Charles Gellman I'm here. Thank you so much for having me today, I appreciate it. Richard Wexler Oh sure. How are you? First of all, where where are you sitting? Where am I talking to you from? Charles Gellman So we are based out of Northern California, on a small city called Folsom. It's a little bit outside the Sacramento area. Richard Wexler Got it. I imagine your weather is probably a little bit nicer than mine in the Boise area where we actually had snow this morning. Charles Gellman Yes, yes, we're waiting for the the next storm to come, but we are anxiously awaiting some snowfall so we can go snowboarding in Lake Tahoe. Richard Wexler Very good. I'm jealous of that you're very, very close. So I want to talk about a pretty big subject in the 20 to 30 minutes that we have, and that subject is medication mismanagement. Can you talk about that a little bit? Obviously there's a huge cost to human life, there's also a cost to the healthcare industry through re-admissions and so on and so forth. Can you kind of give our audience some information about this whole subject of medication mismanagement? Charles Gellman Yeah, I think it's a, it's a big subject that a lot of families and caregivers struggle with. You know, once you have a loved one aging in the home, they generally have a number of different underlying conditions that require them to manage multiple medications. And as you're younger, your memory is pretty sharp, but as you tend to grow older, we tend to forget things. That's when it becomes a big issue to manage those medications, because if you do have a combinations of different medications in the morning, in the evening, or multiple times a day, and you have underlying conditions that are stabilized with those medications- that is when things can go awry pretty quick. If you have family members in the home, you may have noticed that there is a number of medications spilling over in your shelves, your bathroom, or your kitchen, this just is one among millions and millions of people across the United States that are struggling with the same thing. Richard Wexler We've talked about it a lot on the podcast, people want to stay home. And unfortunately, life happened with my parents and my in laws and this happening with millions of people around the country as we age, stuff happens. We wind up in the hospital and we wind up being discharged, and the place that most people want to go is, you're well aware of, is home. I'm not a data scientist like you, but obviously I've seen whether it's my own family or clients that I've worked with, they leave the hospital, they leave skilled nursing and now they have 5, 6, 7, 8 vials of medication- the pink ones, the blue ones, the purple ones... And as you said, memory can be a little bit challenging for some as we age and trying to understand 'which medications I take at a given time' can be challenging. Charles Gellman Yeah. And you know, memory is just one component of this. But also you know, being able to alleviate some of the burden that caregivers and patients have within the home to carry out these complex regimens that their doctors or nurses are providing them. You know, there's a lot of information coming at you. Not only are you struggling with your daily assisted living tasks, such as cooking, cleaning or just being mobile, in addition to those complex regimens of understanding whose meds are who. If you're living in a household with multiple people, sometimes medications can get mixed up, so there's a variety of different complications within the home that contributes to medication errors, where unnecessary hospitalizations and emergency room visits occur on a regular basis. Richard Wexler Wow. I started working on this probably about 12 years ago, around 2012, when the re-admission problem became huge, and I know it's still very large right now, do you see that a lot with people? People that aren't taking medications properly and winding up back, as a frequent flyer as they call it, through the doors of the ER? Charles Gellman Well, it's a pretty ironic question. Because if you think about it, if people are suffering from cognitive impairment or memory issues, you can't ask them whether or not they've been taking their medications as prescribed because they can't recall correctly. So what happens is a revolving door to the ER or to the hospital because these folks simply can't remember whether or not they're taking the medications, and they don't want to let doctors or nurses down when they ask that question. So you know it's a very interesting dichotomy that I think a lot of the patients are struggling with is 'can they be honest with providers when they're struggling at home' and even if they know they're struggling at home, doctors and nurses aren't going to make house calls so they can independently give the medications to patients dose by dose. So we have a real, real big problem on our hands here. Richard Wexler One of the things I wanted to talk about talk to you about is your company and what you're doing with HiDO Health. Can you tell our listening audience and folks, I really want you, as I always tell you, to share this with friends and colleagues, this is some great information- but Charles if you can really talk about HiDO Health, what is it? What are you trying to do? How does it work? Charles Gellman HiDO Health is an AI robotics device in the home to simplify medication consumption and monitoring. So the device itself uses a variety of different cameras and sensors so a patient or a loved one would walk up to the device, it would unlock with face ID and it dispenses the right medications, at the right time, the right dosage, and the right frequency. Once that happens, the user picks up the cup which is transparent and does a video consumption recording to verify that the medications were taken as prescribed. The goal of the company is to help enable patients to help themselves without being reliant on caregivers and ultimately, if you can reduce medications in the home, then we don't have to go to the hospital or the ER so much. It allows people to focus on living their lives, the best way they can versus being encumbered by the way the system is currently set up. Richard Wexler Very interesting. I've seen online, and we will give folks the information of where they can take a look at this before we get off, let's call it the little machine, I mean, who's programming that to make sure that it's spitting out the right pill, at the right time, with the right dosage? Charles Gellman On your regular medications, you have a prescription label, and that prescription labeling information is embedded within our RFID cap and that CAP is auto recognized by the device. All that has to be done on the home setting, by the patient or the caregivers, is to put the 40 gram pill container, which is just your off the shelf pill bottle in the device, and then the device does the rest. So think about this, if anybody is familiar with Waymo, where you have self driving cars in major cities like San Francisco or Phoenix, this would be your Waymo for healthcare in the home. Richard Wexler Wow, I mean, this is again folks, this is fantastic. I mean, Charles said something, and I'm older than he is, but going back in my childhood, doctors made house calls. Now it happens once in awhile, but rarely happens anymore. Plus, look where we've gotten with the advance in medicine, the advance in medication, the amount of medication that people are taking on a daily basis to function normally, to stay with us, and to thrive. I would imagine, and we've talked about this kind of briefly, that if you have a problem, or you were diagnosed, let's say with dementia or Alzheimer's, I mean, this can be really difficult. Backing up, people want to go home- and part of the problem, part of why we put APlan2Age.org together is because people want to go home and there may be nobody there that can really watch them and take care of them and be with them 24 hours a day. Maybe the family doesn't live close and trying to get a professional and is very expensive... Obviously they need to be taking the right dosage and the right medication at the right time. So I'm just throwing out there based on what we're talking about, someone living with dementia, someone is starting to get forgetful, I can imagine this can become a real problem, Charles. Charles Gellman It's interesting because when you start thinking about it, you know there is a lack of capacity and awareness around cognitive impairment. So family members may in fact be diagnosed with dementia, or early signs of dementia, but because their provider or their doctor didn't do a screening, they don't have that formal indication. So being reliant on caregivers and family members that may be around the area, or to your point, could be in a different state, it's very challenging to have people age gracefully in the home if they don't have the resources and the technology to enable them live that life. An alternative is, you know you go to a facility or go to assisted living, and it's cost prohibitive for most families, and most folks do want to age gracefully in the home. So you have a this big push/pull based on who can and who cannot live within the home. Richard Wexler So I know by degree you're a data scientist, so, and I'm just throwing something out there that's obviously above my pay grade, but I would imagine the data you're collecting here and having that data and the accuracy of that information, correct me if I'm wrong, but I would assume that's pretty important. Charles Gellman Yeah, I think it's interesting because when you start thinking about how clinical trials are set up. And the populations that they're set up on, they may not always be the same as the people taking them in the home. And everyone's a little bit unique, and they're unique in different ways such as age, race, gender, location, even income plays a role to it, as well as your underlying chronic diseases. So what's interesting, from a data collection standpoint, is the different combinations of medications people are taking and then how often they're taking them, what type of deviations take place from their expected time to dosage and then ultimately what are those outcomes based upon those different types of medications. So medication A may not work as good as B or C, but you won't know that unless you're actually capturing that data. What's happened in the marketplace forever has been a gigantic question mark on what is happening in the home? No one's ever been able to quantify or collect that to a scientific rigor, whereas what we're doing with HiDO. Richard Wexler Very interesting and I can see obviously, the importance folks, and I'm not sure if I understand this and certainly tell the listening audience- is the HiDO Health, the machine, is it actually out there for public consumption or where are you with that? Charles Gellman Yeah, great question. So we have done National Institute of Health and National Institute of Aging Research and we have been fortunate enough to get several grants to the benefit of the public. We started at Stanford University focusing on at risk patients with underlying mental health disorders, and then we moved on to Rush University in Chicago to explore dementia and cognitive impairment, and now we're collaborating with UC Davis out in Sacramento and some other academic collaborations. Our goal is to provide validation that the use of HiDO device with dementia patients is not only feasible, but it's plausible at scale. We're also exploring commercial applications with Medicare Advantage plans so it becomes accessible to patients in need. Currently we are in research and academic collaboration mode, but our goal is to open it up to the public in the next several years. Richard Wexler So lookout five years, let's look at that crystal ball- where where would you hope this is in five years? Are we talking a lot of use in the home? Are we talking use in skilled nursing? Are we talking use in assisted living? If you can kind of fill in the blanks per your crystal ball. Charles Gellman Yeah, what I'd like to do and it would be pretty novel, but right now, there's currently the lack of approved resources for dementia patients, so our first goal would be the first FDA approved indication for this particular medical device, which would open up the amount of folks that would have access to have the family leverage this technology, and then it would be very strategic on whom would serve. So it probably start off with some Medicare Advantage plans, and then distribution could scale out. But you need several different proof points and data in order to move on. Richard Wexler Very interesting again folks. As we talked about, this is a huge issue. I mean, I've seen it in my own life, I've seen it with clients and I know that Charles has as well. Especially, I mean just being realistic, not every family lives close to where Mom and Dad live. A lot of kids as they grow up, they move for school. Move just to move to find jobs and they're not close as parents age. And obviously, taking the right medication, the right dosage, at the right time is huge. I don't know what percentage of Americans are on medication, but I got to believe it's pretty darn high, and managing that is something that we obviously want to get correct. I mean the way the system is built, is this pretty easy for the average 80 year old, in their home, to potentially use? Charles Gellman I would say it's equivalent to being able to turn on the TV, where you have an on and off switch. You know you're capable of putting the channels up and down. So if the average 80 year old, or folks that are younger or older are able to do that, then we'd have a similar capacity. Most folks that are over the age of 65, about 90% of them, take at least one prescription and the ones that take 5 or more prescriptions are about 2/3 of the population. It's not a question of if people that are older take medications, it's just a question of how many. There's approximately 6 billion prescriptions going out each year. If you start doing the math about how difficult and challenging it is, take these medications, you just have to make this assumption that medication errors are all the time, all over the place - It's just not reported. Richard Wexler Wow, one question. I don't think I've asked. So when someone starts running out of their medication, is that something they're going to get their medication through you and something you put together or they just go into their normal pharmacy and getting a refill on the medication? Charles Gellman That's a great question. So what we've been looking at is how do you fix the entirety of the system? It has to do with more than just patients behaviors in the home, it has to do with pharmacy distribution. So we're looking at a variety of different partners where we can actually embed our technology so the heavy lifting is done before a patient would ever seek any assistance on our end. So what I'm saying is that the prescription labeling is actually done within the pharmacy, sent to the patient, so there's full tracking from pharmacy distribution to house to device to actual consumption with the device. Whereas you know you can make the process as easy on patients as possible and that's important. Richard Wexler Very much. And folks, this has been a lot of great information. Charles, if people do want to get in touch, what do you want to give out? Email, phone number, website any of the above, what would you like to to give the people? Charles Gellman Yeah, if you want to learn a little bit more about what we're doing, go to www.hidohealth.com or visit us, you can type in the same stuff (HiDO Health) and we have a lot of different YouTube videos about testimonials, patients, as well as I did a TEDx talk about AI robotics. So feel free to search that as well. Richard Wexler I've seen some of those videos folks, and I would really encourage you, as Charles keeps moving forward with this, to take a look at this, whether it's for yourself, whether it's for a loved one, a friend. Because as we started this conversation, as we get close to ending it, I mean it's a huge issue. As Charles was saying, I mean, I don't think we're going to change anytime soon, the amount of medication that's out there and we want to make sure that people consume that properly. Folks, as I always say, if you want to get in touch with me, if you'd like to be a guest on the show, if you have comments, questions, best e-mail is [email protected] Thank you to Charles again, this has been some fantastic information. I want to thank him for all that he's doing and pushing forward with this and folks, as I say on every episode until we talk again, have yourself an awesome day.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorRichard Wexler Archives
December 2024
Categories |
RSS Feed
