertrophy and Right Ventricle Specific Induction of Proliferation. First author of this study is Jaslyn Johnson, and the corresponding author is Steven Houser, and they're at Temple University.   The cardiac hypoxia created by myocardial infarction leads to the death of the heart tissue, including the cardiomyocytes. While some procedures such as reperfusion therapy prevent some cardiomyocyte death, true repair of the infarcted heart requires that dead cells be replaced. There have been many studies that have attempted new approaches to repopulate the heart with new myocytes. However, these approaches have had only marginal success.   A recent study suggested that systemic hypoxemia in adult male mice could induce cardiac monocytes to proliferate. Building on this observation, Johnson and colleagues wanted to identify the mechanisms that induced adult cardiomyocyte cell cycle reentry and wanted to determine whether this hypoxemia could also induce cardiomyocyte proliferation in female mice.   Mice were kept in hypoxic conditions for two weeks, and using methods to trace cell proliferation in-vivo, the group found that hypoxia induced cardiac hypertrophy in both the left ventricle and the right ventricle in the myocytes of the left ventricle and of the right ventricle. However, the left ventricle monocytes lengthened while the RV monocytes widened and lengthened.   Hypoxia induced an increase in the number of right ventricular cardiomyocytes, but did not affect left ventricular monocyte proliferation in male or in female mice. RNA sequencing showed upregulation of cell cycle genes which promote the G1 to S phase transition in hypoxic mice, as well as a downregulation of cullen genes, which are the scaffold proteins related to the ubiquitin ligase complexes. There was significant proliferation of non monocytes in mild cardiac fibrosis in the hypoxic mice that did not disrupt cardiac function.   Male and female mice exhibited similar gene expression patterns following hypoxia. Thus, systemic hypoxia induced a global hypertrophic stress response that was associated with increased RV proliferation, while LV monocytes did not show increased proliferation. These results confirm previous reports that hypoxia can induce cardiomyocyte cell cycle activity in-vivo, and also show that this hypoxia induced proliferation also occurs in the female mice.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        With me today for our interview, I have Dr Andrew Hughes and Dr Jessilyn Dunn, and they're from Vanderbilt University Medical Center. And they're here to discuss the review article that they helped co-author called Wearable Devices in Cardiovascular Medicine. And just as a side note, the corresponding author, Evan Brittain, unfortunately just wasn't able to join us due to clinical service, but they're going to help dissect and discuss this Review with us. Thank you both so much for joining me today. Andy, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself?   Andy Hughes:             Yeah, thank you, Cindy. I'm Andy Hughes. I'm a third year medicine resident at Vanderbilt University who is currently on an NIH supported research year this year. And then will be applying to cardiology fellowships coming up in the upcoming cycle.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        Great, thank you. And Jessilyn, I said you are from Vanderbilt. I know you're from Duke. It was Evan and Andy at Vanderbilt. Jessilyn, tell us about yourself.   Jessilyn Dunn:             Thanks. I am an Assistant Professor at Duke. I have a joint appointment between biomedical engineering and biostatistics and bioinformatics. The work that my lab does is mainly centered on digital health technologies in developing what we call digital biomarkers, using data from often consumer wearables to try to detect early signs of health abnormalities and ultimately try to develop interventions.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        Thank you. We're talking about wearable devices today, and obviously the first thing I think most of us think about are the watch-like ones, the ones you wear on your wrists. But there's really a whole lot more out there. It's not just Apple Watches and Fitbits and the like. Can you just give us a quick summary of all these different types of devices and how they're classified?   Jessilyn Dunn:             Yeah, absolutely. We have a wide variety of different sensors that can be useful. A lot of times, we like to think about them in terms of the types of properties that they measure. So mechanical properties like movement, electrical properties like electrical activity of the heart. We have optical sensors. And so, a lot of the common consumer wearables that we think about contain these different types of sensors.   A good example that we can think about is your consumer smartwatch, like an Apple Watch or a Fitbit or a Garmin device where it has something called an accelerometer that can measure movement. And oftentimes, that gets converted into step counts. And then it may also have an optical sensor that can be used to measure heart rate in a particular method called PPG, or photoplethysmography. And then some of the newer devices also have the ability to take an ECG, so you can actually measure electrical activity as well as the optical based PPG heart rate measurement. These are some of the simpler components that make up the more complex devices that we call wearables.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        And how accurate are the measurements? You did mention three of the companies, and I know there's probably even more, and there's also the clinical grade at-home ECG machines versus the one in the smartwatch. How accurate are the measurements between companies? And we also hear recent stories about somebody's Apple Watch calling 911 because they think they're dead, things like that. Obviously, there's proprietary information involved, but how accurate are these devices and how accurate are they between each other?   Jessilyn Dunn:             This is a really interesting question and we've done quite a bit of work in my lab on this very topic, all the way from what does it mean for something to be accurate? Because we might say, "Well, the more accurate, the better," but then we can start to think about, "Well, how accurate do we need something to be in order to make a clinical decision based off of that?" And if it costs significantly more to make a device super, super accurate, but we don't need it to be that accurate to make useful decisions, then it actually might not be serving people well to try to get it to that extreme level of accuracy.   So there are a lot of trade-offs, and I think that's a tough thing to think about in the circumstances, is these trade-offs between the accuracy and, I don't know, the generalizability or being able to apply this to a lot of people. That being said, it also depends on the circumstances of use. When we think about something like step counts, for example, if you're off by a hundred step counts and you're just trying to get a general view of your step counts, it's not that much of a problem.   But if we're talking about trying to detect an irregular heart rhythm, it can be very bad to either miss something that's abnormal or to call something abnormal that's not and have people worried. We've been working with the Digital Medicine Society to develop this framework that we call V3, which is verification, analytic validation and clinical validation. And these are the different levels of analysis or evaluation that you can do on these devices to determine how fit for purpose are they.   Given the population we're trying to measure in and given what the goal of the measurement is, does the device do the job? And what's also interesting about this topic is that the FDA has been evolving how they think about these types of devices because there's, in the past, been this very clear distinction between wellness devices and medical devices. But the problem is that a lot of these devices blur that line. And so, I think we're going to see more changes in the way that the FDA is overseeing and potentially regulating things like this as well.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        These consumer-based devices have started early on as the step counters. When did they start to bridge into the medical sphere? When did that start to peak the interest of clinicians and researchers?   Jessilyn Dunn:             Yeah, sure. What's interesting is if we think back to accelerometers, these have been used prior to the existence of mobile phones. These really are mechanical sensors that could be used to count steps. And when we think about the smartwatch in the form that we most commonly think of today, probably looking back to about 2014 is when ... maybe between 2012, 2014 is when we saw these devices really hitting the market more ... Timing for when the devices that we know as our typical consumer smartwatch today was around 2012 to 2014.   And those were things that were counting steps and then the next generation of that added in the PPG or photoplethysmography sensor. That's that green light when we look on the back of our watch that measures heart rate. And so, thinking back to the early days, probably Jawbone, there was a watch called Basis, the Intel Basis watch. Well, it was Basis and then got acquired by Intel. Fitbit was also an early joining the market, but that was really the timing.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        How good are these devices at actually changing behavior? We know we're really good at tracking our steps now and maybe monitoring our heartbeat or our oxygen levels. How good are they at changing behavior though? Do we know yet?   Andy Hughes:             Yeah, that's a great question and certainly a significant area of ongoing research right now with physical activity interventions. Things that we've seen right now is that simple interventions that use the wearable devices alone may not be as effective as multifaceted interventions. And what I mean by that is interventions that use the smartwatch but may be coupled with another component, whether that is health education or counseling or more complex interventions that use gamification or just in time adaptive interventions.   And gamification really takes things to another level because that integrates components, competition or support or collaboration and really helps to build upon features of behaviors that we know have an increased likelihood of sustaining activity. With that being said, that is one of the challenges of physical activity interventions, is the sustainability of their improvements over the course of months to years.   And something that we have seen is the effects do typically decrease over time, but there is work on how do we integrate all of these features to develop interventions that can help to sustain the results more effectively. So we have seen some improvement, but finding ways to sustain the effects of physical activity is certainly an area of ongoing research.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        I know it's funny that even as adults we love getting those gold stars or the circle completions. All of these devices, whether it's smartwatches like we're just talking about, or the other things for cardiac rehabilitation, they're generating a ton of data. What is happening with all this data? Who's actually analyzing it? How is it stored and what's that flow through from getting from the patient's body to the room where their physician is looking at it?   Andy Hughes:             And that is certainly a challenge right now that is limiting the widespread adoption of these devices into routine clinical care is, as Jessilyn mentioned. The wearables generate a vast amount of data, and right now, we need to identify and develop a way as clinicians to sort through all of the noise in order to be able to identify the information that is clinically meaningful and worthy of action without significantly increasing the workload.   And a few of the barriers that will be necessary in order to reach that point is, one, finding ways to integrate the wearables' data into the electronic health record and also developing some machine learning algorithms or ways with which we can use the computational power of those technologies to be able to identify when there is meaningful data within all of the vast data that comes from wearables. So it's somewhere that certainly we need to get to for these devices to reach their full clinical potential, but we are limited right now by a few of those challenges.   Jessilyn Dunn:             I was just going to say, I will add on to what Andy was saying about this idea behind digital biomarkers because this fits really nicely with this idea that giving people this huge data deluge is not helpful, but if we had a single metric where we can say, "Here's the digital biomarker of step count, and if you're above some threshold, you're good to go. And if you're below some threshold, some intervention is needed." That's a lot of the work that we've been doing, is trying to develop what are these digital biomarkers and how can they be ingested in a really digestible way?   Cindy St. Hilaire:        Yeah, that's great. Regarding the clinical and the research grade devices, I know a Fitbit or Apple Watch can sometimes be used for those, but I guess I'm talking also about the other kind of more clinically oriented devices, how good is compliance and how trustable is that data? Everybody's on probably their best behavior when they're in the office with the physician or if they're on the treadmill in the cardiac lab, but home is a different story. And what don't we know about compliance when people are out of the office and the reliability of that data that's generated in that space?   Andy Hughes:             I think you touched on a really important point right here, and one of the potential advantages of these wearable devices is that they provide continuous long-term monitoring over the course of weeks to months to years as opposed to those erratic measurements that we get from the traditional office visits or hospitalizations where, for example, the measurements we're taking are either in a supervised environment with a six-minute walk distance, for example, or self-reported or questionnaires.   So we build upon that information, but then additionally, we go beyond the observer effect where many individuals, the first week or two that you're wearing this new device, you may be more prone to increase your activity because you know that you're being monitored or you have this novel technology, but as you wear it for months to years, you outgrow those potential biases and you really can garner more comprehensive information.   In terms of compliance, we can speak to some of the research studies that have either really struggled with compliance and that limits the interpretability of their results and something we'll need to address in the future, but I think that's something that can be addressed with future studies keeping in mind all of the advantages that these devices offer compared to some of the traditional measures that we have used in the past.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        With all this data we're collecting, whether it be biological data or even just behavioral data, have we actually learned anything new? And I mean that in terms of All Of Us study this, I don't know, it was like 5,000 patients I think, and lo and behold, it found out that higher step count correlated with lower risk for a ton of diseases, which is not exactly groundbreaking. So are we, at this point in time, learning anything new from the use of these at-home devices, or are they really just able to help us enforce what we thought we knew regarding behavior?   Andy Hughes:             I think these devices have certainly provided some novel insights that build upon our understanding of physical activity. Many of us can hypothesize that decreased activity would have poor outcomes on health, which the studies have demonstrated in many facets. But in reference to All Of Us study that you mentioned, I think it's interesting to look as well at some of the diagnoses or conditions that were associated with decreased activity.   For example, reflux disease was also highlighted in that study, which may not have been identified if we didn't have the vast data and ability to really look for associations with diseases that have not been previously studied or thought to be related to physical activity. So I think that's one of the strong features of that database, is the wealth of knowledge that really will be hypothesis generating and help to inform future studies as we look even beyond cardiovascular conditions.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        One question, and you did bring it up in a bit of the discussion in your piece, is the bias that is in these devices. We know from COVID at-home pulse oximeters do not work as efficiently on darker skin. We actually know that going into bathrooms with the hand sensors that spit out the paper towels. So what kind of disparities or biases do these devices create or reinforce in the population?   Jessilyn Dunn:             This is such a critical topic because a lot of these issues had been discovered retrospectively because the people who were developing the technologies were not the representative of the people who were using the technologies. I think that's something that across the board we've been looking at from device development to AI implementation, which is having people who are going to be using the devices in the process of developing the technology and having voices heard from across the board.   We did a detailed look when we were evaluating devices for their accuracy at this exact question of where the heart rate sensors in smartwatches use optical based technology. And there was some evidence that was also an issue for people with varying skin tones, for people with wrist tattoos or more hair or freckles. And so, we did a deep dive and the generation of devices that we looked at which would meet this study was probably about three years ago.   We didn't see any discrepancies. And so, that's just one study and there are many more to be done, but I think prior to the technology development as well as once the technology comes out, keeping an eye on how that technology is doing, whether there are continued reports of failure of the technologies is really important. And there are a lot of ways that we can be vigilant about that.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        Yeah, that's great. And so, Andy, regarding patient populations, I can also see perhaps socioeconomic implications of this because smartwatches are not cheap. So how do we see that in terms of helping our patients? Are we going to be able to get a smartwatch through our insurance company?   Andy Hughes:             I think that's one of the really important next steps, is finding ways to make sure that as we advance the field of wearable devices in clinical care, that we recognize some of the existing inequities in terms of access to care, access to digital technologies that currently exist, and find ways by partnering with health insurance companies and the industry and providers and members of that community, finding ways to not only advance wearables, but use it in a way that we can decrease health disparities by really helping to increase access for these digital technologies to the underserved communities.   Jessilyn Dunn:             Yeah, the beauty of these technologies is that truthfully, at their core, they're very cheap. They're not difficult to develop, they're not difficult to build and disseminate. So a lot of what we think about is the infrastructure that goes around these devices. Does it require a smartphone to transfer data? Does it require internet access? What are the other pieces that need to be in place for these devices to work within an ecosystem? So this starts to get to questions beyond the devices themselves, but there's certainly a lot to think about and be done in the area of equity and ensuring that these devices can help everyone.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        And there's also the, I guess, ethical considerations of who owns this data. Obviously, if it's a consumable that you went and bought at Target, that's probably different than the one you're getting from your cardiologist. But who owns the data? Who has access to it? And are there any cases in the literature where an individual who's had certain measurements taken, have those measurements come back to bite them?   And I guess I'm thinking of something like cardiac rehab. If a patient doesn't get up and move enough or doesn't follow their physical therapy enough or lose weight quick enough, could their insurance coverage get cut? Could their premiums go up? What safeguards are in place for these very tricky situations? Are there safeguards in place?   Andy Hughes:             And on the clinical side, I think it will be important to treat this information just like any other protected health information that we have as part of the electronic health record. And so, there will be inherently safeguards around that in a similar manner for how we treat other protected health information.   But I think another important component of that will be a very clear consent policy when we reach the point that patients are consenting to include this information and their electronic health record, in terms of what the proposed benefits are and the potential risks associated with it, because it really is a vast amount of unique data that needs to be protected and safeguarded. And part of that comes by treating it as protected health information, but we will also need to make sure that there's a very clear consent policy that goes with it.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        Yeah. What do we see as the next steps in wearable devices? What do you guys see as the next big thing? I know one's coming from the actual AI and device side of things, and the other one is coming from the clinical side of things. What do each of you see as the next thing in this field?   Jessilyn Dunn:             I think on the device and AI side of things, I think we're thinking toward improving battery life, increasing the suite of sensors that are being added to these devices so we have a wider variety of measurements that are more representative of physiology, and then better algorithms to have better detection of sleep or activity or certain types of activity or certain types of arrhythmias. This combination of hardware and software and algorithms, I think coming together as all of these different pieces evolve will show us some really cool technology in the years to come.   Andy Hughes:             And I think from a clinical side, it's really twofold moving forward. I think as Jessilyn mentioned, there's a lot of novel sensor technologies that have a lot of exciting and evolving potential that we can hopefully integrate into the clinical space, but on the other hand, it's how can we use these wearable devices to enhance traditional therapies that we're already using?   For example, if we take the heart failure population, is there a way that we can use the wearable devices and the existing measurements with heart rate and physical activity and blood pressure to find a way to improve remote management and safely up-titrate guideline directed medical therapy, which are medications that we know have clinical benefit. But can we augment their clinical benefit and their utility by using some of the existing technologies that we already have?   And then lastly, building upon the initial studies with larger trials in more diverse generalizable populations to really enhance our understanding of the benefits that these devices may have for different cardiovascular conditions.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        Well, this was wonderful. Dr Andrew Hughes and Dr Jessilyn Dunn, thank you so much for joining me. The review, Wearable Devices in Cardiovascular Medicine, will be out in our March 3rd issue of Circulation Research. I forget which one, so I'll have to edit that out. Thank you so much for joining us, and I learned a ton. This was great.   Jessilyn Dunn:             Thank you.   Andy Hughes:             Thank you.   Cindy St. Hilaire:        That's it for our highlights from the March 3rd and March 17th issues of Circulation Research. Thank you for listening. Please check out the Circulation Research Facebook page and follow us on Twitter and Instagram with the handle @CircRes and #DiscoverCircRes. Thank you to our guests, Dr Andrew Hughes and Dr Jessilyn Dunn.   This podcast is produced by Ishara Ratnayaka, edited by Melissa Stoner, and supported by the editorial team of Circulation Research. Some of the copy texts for the highlighted articles is provided by Ruth Williams. I'm your host, Dr Cindy St. Hilaire, and this is Discover CircRes, you're on-the-go Source for the most exciting discoveries in basic cardiovascular research.   This program is copyright of the American Heart Association, 2023. The opinions expressed by speakers in this podcast are their own, and not necessarily those of the editors or of the American Heart Association. For more information, visit ahajournals.org.  

In this episode of Work in Progress, Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society, joins me from CES 2023 – the Consumer Electronics Show – earlier this month to discuss how technology is changing the skills needed in one of the most in-demand industries: health care. From nurses accessing digital medical records to checkups via Zoom to interpreting flows and streams of data, nearly everyone who's recently received health care has been touched by digital health care, even if that technology is out of view. CEO Jennifer Goldsack tells me that the nonprofit Digital Medicine Society, or DiMe, is on a mission to advance ethical, equitable, and safe use of this digital technology to redefine health care and improve lives. She explains the digitization of health care is transforming the way the industry cares for patients and the way the medical profession literally works. In other words, all health care work is digital. "When was the last time you saw a job opening for a digital marketing consultant? It just doesn't exist anymore. When was the last time we talked about digital in business? It doesn't exist. Digital is the tool, the resources, the platforms that now power different industries. All digital medicine is, is high-quality, trustworthy digital tools that we deploy in the service of better caring for people," Goldsack tells me. Doctors, nurses, medical technicians – all rely on technology to treat patients. But Goldsack says it's important to note that innovations in the field have broadened the opportunities in the industry. The demand for tech-savvy workers is bottomless. "I feel really strongly that digital health is the most interdisciplinary field there is. From citizen scientists and cybersecurity experts to physicists and engineers who are making these chips to data scientists, product experts, clinical scientists, clinical care providers, health care executives, payers, regulators, funders, investors – they all have a part to play in shaping this industry and reimagining what it means to care for people in the digital era," she says. "Every single one of us working in the field has to take seriously our responsibility to build tools that actually help, that address high areas of unmet need for different populations." Software developers and engineers are helping build these news tools and Goldsack says attracting this tech talent to health care is a key initiative. "There is an increased demand for those individuals across all industries. What is going to cause the really talented software engineer who builds high caliber algorithms to come into an industry where they can care for people as opposed to go and sell clicks somewhere else for a different paycheck? "It's interesting because we see those big tech companies with that in-house talent coming into the health care environment. I think if we can continue to hold as our North Star our shared responsibility to care for people, all people, it's only going to be a good thing." There are shortages of health care workers with the right skills all across the industry and the country. Listen to the podcast to discover the three-pronged approach Digital Medicine Society is employing to help employers develop the pipeline of talent they need to help meet their goals – both for patient care and for their businesses. Episode 258: Jennifer Goldsack, CEO, Digital Medicine SocietyHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlExecutive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa PanzerTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0Download the transcript for this podcast here.You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

In this episode of Work in Progress, Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society, joins me from CES 2023 earlier this month to discuss how technology is changing the skills needed in one of the most in-demand industries: health care. From nurses accessing digital medical records to checkups via Zoom to interpreting flows and streams of data, nearly everyone who's recently received health care has been touched by digital health care, even if that technology is out of view. CEO Jennifer Goldsack tells me that the nonprofit Digital Medicine Society, or DiMe, is on a mission to advance ethical, equitable, and safe use of this digital technology to redefine health care and improve lives. She explains the digitization of health care is transforming the way the industry cares for patients and the way the medical profession literally works. In other words, all health care work is digital. "When was the last time you saw a job opening for a digital marketing consultant? It just doesn't exist anymore. When was the last time we talked about digital in business? It doesn't exist. Digital is the tool, the resources, the platforms that now power different industries. All digital medicine is, is high-quality, trustworthy digital tools that we deploy in the service of better caring for people," Goldsack tells me. Doctors, nurses, medical technicians – all rely on technology to treat patients. But Goldsack says it's important to note that innovations in the field have broadened the opportunities in the industry. The demand for tech-savvy workers is bottomless. "I feel really strongly that digital health is the most interdisciplinary field there is. From citizen scientists and cybersecurity experts to physicists and engineers who are making these chips to data scientists, product experts, clinical scientists, clinical care providers, health care executives, payers, regulators, funders, investors – they all have a part to play in shaping this industry and reimagining what it means to care for people in the digital era," she says. "Every single one of us working in the field has to take seriously our responsibility to build tools that actually help, that address high areas of unmet need for different populations." Software developers and engineers are helping build these news tools and Goldsack says attracting this tech talent to health care is a key initiative. "There is an increased demand for those individuals across all industries. What is going to cause the really talented software engineer who builds high caliber algorithms to come into an industry where they can care for people as opposed to go and sell clicks somewhere else for a different paycheck? "It's interesting because we see those big tech companies with that in-house talent coming into the health care environment. I think if we can continue to hold as our North Star our shared responsibility to care for people, all people, it's only going to be a good thing." There are shortages of health care workers with the right skills all across the industry and the country. Listen to the podcast to discover the three-pronged approach Digital Medicine Society is employing to help employers develop the pipeline of talent they need to help meet their goals – both for patient care and for their businesses. Episode 258: Jennifer Goldsack, CEO, Digital Medicine SocietyHost & Executive Producer: Ramona Schindelheim, Editor-in-Chief, WorkingNationProducer: Larry BuhlExecutive Producers: Joan Lynch and Melissa PanzerTheme Music: Composed by Lee Rosevere and licensed under CC by 4.0Download the transcript for this podcast here.You can check out all the other podcasts at this link: Work in Progress podcasts

The Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) is a global nonprofit specializing in the advancement of ethical, effective, equitable, and safe use of digital technology for redefining healthcare and optimizing lives. Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of DiMe, spoke with Intel's Head of Global Health Solutions Alex Flores on the advancements in remote patient monitoring and the role technology plays in this.Remote patient monitoring allows parsing out different digital phenotypes within certain disease states to effectively match treatment with the patient. Goldsack says, “In those broad disease states, where there's very little that we can do to either ameliorate symptoms of the disease or cure the disease — something like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease. We're hopeful that these new measures can start to advance the field.”Goldsack believes there is a much more practical reason for remote patient monitoring to become an essential focus of care: the evolving role and methods of healthcare today.“We must start thinking about how we can start to monitor people's health outside the clinic walls,” she explains. “How can we think about patients with complex chronic diseases who may have episodic conditions with flare-ups? How can we monitor their well-being and health performance under clinicians' care without bringing them into the hospital every time?”The reality that healthcare presently faces is a shortage of doctors and clinicians to treat the number of patients. Remote patient care is one healthcare solution that helps ensure the patient gets the best care possible, even with reduced resources available. “We can use remote patient monitoring to get early signals… [and] we can intervene and care for them before those outcomes become bad and before they become pricey,” Goldsack says.The technology behind remote patient monitoring must be high quality to make high-quality clinical decisions. Clinical validation of the gathered data is vital in this process. Goldsack says it's also crucial that the technology deployed is an affordable solution, because if it isn't, then it won't be sustainable.In terms of utilizing AI in the remote patient monitoring process, Goldsack says there is unlimited potential. Still, it is important to keep things in perspective and focus on the most critical challenges first. “We should look at the ability to identify particular phenotypes within large population-level data sets,” she notes. “AI might be able to tell us if we deliver the right data that some patients do well, and for whatever reasons, some patients end up having a fall and an injury and come back into the hospital within four weeks. It might be that we have no idea what the differences are between those patients who fall and those who don't.” AI could help make those determinations.Learn more about remote patient monitoring by connecting with Jennifer Goldsack or Alex Flores on LinkedIn or visit: Intel The Digital Medicine Society Subscribe to this channel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts to hear more from the Intel Health and Life Sciences at the Edge.

Digital Innovation in Healthcare is a big bucket we love to talk about! On today's episode of the Outcomes Rocker Podcast, we welcome the outstanding Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of the Digital Medicine Society, and Ryan Vega, Chief Officer of Healthcare Innovation and Learning at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, to discuss the current state of digital innovation in our field. DiMe and the VA just started a partnership in which the main goal is to bring together digital solutions, ideas, and innovation for better healthcare outcomes. They also share a bit of their journey in the industry, the challenges they've gone through, and how developing solutions that create a meaningful experience for patients and clinicians is the way to go. The concept of pushing technology forward must include a more holistic approach to treating patients. Tune in to this incredible episode about healthcare technology and digital innovation. Click this link to the show notes, transcript, and resources: outcomesrocket.health

Introduction by Tom Rhoads, CEO Spencer Health Solutions (00:03): This past January, I had the pleasure to speak at the open innovation and health event at the JP Morgan healthcare conference. The event was sponsored by Mount Sinai Innovation, Ogilvy Consulting and Humble Ventures. Our panel discussed the consumerization of healthcare delivery, which was led by Ritesh Patel, Chief Digital Officer of Health at Ogilvy Consulting. Ritesh is an amazing thought leader in the digital health space and has been kind enough to accept our invitation, to be a guest on our podcast. And frankly provide is timely healthcare insights who could have known then the dramatic changes we've experienced over the last six months in healthcare. Simply remarkable. I hope you enjoy this conversation between Ritesh Patel and our senior digital brand manager, Janet Kennedy on the "People Always, Patients Sometimes" podcast. Janet Kennedy (00:52): Welcome to people, always patient, sometimes a podcast production of Spencer Health Solutions. Healthcare has come to a crossroads and it's time to start listening to new ideas. That challenge are always done it that way, thinking we hope you enjoy our conversations with the disruptors, the innovators and the transformers in clinical trials in healthcare. My name is Janet Kennedy and with me today is Ritesh Patel. He's the chief digital officer for health at Ogilvy Consulting. Welcome to the podcast, Ritesh. Ritesh Patel (01:22): Thank you, Janet. Thanks for having me. I hope you're having a good morning. Janet Kennedy (01:26): Everything is going great here a little bit rainy, but uh, I'm very happy to have that. Ritesh Patel (01:31): Absolutely. Janet Kennedy (01:33): We've had a chance to run into each other. A number of times in social also engaging in the digital medicine society, which I find the Slack channel to be very, very engaging and very full of exciting people wanting to do new things. Ritesh Patel (01:49): Yeah. You know, I was funny when, when I first became a member and got invited to be a member of it, I thought, Hmm, that's an interesting way of engaging with your membership using Slack, but I'll tell you what you're absolutely right. It's a fantastic tool. And a lot of other member or societies should really look at that because the engagement level is fantastic. There's so many ideas being exchanged, people, helping each other announcements being made. I think it's a really smart move by the Dime Society to do that. So I'm very impressed. Janet Kennedy (02:23): I have used Slack for a couple of other organizations and companies that I've been in. And I constantly am surprised when people are like, Oh, just text me. You know, it's a conversation that just gets lost. It's very hard to have a group text with anybody and not drive folks crazy. And you are pushed by text, whereas Slack, you can engage with at your own pace and at your own level. So I don't know why they would prefer that, but I love the way Slack has enabled me for instance, to meet and engage with folks. And in our case to reengage after podcast interview over four years ago. Ritesh Patel (03:02): I know. We use Slack as a collaboration tool for Ogilvy Consulting for many years now. With the youngsters that we have coming in from universities, they're used to that. They're not used to us old fogies using email and mainly email. So it was interesting for me, and eye opening society would use it the way that are using it. It's very well done. Janet Kennedy (03:26): Well, I think the other interesting thing about the Digital Medicine Society is you don't join as your brand or company. You join as a person and everybody in essence is equal because it's only $50 to join. And it's an individual membership and you may or may not be speaking on behalf of your company. If you want to innovate, you can come in there and be part of the conversation. Ritesh Patel (03:47): Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I love it. Open Innovation in Health Pop Up on Sunday 12 Jan 2020 in San Francisco, CA, USA. Janet Kennedy (03:50): Well, let me ask a little bit about Ogilvy Consulting for the folks who don't mind for the folks who don't know. Do you mind giving folks a little elevator pitch on what Ogilvy Consulting is? Ritesh Patel (04:01): Certainly. About seven years ago, we noticed that the big consulting companies like Accenture and Deloitte are getting into the creative agency space and buying up agencies. I think Accenture Interactive is huge now because they've acquired so many interactive digital agencies. And so we, as Ogilvy, with our deep 75-year heritage of advertising decided to get into the consulting world. We wanted to make sure we could claim an area because of the brand Ogilvy to help our clients with. And it's really around brand customer experience and positioning in this new digital world that you're living in. So three years ago, it was all about digital transformation. And what we would do is say, well, that's all good. You're transforming your business, but how does your brand fit into that? How are customers experiencing your brand or your products or your service in that digital world, you may be transforming internally, but there is an impact that it has on the revenue that's being generated. Ritesh Patel (05:02): So that's what we focus on. We have a, quite a large group of folks around the world 400 or so that do that for big brands, as well as healthcare where I sort of read on the digital health practice is what can we do from that perspective, if you're a pharma company or a health system or a payer or a medical device company, we're doing a lot of work in that area that way. Janet Kennedy (05:26): And I understand that the work you do is also very collaborative. It isn't Ogilvy coming in to do strategy and we'll do all these other pieces for you. What you're actually doing is basically "cat herding". Ritesh Patel (05:39): You know, a lot of the times one client we're working with a global pharma company where we're creating a digital business framework, et cetera. We then work with, you know, I think they have you name it. They have McKinsey in there, Cognizant in there, Wipro in there, Accenture in there 80 in there. And then on the agency side, they have 13 different agencies they work with. And we're the Switzerland in the middle of that basically works with the business units to create all these things. And then we educate the agencies and the partners to say, this is how we need to operationalize this. So we're very much focused on what is that you're trying to achieve, how will it get achieved? And then who are the players we can help you get there. And that's not necessarily Ogilvy on the sign. Janet Kennedy (06:25): I'm curious about brand with a pharma company because some people may know a drug name better than they know the pharma company when drugs are being designed. And they're going through the naming process and the logo design process. Do they take a lead from the corporate branding or did they view each of these drugs as independent brands? Ritesh Patel (06:47): Well, I don't know if you know, it's a little secret here in the U S that there's only two companies that have the market for naming drugs, that they split between them 50/50, and it's all around the product. It's never around the parents. It's never around, it's a Pfizer products or Novartis products or a Merck product. It's all around the molecule and the medicine. And there's some taxonomy that's been created as a gentleman's agreement between the two organizations that they adhere to and the scientists adhere to. But, you know, I think Inventive owned one of those companies back when I used to work for Inventive that did that naming and they actually, they were based in Raleigh. Actually, if I'm not mistaken, I have to look them up. Now my brain is as melted around all that, but I think most cases, they look at it from the product, never the parents. Janet Kennedy (07:38): That is absolutely fascinating. And I learned my something new today. So I definitely want to find out more about that. That's awesome. Well, I know one of the things Ogilvy Consulting has been doing is some big thought leadership programs from an in-person program at the JP Morgan pre event, where my CEO, Tom Rhodes, was able to participate to a whole series of webinars that you've been doing. Tell me a little bit about how you go about selecting what you're going to be talking about and what are you getting out of these webinars, Ritesh Patel (08:12): I'll take those industries. So the first one is sort of how do we select we select based on what's happening. There's not a sort of a global annual content calendar we create. It really is around what is the interest in? And do we have enough thought leader capability or partners or people we know we can reach out to, to pull that together. And so recently you've seen an uptake on the webinar simply because we're seeing a huge amount of interest from our clients on the topics that we've covered so far. The first one we did was around the open data walls. You know, CMS announced the open data rules and interoperability rules that people like Epic were fighting for a bit and the President signed them into law not too long ago. So there was a huge amount of interest from a lot of our clients. What does that do for me? And what's the impact on my business? We thought it'd be good to bring some people together who knew about that stuff so they can get into the nitty gritty of it a little bit. So that was then, and similarly, the next one was around virtual trials, huge amounts of interest in virtual decentralized trials because clinical trials have come to a bit of a grinding halt since the pandemic. And so what can we do? I was getting frustrated because I was attending a number of these, whether it was all about the technologies, it really wasn't about how do you do this and what are the pitfalls like, really, if you're going to go do this, it's not just a matter of putting some remote patient monitoring tools in the patient's hands and digitizing the investigator. There's a huge amount of change that has to occur. So we brought some people together who are doing that at the cliff face, like Moe, from Boehringer and Craig from Pfizer, or formally from Pfizer to impart their knowledge about what you need to think about. If you're going to go down this route. And the same thing, patient centricity, we've been hearing the worst patient centricity from our healthcare pharma clients for 10 years. Now, everybody says the words, but what really does it mean? And how are you going to actually make it happen? And with the pandemic, everybody's even amplified the patient centricity verbiage, but nobody's really doing anything about it by things like, including patients in the trial design or including patients and figuring out how you can engage in a trial or how you discover a trial, or what do you do if you want to enroll in one or whatever. The rare disease community has figured it out a little bit, but in general, they haven't. Ritesh Patel (10:41): So we said, you know what? Let's bring some people together around that. So that's how we sort of have been putting them together this year. And then on the, on the popup side, it really is around innovation. We wanted to, one of the biggest issues I have is when I call people to see how, if I can help the word Ogilvy qualitate in their mind an ad agency, we really needed to reposition Ogilvy Consulting in the marketplace, particularly within the healthcare environment, as the consulting organization that can help you think through these hard problems from a digital perspective. So that's how we started doing those innovation popups. And it's really around positioning, Ogilvy Consulting as the guys to come to. If you're really thinking about some of these challenging things, we can certainly help you there. Janet Kennedy (11:25): Well, I definitely think that Coronavirus has accelerated a lot of conversations regarding decentralized trials. And I'm curious to know in hosting all of these webinars and having a chance to listen to all of these thought leaders, do you think digital health and innovation are really going to change clinical trials? Ritesh Patel (11:47): Yes. With a caveat, the caveat is how do you get the IRB on board? Because they are a gatekeeper and increasingly the ones that say no to most of these things. Number one, number two is how are you convincing the sponsors who are led primarily by the CRO to do this as well because the CROs have a view and a difference of opinion on how things need to be done because there's revenue involved there, right? You always have to look at the money, follow the money. Here's why I think it'll change. The pandemic has forced a fundamental change in the way we consume healthcare anyway. In a recent study from cancer, 70% of the doctors that they interviewed, I think it was about three, 400 of them in the U S C 30 to 50% of their practice being completely tele-health after the pandemic is over. Ritesh Patel (12:43): So what has been adopted as a way of working in the interim is becoming normal going forward. And if that's the case, then I'm going to start looking at other ways that I can apply this technology and these ways of working into what I do. And so a lot of these doctors are also primary investigators. So they're going to start asking, well, hell if I can see a patient using telehealth, why can't I see a patient on a clinical trial using the same technologies. And I'm already starting to hear some of those rumblings from a few investigators that we're working with. So I think this force digital for the pandemic is going to change and create new norms that a percentage of the population will expect. And therefore that will drive the innovation within clinical trials. Janet Kennedy (13:32): I think that's an interesting point because you were talking about innovation at the convenience of the investigator. And I think one of the things that the patients have been saying all along, but with Coronavirus, they can finally say, 'no, I'm not leaving my house. You have to figure out how to get to me if you want me to participate'. So I think we've seen a sea change in that patients were requesting asking demanding, but they were just a smaller part of the equation. And now we have clinical trials with no patients because people won't come here. I've got to figure out how to accommodate them. Ritesh Patel (14:10): And the sponsors have to, right. We are talking about billions of dollars at stake here. So if an investigator, if she uses to do it, it's incumbent on the CRO or the sponsor, or whoever's running that trial to figure out a way to either change the investigation or figure out a way to give the investigator the tools and the capabilities to do all of these technologies that we're talking about now have been around for five years. The pandemic has forced the use of them. And I think that's the biggest thing here. That's the mindset change and it's personalize the box suffocation of our lives. You know, there are taboo subjects that never were spoken about. I remember working on Cialis in 2012, I think. And you know, it was the, what they call the doorknob conversation that the man had with the call with the doctor. Oh, by the way, I've got a little problem as they're leaving the office along comes hymns and Romans, and now it's perfectly acceptable to go to a website, talk to a doctor via video, get a prescription. And it arrives in a box every three weeks. So these new norms, and now that we've gone through pandemic and we're used to having Instacart deliver our food to us Uber deliver our takeout to Doordash and GrubHub doing the same thing, Amazon doing the same thing, Hey, this stuff actually works. I press a button and things are over at my door. So why can't I apply it to healthcare? Janet Kennedy (15:37): That makes so much sense. Well, I'm curious where you think if you wanted to make impact and get your innovation into a clinical trial, would you be talking to pharma people or would you be really working the CRO route? Ritesh Patel (15:53): It's an ecosystem, I think. The sponsors have a responsibility to make sure that the trial is successful, obviously because there's revenue at the end of it or bring you a new product to market, right? A lot of us struggling because their business model is not conducive to the new world that we're living in the business model was a army of people managing this thing for you, making sure the CRS were trained, making sure the investigators were set up when the site was done. Even the feasibility study work, right? There's enough data out there today that you can create a dashboard around, say, you're doing a trial for a new diabetes thing. You can take the care set data, which is five years or eight years up to date have Medicare or Medicaid data overlay with IQVIA data and some other data. And you can find the referral patterns between hospitals and the investigators within those areas. Ritesh Patel (16:46): And also the patient population within a two mile radius of that facility. You don't need an army of people going around doing that. Feasibility has to change as well. So there are processes that are embedded in the CRO, particularly the bigger ones, that need to change as well. And then the third area is around the investigators and the IRB. The IRB is particularly the one. Those independent review boards. It depends on the digital acumen of the person reviewing. We all proposal as to whether you're going to get it done or not. So really need to educate those people and engage with them and show them that the EKG that's handheld, that the patient is using that's FDA approved device is as good as the patient going into the office and having a nurse do the EKG. Janet Kennedy (17:36): Now, the other thing too, is the ability to get the information much more frequently. If your patients who are having to come in every week, well, that's a huge burden for the patient. If you were only seeing the patient once a month, that's a long time between datasets. If you're not gathering information digitally. Ritesh Patel (17:52): I believe there are certain trials where you can do this completely remotely today, where you have the ability for a patient to use a device in their home to be able to report data. And it's not the eCOA, forget the eCOA is actual real data, right? So the EKG, for example, the cardio mobile product from AliveCor is a six and a 12 lead as good as any EKG you will find in any academic center. So I think the lower end product is on sale for $89, right in Walmart. So you can get an $89 product as a sponsor, give it to a patient and you can collect the data on a daily basis. You can do it on an hourly basis if you wanted, and then have the patient come in once a month, you can do the same thing with a bunch of other tool sets. Ritesh Patel (18:40): Now, Propeller just got approved for the AstraZeneca. I think it's AstraZeneca is inhaler product, where they are now going to collect the data for every squeeze of that inhaler for the patient. So why can't we apply that to a COPD trial? Right? So I think there are some places where we have to sit through and things that journey through and say, where's the application of data collection or connectivity with the patient. And then instead of saying, I'll get you an Uber because you don't have a car or we'll figure out a way to pay for your journey on public transport. Well, his $89 kit go do it yourself and we'll collect it every morning and every evening as you use it. Janet Kennedy (19:22): Just a really relatively easy solution that pays for itself in minimal amount of time. When you just add up the Uber trips or the however else, things are being funded. Ritesh Patel (19:33): It's not that hard to find the money for something like this. I mean, look, what is the cost of a trial these days? Do you have any idea, roughly? Do you take a product like a COPD product, right? The trials gotta be at least a couple of hundred million dollars by the time you're done. Right? So if you're going to get 10,000 patients times, 200 bucks, not that much money for the trial to be successful, the problem is the collectors of the end point data. It's like researchers in an agency, the researchers in an ad agency, I used to using four tools. If you come across and say, here's a new digital tool that can give you 600 mums at scale on an app that can tell you instantly within 10 minutes, what they think of your product, they're looking at you like you're from Mars. It's not possible. It's not research. It's not statistically viable. Who's going to do the tabulations, how aren't going to know, which is... All of the questions come up of the traditional way of doing things. And we have the same issue with the people who manage the end points of the data collection. A lot of them say, well, you know, the investigator nurse didn't actually check it. How do we know it was not them, really, could they give it to their child in the house? All of those things come up. Janet Kennedy (20:50): Absolutely. Well, I think we're going to have a conversation that's going to happen multiple times over the coming months and years regarding digital health innovation and clinical trials, because it is, I hope as exciting for those folks in pharma, as it is for those of us working with pharma, there are so many opportunities to do a better and more efficient and more cost efficient job in clinical trials. By engaging with digital health. Ritesh Patel (21:20): I'm even more optimistic because I've seen how R&D has embraced AI already for discovery. And I think that step has been taken and the culture within the sponsors to use AI and AI capabilities for drug discovery will bleed over into trials fairly quickly I think. Janet Kennedy (21:40): Awesome. Well, Ritesh, I cannot thank you enough for being a guest on People Always, Patients Sometimes it is always a pleasure to talk to you. And I think this is a conversation we should have on a regular basis because the innovation that's going on in pharma and in healthcare is one that's literally changing every day. Ritesh Patel (22:00): I'm thankful to you and happy to be a part of the conversation anytime you need Janet. It's always a pleasure to speak to you. Janet Kennedy (22:07): Thank you so much. Ritesh Patel (22:08): Thanks. Have a great day. Connect with Ritesh Patel Twitter LinkedIn

Jennifer Goldsack on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jgoldsack/ Digital Medicine Society on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/dime-society/ https://www.dimesociety.org/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Bates is a scientist, inventor, investor, and entrepreneur. He has co-founded several companies including Linus Health and Bode. He is a founding partner of Tamarisc Ventures and serves on the board of several high-growth technology companies. He is on the board of directors of TMCity Foundation and is Strategic Advisor to the Digital Medicine Society. He previously worked at Morningside Ventures where he focused on biotech, healthcare, and cleantech investments. David was also the Chief Strategy Officer for F-Wave, a building technology company and Morningside portfolio company He helped with the acquisition of Fuji Solar in Japan and the company’s expansion from New Zealand into the United States. David has held various positions as a research scientist at Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital/Shriners Burns Hospital, University of Louisville School of Medicine, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has published in several high-impact journals and is a co-inventor on multiple technology and biotechnology patents. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemical and Materials Engineering from the University of Auckland and a B.S. and M.Sc. in Applied Biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Even under COVID-19 quarantine, patients wearing remote sensors keep clinical research moving forward digitally. “Now suddenly, very suddenly, we're faced with an intense patient safety issue where we really are risking patients' lives by having them come into these clinical sites,” explains Paul O’Donohoe, Medidata Solutions. "I suspect we're going to see a significant uptake in the acceptability and use of technology as a way of allowing patients to now provide us that data in the safety of their own homes.” Bill Byrom, Signant Health, moderates this podcast with Paul and Jennifer Goldsack, Digital Medicine Society, and serves on the Steering Committee for the August 2020 virtual Digital Technology in Clinical Trials conference co-sponsored by DIA and the ePRO Consortium of the Critical Path Institute.

Host Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick talks with Jennifer Goldsack, Executive Director of Digital Medicine Society (DiMe). They discuss the importance of creating a society to validate and drive innovation in Digital Medicine. Want to stream our station live? Visit www.HealthcareNOWRadio.com. Find all of our show podcasts on your favorite podcast channel and of course on Apple Podcasts in your iTunes store or here: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/heal…1301407966?mt=2

For all my Digital Health listeners, I wanted to share this interview with Jen Goldsack of the DiMe Society from the "People Always, Patients Sometimes" podcast. This podcast is a production of Spencer Health Solutions (full disclosure: my day-job!). Our podcast focuses on the innovators, thought leaders and patient influencers who are demanding change now in clinical trials The Digital Medicine Society is a group of individuals who are committed to innovating and transforming how digital apps, medical devices, software and processes can positively impact healthcare and clinical trials. Since Jen handles all my questions so well, it didn't make sense to repeat the same interview for Get Social Health. Here is the interview and transcript from my interview with Jen Goldsack about the DiMe Society on the "People Always, Patients Sometimes" podcast. The DiMe Society – Jen Goldsack It’s time to discuss the digitalization and democratization of medicine so we invited Jennifer Goldsack to join us on the “People Always, Patients Sometimes” podcast.  Jennifer is the interim executive director of the DiMe Society, pronounced like the coin, an abbreviation of the Digital Medicine Society.  In our discussion, Jennifer spoke about the “trans-disciplinary nature of digital medicine as a field” and how, without professionals from every field at the table, the healthcare community will make mistakes and under-deliver on possible treatments for the individual.  As a nonprofit, Jennifer explained that “we do welcome all comers” at the DiMe Society – unlike other organizations, the DiMe Society charges individuals only $50 for membership, creating a low barrier of entry and ensuring accessibility to everyone. The DiMe Society was created with the mission to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration between professionals within the global healthcare and technology communities in their research, teaching, and promotion of best practices in medicine.  The DiMe Society believes that everyone has something to contribute to the advancement of medicine, from white-hat hackers, engineers, and clinicians to citizen scientists.  Founded earlier this year, the DiMe Society already has around 700 members from 24 countries after only 5 months of opening their doors. To learn more about how Jennifer and the DiMe Society cultivate collaboration in the field of digital medicine, click on the link and listen to this week’s episode of People Always, Patients Sometimes, hosted by Janet Kennedy.  

It’s time to discuss the digitalization and democratization of medicine so we invited Jennifer Goldsack to join us on the People Always, Patients Sometimes podcast.  Jennifer is the interim executive director of the DiMe Society, pronounced like the coin, an abbreviation of the Digital Medicine Society.  In our discussion, Jennifer spoke about the “trans-disciplinary nature of digital medicine as a field” and how, without professionals from every field at the table, the healthcare community will make mistakes and under-deliver on possible treatments for the individual.  As a nonprofit, Jennifer explained that “we do welcome all comers” at the DiMe Society – unlike other organizations, the DiMe Society charges individuals only $50 for membership, creating a low barrier of entry and ensuring accessibility to everyone.  The DiMe Society was created with the mission to facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration between professionals within the global healthcare and technology communities in their research, teaching, and promotion of best practices in medicine.  The DiMe Society believes that everyone has something to contribute to the advancement of medicine, from white-hat hackers, engineers, and clinicians to citizen scientists.  Founded earlier this year, the DiMe Society already has around 700 members from 24 countries after only 5 months of opening their doors. To learn more about how Jennifer and the DiMe Society cultivate collaboration in the field of digital medicine, click on the link and listen to this week’s episode of People Always, Patients Sometimes, hosted by Janet Kennedy.

Aaron Gani is the founder and CEO of BehaVR, LLC, which creates digital therapeutics for behavioral health through the unmatched psychological power of Virtual Reality. He is on the cutting edge of creating innovative consumer-centered, technological solutions to some of our major health challenges. Aaron previously served as Chief Technology Officer of Humana, and is a founding member of the Strategic Advisory Board of the Digital Medicine Society, and a founding advisory board member of the International Virtual Reality Healthcare Association. Wait till you year about the unparalleled promise Aaron is seeing in the application of VR to behavioral health.  Visit A Second Opinion's website here: https://asecondopinionpodcast.com/ Engage with us on social media at: Facebook Twitter Instagram

Happy Independence Day, everyone! Today's guest is the Executive Director of a brand new society, The Digital Medicine Society! Jennifer Goldsack, MChem, MA, MBA, OLY Bio: Jen Goldsack is VP of Digital Measurement at monARC Bionetworks and serves as the Interim Executive Director of the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe). Previously, Jen spent several years at the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative (CTTI) where she led development and implementation several projects within CTTI’s Mobile Program and was the operational co-lead on the first randomized clinical trial using FDA’s Sentinel System. Jen spent five years working in research at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, first in Outcomes Research in the Department of Surgery and later in the Department of Medicine. More recently, she helped launch the Value Institute, a pragmatic research and innovation center embedded in a large academic medical center in Delaware. Jen earned her master’s degree in chemistry from the University of Oxford, England, her masters in the history and sociology of medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, and her MBA from the George Washington University. Additionally, she is a certified Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and a Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality. Ms Goldsack is a retired athlete, formerly a Pan American Games Champion, Olympian and World Championship silver medalist. DiMe's bio: Founded in 2019, the Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) is the professional organization for experts from all disciplines comprising the diverse field of digital medicine. Together, we drive scientific progress and broad acceptance of digital medicine to enhance public health. Website: https://www.dimesociety.org/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dime-society/ Blog: https://medium.com/digital-medicine-society-dime/laying-the-foundation-defining-digital-medicine-49ab7b6ab6ef

This week, hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Jennifer Goldsack, Interim Executive Director of the newly-launched Digital Medicine Society, or DiMe, the first organization dedicated to providing guidelines for the emerging reality of digital technology in health care. She talks about the need for creating agreed-upon standards, guidelines and best practices to ensure that digital health technologies live up to their promise of improving health care delivery, research and outcomes without doing any harm. The post Digital Medicine Society Executive Director Jennifer Goldsack on Need for Standards in This New Era in Medicine appeared first on Healthy Communities Online.

The topic: The use of the term 'digital health' is continuing to grow, with new subsets of products and services being grouped within it: digital doctor’s visits, digital clinical trials, digital therapeutics, and digital medicine - these are just some of the terms that have burst onto the scene. In this episode, we’re diving into one of the terms in the digital health lexicon: 'digital medicine.'  We explore what digital medicine is, how it is positioned along with digital therapeutics and digital health, and explore what’s needed to make the field of digital medicine stronger, smarter and faster.      The guest: My guest is Jen Goldsack, the Interim Executive Director of the new Digital Medicine Society that’s just been launched.  Jen has a background in clinical trials, outcomes research and innovation, and she holds masters degrees from the University of Oxford in England, the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from George Washington University.  She is also a retired athlete - she is a Pan American Games Champion, Olympian and World Championship silver medalist.  She’s a dual-national with both British and American citizenship, and currently resides in Florida. Action items: Be sure to subscribe to and rate our podcast, and use the sharing features of your podcast app to send this and your other favorite episodes to your friends and colleagues.  Get the full show notes here. --- Digital Health Today is made possible by the support of our sponsors. Thank you! Bayer G4A - a global program that offers support to startups and companies that are developing innovative solutions in health and care. Cedars-Sinai Accelerator- transforming healthcare quality, efficiency, and care delivery by helping entrepreneurs bring their innovative technology products to market. Dot Health - the domain extension for brands, organizations, and individuals who provide health products, services and information. Medable - enabling therapies to get to people who need them faster by providing technology that enables patients, providers, CROs, and sponsors to work as a clinical trial team. Ostendio -  cloud-based software to set up and manage your cybersecurity and information management programs with one platform. Start-Up Nation Central - connecting business, government, and NGO leaders from around the world with Israeli innovation. --- Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices