The Health Pulse

Season 4: Episode 10 Accelerating Health Equity With Technology and Trust       

Health equity is a hot topic in health care, and Dr. Pooja Mittal speaks about key success components, including the importance of trust, technology and strong relationships with communities.

Bringing health stakeholders and community members together is crucial to building trust and providing culturally relevant care that drives better health outcomes.

From a young age, Mittal realized that health care is not equitable, and challenging environmental conditions cause higher disease rates.

With a mission to reduce health disparities, Mittal became a physician and Chief Health Equity Officer at Health Net.

She believes technology is key to making care more equitable and supporting patients from historically disadvantaged communities, as it enables access to data to better understand needs, access to telehealth, enabling patients to receive care remotely and access to culturally sensitive technology, supporting unique needs.

Season 4: Episode 9 SAS opens up about open source in life sciences      

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but there are many benefits to a balanced diet.

That’s SAS’ philosophy in embracing and extending open source, according to life sciences leaders Mark Lambrecht and Matt Becker on this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast.

To keep up with the staggering pace of change, life sciences organizations need cutting-edge analytics and the flexibility to use different programming languages.

Tune in for a candid conversation on the pros and cons of open source and commercial software and the importance of the statistical computing environment (SCE) in clinical research.

Season 4: Episode 8 The Impact of Diagnostics on Health Care     

Bryan Vaughn is passionate about bending the cost curve in health care.

As Senior Vice President of Hospitals and Health Systems at Labcorp, he focuses on diagnostics in delivering better, more affordable care.

In this episode, Vaughn notes that impactful partnerships across the health care ecosystem help reduce the cost of critical diagnostics, creating a win for all stakeholders.

When it comes to analytics, he is excited to see Labcorp’s wealth of health data empowering and informing patients and their doctors today – as well as the potential for predictive analytics and AI to improve health outcomes in the future.

Season 4: Episode 7 Real-World Data and the Bigger Picture of Health    

Krishna Tangirala is an expert at uncovering insights about pharmaceutical products in the real world. He is Head of Data Analytics and Director of Field Outcomes Research at Organon Pharmaceuticals.

In the first part of this episode, Tangirala talks to Alex about how stakeholders use health economics and outcomes research throughout the pharmaceutical life cycle to better understand the value, potential and safety of drug products. He also discusses new and emerging applications for real-world data (RWD) in pharma, including external control arms and digital twins and the potential for technology to solve challenges around managing, analyzing and visualizing data insights from RWD.

Next, Sherrine Eid, Global Lead for Real-World Evidence and Epidemiologist at SAS, joins Alex. Eid is passionate about mathematically modeling disease patterns and finding ways to intervene and improve outcomes. For her, it’s all about using the best tools at her disposal to help people live their healthiest, best lives.

Eid discusses the role of RWD and connected devices to enable personalized medicine and shares her perspective on the value of personalized health information as a diabetes patient.

Season 4: Episode 6 Modernizing public health with population health analytics   

Dr. Iulia Vann, Public Health Director in Guildford County, NC, is passionate about public health and data-driven decision making.

On this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast, Vann discusses the importance of prevention, the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic, lessons learned about closing gaps in data and analytics and resiliency.

Vann explains that effective public health strategies include strong relationships with local partners, communication and planning for health equity measures, like putting 40% of vaccines aside for historically marginalized communities.

Data modernization is another crucial element for health organizations to serve their communities better. Requiring agencies to integrate data from different systems and ensuring the data is transparent and reliable is essential in making data-driven decisions as a public health agency.

She explains how Guilford County partnered with SAS to create dashboards and monitor program performance and public health areas of focus, such as chronic diseases, cancer and environmental health, to make the best possible decisions for their community.

Season 4: Episode 5 The promise of AI in pharmaceutical manufacturing  

SAS’s Andy Bayliss works with life sciences manufacturers, applying AI and machine learning to improve their processes at scale.

On this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast, he tells Alex that pharmaceutical manufacturers are experts at reliably delivering high-quality products.

They must be because it’s a highly regulated industry with a patient at the end of every product.
 
The opportunity to utilize technology energizes Bayliss. Technology like sensors and computer vision allows continuous monitoring to spot trends and potential deviations earlier in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

It’s about giving the human expert additional insight to create meaningful action.

Season 4: Episode 4 Is ethical AI the future of health care?

Dr. Michel van Genderen, physician, AI leader and founder of the Datahub at Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, shares his passion for ethical AI in hospitals.

Could AI be a game-changer for the health care industry?

Genderen thinks so and explains the two biggest global health care challenges – the shortage of personnel and an increasing health care demand.

He believes trustworthy AI could alleviate these pressures and solve clinical challenges faster. For example, Erasmus Medical Center developed an AI model used in the intensive care unit that decreases the administrative workload for nurses.

Using AI in a responsible, ethical and sustainable manner is crucial to its adoption in clinical settings so that health care professionals trust AI when they use it at the bedside.

To develop and deploy AI models in clinical settings, a group of multidisciplinary teams comes together, including data scientists, data engineers, physicians, nurses, patients and more, which is the remit of the Datahub at Erasmus Medical Center.

Adhering to ethical guidelines is crucial when teams develop models, monitor their performance and adopt them in clinical or operational settings. Genderen is optimistic that all industries will be able to benefit from AI if decisions made with analytics and AI are ethical, trustworthy, explainable and fair.

Season 4: Episode 3 Balancing data, analysis and speed in business decision making

Steven Lehmann is passionate about the impact of data science in business.

He is Head of Data Science and Analytics Strategy for Johnson & Johnson in EMEA.

He also wrote the book Digital Jackpot on what it really takes to make data-driven decisions that matter. Hint, the answer often isn’t more data.

In this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast, Lehmann talks with Alex about the importance of telling the right story with data so people will listen.

He introduces the concept of data elasticity in finding the balance between enough data and the speed you need to make business decisions to solve real-world problems.

Data elasticity lets data scientists and business leaders make strong recommendations with imperfect data, knowing their recommendations would still be within a reasonable margin of error.

He reminds us that these are excellent tools when it comes to the explosion of data, AI and advanced analytics.

Still, the individuals and organizations who can make the best use of them to drive impact will ultimately succeed.

Season 4: Episode 2 Bird flu: The next pandemic?

Dr. Meg Schaeffer, an Epidemiologist and Public Health Advisor at SAS and an elite athlete and champion for health equity, is a perfect example of what passion for public health looks like.

In this episode, Schaeffer considers the evolution of bird flu and explains that North America, Europe, Asia and some African countries are in the midst of the largest bird flu outbreak, with millions of birds culled.

Monitoring outbreaks is crucial to predict the future of health care and to prevent a human pandemic.

She also talks about health equity and the importance of combining quantitative with qualitative data to understand population needs and challenges. This helps design effective programs that reduce inequities. There is currently a lack of qualitative data, leading to resource misalignments, Schaeffer explains.

Combining interviews, focus groups and text data with advanced analytics could be the key to currently overlooked insights. Despite challenges the health care industry is facing, being an elite, world-ranked triathlete has taught Schaeffer there is always a way – that temporary discomfort leads to success.

She is optimistic about the future of health care with the dedication of the public health workforce and cutting-edge software, supporting decision making processes.

Season 4: Episode 1 The right tools for the right questions to fight cancer

As Vice President and Head of Oncology Statistics and Data Management at Bayer, Dr. Richardus Vonk wants to see cancer become a manageable disease in his lifetime.

With as many as one in two people getting cancer at some point, the goal to better treat and eventually prevent and cure cancer is incredibly impactful.

On this episode of the Health Pulse Podcast, Vonk sits down with host Alex Maiersperger to discuss data, analytics, AI and automation in advancing cancer research and drug development.

Vonk explains that AI plays an essential role in early cancer detection but has yet to find widespread adoption in drug development.

Automation is critical because it frees time at the end of clinical trials to explore the science and uncover valuable insights to inform care. Regarding analytics software, he thinks the future is a mix of commercial and open source.

What’s more important, according to Vonk, is expanding access and data sharing while protecting patient privacy and using the right tools to answer the right questions.

Season 3: Episode 12 From radical to routine: The use of Bayesian statistics in clinical trials

More than a decade ago, Bruno Boulanger made a big bet on applying Bayesian statistics in clinical trials. At the time, very few in the industry thought the method, which applies probabilities to statistical problems, had a place in clinical development.

Boulanger saw an opportunity, founding a company that quickly grew and was acquired by CRO PharmaLex in 2018, where he now serves as global head of statistics and data science.

In this episode, Boulanger explains how Bayesian statistics uses probability and prediction to solve challenges in the increasingly complex world of clinical research and clinical trial design. Bayesian statistics allows researchers to expand decision making for clinical trials beyond its participants, which is imperative for trials targeting rare diseases.

Looking forward, Boulanger is optimistic about the expansion of therapeutic innovation combined with digitalization and data science to meet the unmet needs of patients.

Season 3: Episode 11 Is Value-Based Care Failing?

What is needed to make value-based care work? Bryony Winn shares her views on key enablers, implementation challenges and how they can be overcome.

Winn is President of Health Solutions at Elevance Health. Being born and raised in Zimbabwe, educated in the UK, having worked in Europe as a consultant and moved to the United Stated, Winn has a truly international career path and a wealth of knowledge of different health care systems.

On this episode, host Alex Maiersperger and Winn talk about the role technology plays in integrating care systems. Winn explains a big challenge is that patients are often treated for conditions in isolation, without taking a whole-person approach.

Data integration and deep partnerships across different health and social care providers are crucial requirements to gain full transparency and insights into a person’s whole health, enabling key stakeholders to make value-based care work and tailor care more effectively.

At the same time, Winn addresses some of the criticisms of value-based care models, as many don’t believe the concept is working. Winn explains that the industry had a narrow view at the beginning, believing the shift to value-based care is only a change of payment models, but she emphasizes data integration and infrastructure around payment models are also needed. Despite some of the challenges and criticism, Winn remains optimistic about value-based care models and their role in driving affordability, quality of care and high experience scores.

Season 3: Episode 10 Are Genomics the Key to Placebo-Free Clinical Trials?

Are placebo-free clinical trials the next normal? Nino da Silva thinks so. In this episode, he shares his views on trends in drug development and clinical research, including the integration of genetic data into drug development with synthetic control arms and the importance of data protection.

Da Silva is an international leader in medical informatics, health care and business strategy. He is currently Deputy Managing Director at BC Platforms, a global data science solutions leader in personalized health, drug discovery and life sciences research.

Guest host Antonio De Castro talks with da Silva about advancements in drug discovery and development by combining genetic data with phenotypic data. For example, synthetic control arms incorporate external health data into clinical trials to speed up drug development, reduce trial costs and address ethical concerns. Improved access to data from many research fields and the real world make the adoption of synthetic control arms possible.

Da Silva explains the importance of trusted research environments (TRE) and trusted collaboration environments (TCE) in enabling highly dynamic research with analytics, while protecting citizens’ data privacy. Also critical to this work is the ability to harmonize and make comparable data from multiple sources and geographies. Da Silva, who is based in Singapore, leaves us with his thoughts on the importance of diversity and representation in clinical trials and the role of the Asia Pacific region as a growing R&D hub for life sciences.

Season 3: Episode 9 Using Genetic Information to Improve Patient and Population Health

Levana Sani is co-founder and CEO of NalaGenetics, a company bringing individual genetic information to patients and health care settings in Southeast Asia.

On this episode, Sani talks with SAS’ Antonio De Castro about the importance of ethnic diversity in genetic research.

She explains that polygenetic risk scores, which calculate a single score for many variants in the human genome, are greatly improved when genetic samples from multiple ethnic groups are included.

Sani and De Castro also discuss a range of considerations around making individual genetic information available to patients, providers and payers, including health data privacy, delivering practical recommendations to patients based on their genetics, and delivering the right information at the right time to improve health outcomes for individuals and the population.

Season 3: Episode 8 Is the great pandemic yet to come?

Could the bird flu cause the next pandemic? Dr. Robert Redfield thinks so, and shares his views on the public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lessons to prepare for new infectious diseases. Redfield is a virologist and former Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Public Health Advisor to the Governor of Maryland and Senior Medical Advisor at PERSOWN.

Redfield joins host Alex Maiersperger to speak about public health measures against the COVID-19 pandemic and shares insights into what has worked, what hasn’t, and what takeaways decision makers could apply in the future. The main challenge in the United States, he explains, is that the public health infrastructure is extremely underfunded, leading to a lack of resources, including the workforce, equipment and funding for a modern data infrastructure.

Building public health resilience – an approach that ensures public health systems have enough equipment and trained staff to respond to a pandemic – while maintaining the quality of routine health services is a major need Redfield speaks about. He suggests that redundant resources can be diverted to diagnostics for chronic diseases when there is no pandemic. Redfield believes the great pandemic is yet to come, which will likely be a bird flu pandemic with significant mortality rates. Having the mRNA technology in place to produce effective vaccines is key a scientific advancement Redfield speaks about. He also highlights manufacturing and scalability issues that can slow down a fast response.

Despite some of the challenges public health agencies are facing, Redfield remains optimistic about the future, as he shares his confidence in science and the power of modern medicine.

Season 3: Episode 7 The future of clinical trial recruitment is digital, and patients are the biggest winners.

Tobias Kruse never dreamed of being an entrepreneur. He recognized a problem he knew he could solve and founded the clinical trial recruitment company Trials24, where he is now CEO.

On this episode, Kruse shares his company’s inception story with Alex. As a young scientist working on a clinical trial, Kruse realized that dated, print-based patient recruitment tactics weren’t working. He had learned a thing or two about online marketing from one of his side hustles and decided to take a leap. He launched Trials24 to digitalize patient recruitment and to speed up drug development timelines. The company’s digital-first approach helps address the lack of diversity in clinical research by targeting awareness campaigns to underserved communities and recruiting more diverse populations for clinical trials.

Kruse knows digitalization is the future of patient recruitment, bringing better patient experiences and more representative clinical trials.

Season 3: Episode 6 Saving Lives With Better, Faster, Affordable Diagnostics

Eric Doherty is President of PERSOWN, the company striving to make a lifesaving impact by delivering accurate, rapid and affordable diagnostics to the point of care anywhere in the world.
 
In this episode of The Health Pulse, Doherty joins host Alex Maiersperger to discuss disparities in global health care and how access to high-quality, low-cost diagnostics can help close the gap. Doherty shares the shocking statistic that there are 0.23 doctors per 10,000 people in the world’s poorest countries. What’s more, diagnostic errors account for the deaths of 7 million children per year worldwide.

PERSOWN addresses devastating global health care access disparities with high-quality, affordable diagnostics with results in under two minutes. The company is working on assays for various applications, including COVID-19, tuberculosis, sepsis, breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and concussions. Doherty shares an inspiring vision of the role of technology in health care innovation and the importance of personal ownership of health care data.

Season 3: Episode 5 The Role of Patient-Centricity in Improving Health Worldwide

SAS’ Antonio De Castro is a truly global citizen. Having lived in Southeast Asia and Europe, now working for a US company, he joined Alex from a studio in Singapore to talk global and local trends in the wake of COVID-19 and his passion for data and analytics in health care. Later in this season of the Health Pulse podcast, he’ll be jumping into the conversation as guest host for Asia Pacific.

De Castro loves mathematics and problem solving and has a background in nutritional research. These passions shape his perspective on consumerism in health care and life sciences, where patient-centricity is contributing to significant advances, including decentralized clinical trials and more informed and engaged patient populations.

De Castro is infectiously optimistic that today’s global health care challenges will drive innovation that leads to a healthier tomorrow.

Season 3: Episode 4 The End of Global Supply Chains?

What has disruption taught us about global supply chains? Robert Handfield shares his vision on what agile and resilient supply chain models look like in the future.

Handfield is the Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management at NC State University and Founder/Executive Director of The Supply Chain Resource Cooperative. On this episode, he joins host Alex Maiersperger to talk about the impact of the pandemic on global supply chains and provide insight into what has worked, what hasn’t and what lessons we can apply in the future.

Handfield addresses the dependency on global supply chains for urgent medical supplies during the COVID-19 pandemic and inadequate national stock due to a “just-in-time” inventory management system. Strategic national stockpiles have become a major governmental and industry focus, as well as increasing domestic sourcing of certain medical and pharmaceutical products.

Handfield speaks about a shift toward nearshoring, where a company transfers work to suppliers nearby in the region where possible, despite remaining dependent on certain products from global supply chains. Finally, he emphasizes that the right technology, training and workforce will be key to resilient and agile supply chain systems in the future.

Season 3: Episode 3 Why Forecast Agility Is King in the New World of Supply Chain Disruption

For Felipe Sotelo, it’s all about priorities. That’s why Dad & Husband are the titles on his LinkedIn profile. It’s also why he now believes demand forecast agility is more important than accuracy in the post-pandemic world of supply chain disruptions.

On this episode of The Health Pulse, positive thinker, business reinvention leader and writer Sotelo joins host Alex Maiersperger to share his insights as a supply chain leader for organizations including Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceuticals and PepsiCo.

Forecast accuracy can never be perfect, and in a scenario full of disruptions, Sotelo argues it’s more important to focus on agility and speed so organizations can respond to disruptions more effectively. In his opinion, prioritization plays a big role, and successful organizations have both a strong leadership strategy and investment in technology and analytics to create insights that keep the strategy on track.

Sotelo predicts we won’t see a light at the end of the tunnel for pandemic-related disruption before 2024. But that doesn’t keep him from being optimistic about the role of supply chain leaders in shaping a better, more sustainable future.

Season 3: Episode 2 Meet your digital health twin of the future

Is it too much to expect health care to deliver delightful experiences? Dr. Koen Kas doesn’t think so, and his vision includes digital twins, personal data stores and preventive medicine. He is a health care visionary, digital health and biomarker expert, health-tech entrepreneur, Professor of Molecular Oncology and Digital Health at the University of Ghent, international keynote speaker and author of Sick No More and Your Guide to Delight.

Host Alex Maiersperger and Kas talk about the concept of delight thinking, an approach that requires stakeholders to think outside the box – creating new health care delivery models, never imagined. Delight thinking has the patient at its core, rewarding health care systems for keeping patients healthy. Kas also speaks about the role of a digital twin for the future of health care. The twin is a full representation of the holistic health of a human, combining all health data from different sources into an avatar. Testing preventive or clinical measures on the avatar will enable a visualization of health outcomes, before implementing them on the human. Finally, he emphasizes the key to prevention and personalized medicine is data integration and encourages health care systems to reward providers and citizens for preventing, predicting and reversing diseases.

Season 3: Episode 1 The (Not So) Secret to Making Cancer Care more Equitable and Effective

Dr. Sean Khozin is on a mission to break down silos and improve access to quality cancer care for all. Khozin is a board-certified oncologist, physician scientist, data scientist and the CEO of ASCO’s CancerLinQ®, a non-profit health technology company focused on improving health outcomes for all patients with cancer. On this episode of The Health Pulse, Khozin joins host Alex Maiersperger to talk about how his organization is democratizing access to the best cancer care by bringing real-world evidence (RWE)-based decision support tools to the point of care. As Khozin explains, only about 5 percent of cancer patients have access to clinical trials. This means oncology clinical trial data often lacks external validity because it represents highly selective patient populations. CancerLinQ® is helping to close the gap using real-world data (RWD) to develop algorithmic support tools to inform personalized, multi-modal patient care in near real time. From deriving insights from complex data to tackling treatment artifacts that we need to unlearn, Khozin shares his vision for improving precision and why data convergence at the point of care leaves him optimistic about a major inflection point for cancer treatment in the next 10 years