Faces of Digital Health

There are three “laws” for successful TikTok posts: make people laugh, tell a personal story people can empathize with, or teach people something. Doctors use the platform to talk about their career paths; nurses use TikTok to record dancing routines during the breaks in their shifts. There’s an MRI image explanatory channel, and specialists from a broad spectrum talk about their expertise or give insight into their working environment.  MD candidates from the US Amanda d’Almeida and Dan Villavecer are the faces behind Medicine Explained. Medicine Explained is a channel with over 1.1 million of followers, explaining everyday issues such a “What is a brain freeze? How do menstrual cups work? What is scoliosis? Can women exercise, bathe or swim during their period?” etc. Dan and Amanda started creating content as a way to fight medical misinformation on the internet. Medicine Explained was started to decentralize medical information by making it understandable to everyone, acting as preventative health education to people around the world who may never have access to proper healthcare, but have access to social media.  In less than 6 months, the TikTok channel has amassed over 1.1 million followers and over 100 million views worldwide. The hashtag #MedicineExplained has over 100 Million views on the platform.  Dan and Amanda don’t show their faces but use drawings to get their point across.   Dan Villavecer is a current Doctor of Medicine (MD) candidate in the US, where he is the President of Medical Entrepreneurship. He received his Masters of Science in Cellular and Molecular Biology. Prior to starting his medical education, he worked at Forward (goforward.com) in San Francisco, which was among the first primary care practice providers with a truly patient-centered design, at Forward doctors sit next to the patient in the doctor’s office, not behind the computer screen etc. Forward is an exemplary case of how the doctor-patient relationship can look like in the modern era and was listed as a Top 25 Inventions of 2017 by Time Magazine for reinventing primary care. Amanda d’Almeida is a current dual Doctor of Medicine (MD) and Master of Public Health (MPH) candidate. She was part of Nature published Beat AML program, which created the largest-to-date dataset on primary acute myeloid leukemia (AML) samples offering genomic, clinical, and drug response data. Amanda and Dan currently also work as interns at Lumos - AI-powered search tool for doctors that gives direct answers to clinical questions, using trustworthy sources. In this discussion, you will hear more about their thinking. They offered insight into the current state of medical education, their creative process, content strategy on TikTok and more. More on: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com

This is the fourth and final episode of a short series of discussions with doctors that moved from full-time clinical practice to work in digital health. Guillem Serra is a serial entrepreneur coming from a family of doctors. His mother, father, grandfather, and great grandfather were doctors, which made it easy for Guillem to go study medicine given his familiarity with the profession. Besides medicine, he studied math and during his medical studies, discovered, that for him, medicine was actually boring. Today, he is a Physician and Mathematician with deep knowledge in the eHealth market, MedTech, and startups in the field of medicine. He founded several digital health startups and is an investor and board member to many startups. His first company MediQuo is a "Whatsapp for healthcare" - a platform enabling patients to chat with doctors and specialists 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in a secure way, with all the tools and compliance needed for healthcare.   Summary of the episodes in the series: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f081-084-doctors-and-digital-health Presented in the series: Daniel Kraft: https://danielkraftmd.net/ Exponential Medicine: exponential.singularityu.org/ Digital.Health: https://www.digital.health/ Mediquo:  https://www.mediquo.com/ Dock.Health: https://www.dock.health/ Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org/

This is the third discussion in a short series about doctors who left clinical practice to work as entrepreneurs in digital health. In the previous episodes, Daniel Kraft talked about a new idea for more precise dosing of medications chronic patients with comorbidities have to take daily, he also shared his thoughts about COVID-19 management in the US and innovation efforts to aid the pandemic, Michael Docktor, former full time pediatric gastroenterologist and Clinical Dir. of Innovation Boston Children's Hospital talked about better task management in hospital settings and healthcare suited app called Dock-Health which he co-founded. Today, we are moving from the US to UK. You will hear from Owain Rhys Hughes - NHS surgeon who left clinical practice to build an advice and guidance platform for clinicians. In this discussion, you will hear why are referrals from primary to secondary care suboptimal how can they be improved with one solution that can impact GPs efficacy in referring patients to specialists, it, optimizes care specialists give to patients once they see them, it can drive down costs and most importantly, offer patients an incredibly improved experience with the healthcare system.    Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org/  Summary of the series: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f081-084-doctors-and-digital-health   Other speakers/prrojects presented in this series:  Daniel Kraft: https://danielkraftmd.net/  Exponential Medicine: exponential.singularityu.org/  Digital.Health: https://www.digital.health/  Mediquo:  https://www.mediquo.com/  Dock.Health: https://www.dock.health/

This is a second episode from the short series about why doctors leave clinical practice to work in digital health. GI pediatric specialist Michael Docktor was, until recently, one of the driving forces of digital health innovation at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. In this episode, he shares his insight into how paperwork is complicating the coordination and management of patient care. To solve that, he helped design Dock.Health - a simple, HIPAA compliant task management and collaboration platform designed for healthcare. Michael still partially works in clinical practice but is spending most of his time as the CEO of Dock.Health. In this episode, Michael commented on the changes in healthcare due to COVID-19 and talked about the meaning of tech solutions for increased empowerment of patients. Summary of the series: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f081-084-doctors-and-digital-health Dock.Health: https://www.dock.health/  Other solutions presented in the series: Daniel Kraft: https://danielkraftmd.net/  Exponential Medicine: https://exponential.singularityu.org/    Digital.Health: https://www.digital.health/  Mediquo: https://www.mediquo.com/  Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org/

This is the first part of a special 4 episode series about doctors who left full-time clinical practice to develop new solutions for healthcare improvement. As Faces of digital health is a podcast exploring global perspectives, you are going to hear from doctors from different countries: the US, UK, and Spain. Many doctors who go into entrepreneurship are trying to solve systemic issues plaguing healthcare. You will hear UK surgeon Owain Hughes explain, how he started building a company and platform that connects GPs to specialists, to enable GPs to refer patients more accurately. Consequently, patients can receive better care already on the primary care level, which makes the work of specialists much more efficient once patients reach them, making specialists and GPs much more satisfied with their work, because they don’t lose time with patients with poorly defined conditions or because patients have better outcomes since part of the urgent treatments have been begun by GPs based on specialist’s recommendations. Cinapsis: https://www.cinapsis.org/You will hear GI pediatric specialist Michael Docktor from Boston’s Children’s Hospital explain, how he designed a task management app to enable better coordination of healthcare and administrative workers around all the bureaucracy and care entailed in the treatment of every patient. Dock.Health: https://www.dock.health/ Guillem Serra is a serial entrepreneur coming from a family of doctors - his mother, father, grandfather, and great grandfather were doctors, which made it easy for Guillem to go study medicine given his familiarity with the profession. Besides medicine, he studied math and during his medical studies, discovered, that for him, medicine was actually boring. So he went to found what is called a “Whatsapp healthcare app” connecting doctors and patients in Spain, South and Latin America. Mediquo: https://www.mediquo.com/ This episode features Daniel Kraft, one of the top authorities in digital health. Daniel Kraft is the founder and Chair of Exponential Medicine - a program with the goal to 'un-silo' thinking and unleashing cross-disciplinary innovation across healthcare by bringing together thought leaders and forward-thinking clinicians and innovators to explore potentials to reshape health and medicine with technology. Daniel is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist, inventor, and innovator with over 25 years of experience in clinical practice, biomedical research, and healthcare innovation. We discussed: his journey from the medical practice to digital health, his mission to turn his website digital.health into a medical digital health formulary, where doctors could search for clinically approved and reliable digital health solutions to prescribe to their patients, Daniel also shared his views of COVID-19 related innovation, some broader societal problems that are arising in the US because of imposed measures to manage COVID-19. We also talked a bit more about how to improve medication adherence in patients with chronic conditions and co-morbidities, that take five or more different pills daily. The idea behind his company Intellimedicine is to provide patients with a device that would keep all medications of a patient in separate cartridges and would produce only one pill the patient would need to take. The pill’s structure would be based on the patient’s daily various health measurements supported by AI analysis.   Summary of this series: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/f081-084-doctors-and-digital-health Daniel Kraft: https://danielkraftmd.net/ Exponential Medicine: exponential.singularityu.org/ Digital.Health: https://www.digital.health/

On April 15th this year a panel of experts published a position paper online in the Lancet Psychiatry, where they outlined a proposed government response to curb the long-term "profound" and "pervasive" impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health. Undoubtedly, the global lockdown caused a lot of anxiety in some individuals, depression in others, it is fair to assume some medical professionals will suffer from PTSD after the worst is over. The positive news is, that by today we have many validated digital tools and programs to help patients deal with mental health problems remotely. In this episode, Christopher Molaro, talks about why is access to mental health care still problematic, how can digital tools support providers and patients, and what trends are already visible because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Chris is co-founder of NeuroFlow -  a health care technology company whose goal is to bridge the gap between mental and physical health in all care settings. Chris first started thinking about the need for better mental health support and care coordination when he was still working for the US army. Upon return from his mission in Iraq, he started noticing how veterans and civilians alike face too many barriers when it comes to receiving appropriate, timely care.  One of the things that CDC, WHO and other authorities advise us of doing in case of stress, anxiety, fear, sadness and loneliness in this unprecedented times, is to get plenty of sleep, avoid alcohol and drugs, try to eat healthily, keep in contact with your friends, colleagues, and family, and try to destress with deep breaths and meditation.  Read WHO recommendations for mental health issues management, as well as the CDC guidelines to ease difficulties occurring during this pandemic.  Summary of the show: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/s080-how-far-are-we-with-digitising-mental-health-support-christopher-molaro The background music in this show was composed by the pop artist based in New York Cheryl B. Engelhardt. Cheryl suffered from debilitating panic attacks her entire life, tried many coping strategies and in the end composed an album called Luminary and started  a daily meditation practice with it. If you wish to find inner calm with her music, you can access it for free on all streaming platforms and meditation apps Insight Timer and Simple Habit. Listen to “Luminary” here

Healthcare is anything but relaxing once you're a patient. But what if you could look forward to your appointments as you look forward to a wellness visit?  This was among the guidelines designers of Tia - the next generation women's healthcare platform - are operating under in their product development.  Tia was first a search-engine like support companion for women interested in anonymous search of reliable health information. By today, Tia is an ecosystem of services: a personalized women's health information provider, a brick and mortar clinic in New York City. Listen to co-founder and CEO of Tia Carolyn Witte explain what patient-centered care looks like and how can healthcare be made more affordable, as in the case of Tia.   Summary of the show: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/s079-womens-health-and-the-dream-but-real-healthcare-setting-carolyn-witte More about Tia: https://asktia.com/

Wellthy is one of Asia's leading digital therapeutics companies that inspires and enables patients to prevent, reverse and control chronic diseases. It works with pharmaceutical, medical devices companies, payors and healthcare providers to improve health outcomes. With active therapeutic areas in diabetes and cardiology, it has published real-world evidence across 20 publications in leading peer-reviewed journals and global conferences. In this episode, the last one of the 5-part series about digital therapeutics, Abhishek Shah, the CEO and Founder of Wellthy, on of the largest DTx companies in Asia, talks about the importance of understanding that healthcare is always local and shared some vivid examples of different rules of engagement with users in India compared to the West. Recap: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/s078-dtx-series-55-chronic-disease-management-in-india-abhishek-shah Wellthy: https://wellthytherapeutics.com/about

In any given year, 12% to 14% of the adult population in the US will visit their physician for back pain. In the UK muscosceletal conditions (MSK) affect 1 in 4 of the adult population. MSK are very expensive to treat, as patients require medical imagining, medications, sometimes surgery and physical therapy, explains Mark Liber, VP of Business Development at Kaia Health - a digital therapeutics company offering a solution for mitigating musculoskeletal diseases such as chronic back pain. Kaia Health works by offering the user an AI-supported motion sensor guided exercises, which means that an individual not only tries to follow the video instructions but can get feedback if he is executing the positions correctly or not. The app is additionally supported by an actual coach the user can connect with. Recap of the show: www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/s077-dtx-series-45-want-to-get-rid-of-back-pain-mark-liber-kaia-health Kaia Health: https://www.kaiahealth.com/

According to WHO, 3 million deaths every year result from harmful use of alcohol. These deaths represent 5.3 % of all deaths. Australian organization Hello Sunday Morning has been tackling alcohol abuse for over a decade, with a digital approach, that has by today been developed to the level of a soon to be a digital therapeutic (DTx). Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and lock-down across the world, Hello Sunday Morning has been noticing an increase in alcohol consumption.In this episode,  Jamie Moore who is a  General Manager & Daybreak Co-Founder of Daybreak program at the Australian organisanition Hello Sunday Morning, talks about the early days of Hello Sunday Morning, the drinking culture in Australia and the meaning of community support in tacking alcohol addiction. When the organisation was founded over ten years ago, the emphasis was on binge drinking. By today, the user structure has changed and  Daybreak members are predominantly dependent drinkers, they are very much on the heavy end of drinking with 40+ drinks per week, while some users are moderate drinkers. Recap of the show: https://www.facesofdigitalhealth.com/blog/s076-dtx-series-35-are-you-drinking-jamie-moore Hello Sunday Morning: https://www.hellosundaymorning.org/ DTx Alliance: https://dtxalliance.org/