Health Innovation Matters

Logan chats with Dennis Truong, Telemedicine/Mobility director and an assistant physician-in-chief for Kaiser Permanente's Mid-Atlantic Region, about innovation in telemedicine and health care delivery. Truong, a trained ER physician, talks about how Kaiser's Mid-Atlantic telemedicine program started without a budget and was built from the ground-up in 2012. As an integrated, capitated system, Kai...

Logan Plaster chats with Brian Skow, M.D.,  about Avera's digital hub in Sioux Falls, SD, which has 10 different health care services, including ICU, Pharmacy, Hospitalist, Senior Care, School Nurse, Virtual Consult, Avera Now (direct to consumer), Prison, Specialty Clinic, Indian Health Services, Behavioral Health and Emergency on call 24x7 anywhere in the United States. Skow serves as the Avera...

Our new host, Logan Plaster, chats with Timothy Peck, MD, co-founder and CEO of Call9 Inc, about the challenges he faced with his start-up company. (This episode is a cautionary tale of the roller-coast ride that almost all health care start-ups face at one time or another. Peck's company recently shut down and is now figuring out how to rebrand with a different payment model (working with ACOs) i...

Robins chats with Anita Watkins , Director for Strategic Innovations at Rex Health Ventures, the venture arm for the UNC Health Care system, and with Tom White, the CEO & Co-Founder of Phynd, one of Rex's portfolio companies. Rex has invested in more than a dozen companies, many of them in the automation and data management space, says Watkins. Rex works with portfolio companies before they're in...

Robin chats with Jon Pearce, the co-founder and CEO of Zipnosis (from the Greek for "fast notice.") Zipnosis licenses its virtual technology to providers and clinicians. Some day,  Pearce says, telehealth will just be "health care." Zipnosis helps enable clinicians to take advantage of "virtual" services and streamline health care and improve the clinical experience, vastly reducing administrative...

Robin chats with Ardy Arianpour, CEO & Co-Founder of Seqster, a data-driven healthcare SaaS platform that seamlessly integrates into any payer, provider, or clinical research enterprise. Seqster is at the forefront of the movement to integrate baseline genetic data, including DNA, with patient electronic medical records.  Seqster's business model is business to business, through SaaS, where busine...

Robin chats with Kent Dicks, the founder & CEO of Life365, Inc., about the digital health care revolution. Dicks has been in the forefront of the Internet of (Medical) Things, (IoT), and connected care solutions, in integrating the home and telehealth as important components of health care. Now, through mobile phones, advanced technology, and new reimbursement models, the health care revolution is...

Robin chats with Clynt Taylor, CEO of Intervention Insights, about precision medicine in oncology. Taylor discusses what it was like to deal with his father's diagnosis of cancer and the difficulties in finding the latest treatment options for his father's particular subset of cancer. Intervention Insights has a platform includes lab reports and payer data that deals with the clutter of informatio...

Robin chats with Yann Fleureau, CEO and co-founder Cardiologs about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on health care innovation. With their comprehensive database on EKGs and the use of AI, Cardiologs has the capability of significantly improving accuracy and speed of EKG reading and cardiac diagnosis, no matter where a cardiologist may be located. At the end of the day, Fleureau says, hi...

Robin chats with Stephen Shaya, Chief Medical Officer and EVP of Corporate Development at J&B Medical. Shaya describes his riveting immigrant story, which starts with his parents coming from Iraq in 1966. His father worked four jobs while attending the University of Michigan. His father eventually founded J&B Medical Supply in 1966, which has now become a dynamic global leader in health care, whos...

Robin chats with Suzi Johnson, MPH, RN, Vice President of Sharp HospiceCare in San Diego, who won the 2019 Hearst Health Prize at the 19th Annual Population Health Summit in Philadelphia March 19. Sharp's program provides expert palliative care directly in the patient's home—prior to the patient having to go to the hospital for end-of-life care. There are distinct advantages to not going to the ho...

Robin chats with cardiologist Peter Libby, Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of Cardiovascular Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, who has researched the role of inflammation as a cause of disease. According to Libby, inflammation consists of two key arms — innate immune response, which is very rapid, blunt, and primitive, and the...

Robin chats with David Pearce, executive vice president of innovation and research at Sanford Health, about the diagnosis and treatment of rare diseases.  Technology is at the forefront in the treatment of rare disease with the advent of gene therapy, Pearce says. There is tremendous interest from Big Phama in rare diseases, Pearce points out, noting the recent purchase of rare disease technologic...

Robin talks with Naveen Jain, entrepreneur, philanthropist and founder of an impressive list of innovative companies that includes Moon Express, Intelius and Infospace. His newest company, Viome, provides bacteria analysis of the gut to uncover the source of digestive and other health problems. According to Jain, the gut microbiome is the key to overall health. Most chronic diseases people are liv...

Robin talks with Richard K. Burt, MD, chief of the Division of Immunotherapy and Autoimmune Diseases in the Department of Medicine at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, about the results of recently completed clinical trials that treated multiple sclerosis (MS) patients with stem cell transplants as an alternative to drugs. Burt, an internationally recognized pioneer in stem ce...

Robin chats with Dr. David Nash, the Founding Dean and the Raymond C. and Doris N. Grandon Professor of Health Policy at the Jefferson College of Population Health in Philadelphia, about the intersection of population health and precision or personalized medicine. Nash, who helped create the first college of population health, says that population health must involve better outcomes, especially si...

Robin chats with David Harshfield, medical director of the Arkansas Institute of Regenerative Medicine, chairman of the International Cellular Medicine Society IRB and member of the AAOM Board of Directors, about innovative regenerative medicine legislation in Arkansas that could potentially save millions of dollars. Harshfield first stressed the importance of a holistic approach toward medicine,...

Robin chats with Kelly Close, founder and chair of the board of the diaTribe Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the lives of people living with diabetes and prediabetes, and advocating for action and Adam Brown, who serves as senior editor at diaTribe.org and head of diabetes technology & connected care at Close Concerns. There are more than 400 million people globally who have diabete...

On location in Sioux Falls, SD, Robin chats with two Sanford Health officials, Micah Aberson and Dr. David Pearce, and the winner of the inaugural Sanford Lorraine Cross Award.  The $1 million award, which is donor driven, was created to reward those who have recently accomplished health care breakthroughs and to act as a catalyst to inspire the next generation to become "medical mavericks, " acco...

Robin chats with Dr. Steven Gerst, a scholar at the Wharton School of Business, about the digital health revolution. Gerst, who has an extensive background in several areas of health care, is one of the most knowledgeable experts on health care innovation. Gerst cites a 2015 Goldman Sachs report, which categorized the digital health revolution as comprising three major platforms: remote patient mo...

Our host, Dr. Robin Smith, chats with Dr. Ron DePinho, professor of medicine and former president of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and an internationally recognized physician for his basic and translational research in cancer, aging, and age-associated degenerative disorders. DePinho launched the Cancer Moonshot Program, played a critical role in the amazing discover...

Subscribe now. Coming soon.