Tech Tonics - TopPodcast.com

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Tech Tonics — Health & Fitness
Tech Tonics

Tech Tonics, the Podcast, is a twice-monthly program focused on the people and passion at the intersection of technology and health. Hosted by Lisa Suennen and David Shaywitz (the co-authors of “Tech Tonics: Can Passionate Entrepreneurs Heal Healthcare With Technology?”) the show draws on their experience in business, medicine, and health-IT.

The Tech Tonics podcast seeks to bring the people in the digital health field to life and, ideally, elevate humanism in a healthcare world captivated by technology. “We deeply believe in what Robert Coles, an inspiration to us both, has termed ‘the call of stories,’” David Shaywitz says. “Our aspiration is to bring the spirit of Coles and Michael Lewis to the world of digital health.”

Together, Suennen and Shaywitz engage a range of intriguing guests in discussions that enable listeners to appreciate the stories behind the startups and the people behind the passion.

Lisa Suennen is the Managing Partner of Venture Valkyrie Consulting, LLC, a firm that provides advisory services to corporate and independent venture capital funds and to large and small companies around investment and product strategy, innovation spin-outs, market development, partnerships and financing. She is currently a member of the Qualcomm Life Advisory Board, the Sanofi Integrated Care Advisory Board, the Dignity Health Foundation Board, and an Advisor to the California Health Care Foundation Innovation Fund and a member of several private company Boards of Directors.

Dr. David Shaywitz is the Chief Medical Officer of DNAnexus, a company that makes it easier to work with genomic data using advanced bioinformatics and scalable compute systems based on the cloud. He received his M.D. from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health, Science, and Technology at Harvard Medical School, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Biology at MIT. He trained in internal medicine and endocrinology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and conducted his post-doctoral research in Doug Melton’s lab at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Tech Tonics, the Podcast is produced by Jason Lopez and syndicated by Connected Social Media. You can also find out more at venturevalkyrie.com and connectedsocialmedia.com.

Copyright: © ConnectedSocialMedia.com

Latest Episodes:

Tech Tonics: Geeta Nayyar, Executive Medical Director, Salesforce Sep 28, 2020

Show notes

Geeta Nayyar started off wanting to be a teacher, but then decided “science is the answer to everything” and became a doctor. Today she is the recently-appointed Executive Medical Director at Salesforce and gets to do both, which is her dream come to life.

Geeta’s parents were both MDs and her two brothers are both in the healthcare field (and one is in medical school as a start to a 2nd career), so becoming a doctor was somewhat pre-ordained. She started her own medical training at the age of 17 and continued to fall in love with science, though soon encompassed healthcare IT into her definition of the field.

While believing that “science is the answer to everything, even emotion,” Geeta decided to get an MBA after watching the business of healthcare fail patients who needed so much more than what was traditionally provided. While there,

she observed the roll-out of the hospital’s first electronic medical record system and became enamored by the potential for technology to change medicine. This lead to becoming one of the first chief medical officers in a tech company, AT&T. But it was a role ahead of its time.

Geeta went on to spend time at a startup, at a physician organization and at Greenway, the EMR company, and now has found her way back to a large tech company targeting healthcare: Salesforce. But this time, she feels like a real difference can be made, especially in light of the pandemic, noting that her parents, now in their 70s and still practicing physicians, are performing virtual visits.

A recognized force of nature in health IT, we are so happy to welcome Geeta to the show.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Dr. Ken Mandl – Forging Connection Through Technology Sep 14, 2020

Show notes

Ken Mandl has a gift for listening to other people, whether they’re mentors offering the advice that shaped his career in pediatrics and informatics at Boston’s Children Hospital and Harvard Medical School, or helping physicians and patients learn from each other by making it easier for them to share information. He’s a pioneering leader of a long-anticipated era whose time, it seems, has finally arrived.

The son of a physicist and an English professor, Ken Mandl’s family settled in the Boston area when he was five and, except for a brief college detour to Providence, he’s been shoveling winter snow there ever since.

A biology and psychology major at Brown, Ken expected to study child psychology but was drawn toward med school by a conspicuously intense premed roommate (who apparently hadn’t received the Brown memo…). Presumably recognizing the value of competitive peers in raising his game, Ken then matriculated at Harvard Medical School, arriving at a particularly auspicious time. He was a member of the first class of a bold new medical education program called “New Pathway,” featuring small-group learning led by luminaries such as (in Ken’s case) legendary surgeon-innovator Judah Folkman (see here).

Ken’s training continued in pediatrics and emergency medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. While and ER doctor there, he appeared as a prosecution witness (for a tragic case of “shaken baby syndrome”) on one of the earliest Court TV cases, where he was cross-examined by noted defense attorney Barry Scheck.

While Ken’s student research experience was in traditional molecular biology, he found himself drawn to an intriguing new program focused on clinical effectiveness. After receiving some particularly wise counsel from noted Harvard physician-scientist Howard Hiatt (who Ken describes as “a gentleman and a scholar”), Ken connected with Dr. Troy Brennan (now Chief Medical Officer of CVS Health), and embarked on a fascinating research project looking at the impact of maternal length-of-stay on obstetrics outcomes, which led to some intriguing (if initially controversial) publications.

Ken then joined forces professionally with his friend (and previous Tech Tonics guest) Dr. Zak Kohane, who had recently founded a pioneering informatics program at Boston Children’s Hospital. Ken recognized an important opportunity at the intersection of technology, clinical medicine and population health. While initially struggling for funding given the novelty of the field – in fact, his grants would be critiqued simultaneously as proposing research that “can’t be done” and which “had already been done by the dot coms.” Nevertheless, his research soon gained traction and his career took off.

Today, a Professor of Pediatrics and Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, Ken directs the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. He is a founder of modern approaches to biosurveillance and is perhaps best known for his work and leadership driving the development of an “app store model for health IT innovation” SMART on FHIR – an initiative David described several years ago Forbesas “our last, best hope for interoperability.”

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Show notes:
David’s Astounding HealthTech column for Timmerman Report on the recent Duke real world evidence conference – “Closing medicine’s feedback gap: Can tech help integrate clinical care and clinical research?”

David’s related 2019 commentary in Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics – “A Drug Is not an Outcome: Extending Translation Through Implementation Using Real-World Data”

Tech Tonics: John Groetelaars – Connecting MedTech to the Digital World Aug 24, 2020

Show notes

John Groetelaars learned to work with his hands on his family’s vegetable farm, but he realized early that he was more interested in using those hands to build motorcycles and mechanical devices.

He followed his inclination first by helping manufacture engines and axles after earning his engineering degree through the GM Institute; he later transferred to the GM’s Chevy Lumina factory. The auto industry was very resistant to change, but John early on recognized the importance of designing for the customer and decided to broaden his skills earning his MBA at Columbia University. His first landing point post MBA – at Eli Lilly and then it’s Guidant spin-out—launched his medical device career and he has never looked back.

Many of the Guidant alums from that time went on to become giants of the medical device industry and John is no exception. He had successful stints in the U.S. and globally at Ventrica, Bard and Boston Scientific before being named CEO of Hill-Rom, a public, Fortune 1000 medical device company that is navigating it’s way across the digital and data realm.

The healthcare world has gone digital one segment at a time, with medical device companies holding up the end of the parade. Despite what looked like a traditional medtech career, John has pushed Hill Rom to step out in front of the band and right from the start, and set his sights toward re-defining the medical device giant as a connected health company. On the heels of Hill-Rom’s merger with Welch-Allyn and a string of digital health acquisitions, such as that ofVoalte, John is always seeking to find the right investment balance between the company’s medical device history and its digital future.

In our discussion John discusses the importance of thinking beyond what’s always been done and the interesting new challenges faced by first-time CEOs, even those with significant management experience. As a leader with a remarkably gender-diverse management team and board of directors, he also discusses why he believes that meaningful commitment to diversity makes companies perform more effectively.

We are delighted that John could join us on Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping its clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Andrew Trister – From Jersey Boy to Digital Doc Aug 10, 2020

Show notes

With a knack for engineering and a passion for patients, Andrew Trister career has taken this Jersey boy from radiation oncology to Apple to his current role at the Gates Foundation, where he’s spearheading their efforts to leverage technology to improve the health of people around the world.

Andrew – like E Street drummer Max Weinberg — grew up in the lovely North Jersey town of Maplewood, and like Weinberg’s, Andrew’s family was also originally from Eastern Europe and had left to escape persecution (though Weinberg’s family immigrated to the United States several generations earlier).

Growing up, Andrew shared the complex experience of many children of immigrants; he says he felt “like an American” within the context of his family, where Romanian, not English, was the first language, but a bit like an outsider among his classmates and neighbors.

Inspired by his father (who at one point had started to train as a doctor) and an uncle, who was an engineer, Andrew was drawn to this interface; his interest in becoming a doctor took on a greater sense of urgency following the tragic death of a young cousin from a devastating brain tumor.

Always working at the intersection of disciplines, Andrew pursued both engineering and pre-med subjects in college at the University of Pennsylvania, and stayed at Penn for his MD/PhD. His graduate work encompassed both bioengineering and machine learning (presumably before at least one of those disciplines was cool….) He was increasingly gripped by the idea of using technology to improve patient care.

He continued his training, in radiation oncology, at the University of Washington, where his career was profoundly impacted by relationships with two polymath, intellectually unfettered mentors: Dr. Mark Groudine and Dr. Stephen Friend.

Working with Friend, who was at the time just putting together the open science platform known as Sage Bionetworks (David, incidentally, was a founding advisor of Sage), Andrew became increasingly interested in the possibilities of using wearables to better understand phenotypes, and to advance patient-centric health.

Apple, it turned out, was also developing an interest in this space, and Andrew and Stephen would ultimately join Apple for several years to advance their health-focused initiatives.

More recently, Andrew returned to Seattle for what seems like the perfect role for him: driving digital health technologies for the Gates Foundation – an effort that, as he discusses, has placed him squarely in the epicenter of a range of COVID-19-related efforts. It’s a challenge worthy of his exceptional talents.

We are grateful to Andrew for joining us today on Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Jill Hagenkord’s Wild Ride Jul 27, 2020

Show notes

Growing up in a small town in Iowa, Jill Hagenkord never imagined herself as a doctor, or scientist, or entrepreneur – yet she became all three, blazing her own path and charting for herself a captivating personal and professional journey.

Jill’s childhood was especially difficult; her parents divorced when she was ten, leaving Jill and her siblings struggling to get by, relying on subsidies for both goods and housing. She describes herself as a rebellious student who was secretly good at school, and says she went to college to pursue her interest in “cute boys and fun parties.” She attended the University of Iowa.

At college, she worked 2-3 jobs, did really well, and “partied all the time.” Her ultimate career direction would be strongly influenced by a “terrible boyfriend” – a guy who, she said, constantly told her she “wasn’t smart enough to succeed in science classes or get into medical school.” It motivated her to prove him wrong, which she did, time and again, ultimately earning admission to the Stanford MD/PhD program.

Jill moved to the Bay Area but lived in San Francisco, not Palo Alto, worked at a bar, and spent as little time in class as possible, while nevertheless mastering all the material. She dropped the PhD part of the training and pursued a residency in pathology at UCSF, but then got drawn into the startup world; while there, she served as a mouse pathologist at a buzzy startup that ultimately IPO’d.

Jill initially returned to Iowa to finish her pathology residency, with the plan to settle down and become a “normal” pathologist there, but discovered that she missed the innovation culture she had known in California. So, off she went to University of Pittsburgh, to pursue not one, but two ultra-specialized fellowships (in molecular genetic pathology and pathology/oncology informatics), then returned to the Bay Area to serve in a series of Chief Medical Officer roles, including, most significantly, a role at 23andMe right after they received a highly-publicized warning letter from the FDA. With her help, the company got itself back into the Agency’s good graces; ultimately, Jill was able to sell her shares, and realize a significant return.

After a brief period as a medical consultant in the health tech industry, Jill has just started at Optum as Chief Medical Officer of its new Genomics team. She is thinking about living in Iowa.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Arnaub Chatterjee – Making Healthcare Smart Jul 13, 2020

Show notes

Arnaub Chatterjee comes from a long line of physicians, and in his youth, assumed he’d follow the family tradition. At college at the University of Michigan, he pursued a well-traveled path towards medicine, graduating with a degree in cell and molecular biology. But then his heart wandered, and ultimately he found himself having a difficult conversation with his parents. Fortunately, he assures us, his younger sister eventually became a physician, much to his parents’ delight — and relief.

Arnaub, meanwhile, pursued an interest at the intersection of the business and policy aspects of healthcare, working for an HMO one summer, a physicians group supporting a national healthcare plan the next, and at https://www.samhsa.gov/within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services the summer after that, focused on mental health.

He continued his training at Cornell, pursuing an intense dual degree program focused on health policy and healthcare administration – his fellow alums include previous Tech Tonics guest Nancy Schlichting, and also former Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini. Upon graduation, Arnaub pursued healthcare consulting at Deloitte, then left to work in the Obama administration.

After initially working in a division focused on Medicare fraud, his life changed when he happened to hear a talk by legendary healthcare innovator and entrepreneur Todd Park. He soon joined Todd and the remarkable group that was around him working to change the way technology could impact health and health policy. Arnaub helped launch healthdata.gov, established the first cohort of the Innovation Fellows program within government and co-authored one of the seminal whitepapers on big data in healthcare with colleagues at McKinsey. Not only was the work interesting, he says, but the relationships he formed shaped the future trajectory of his career.

Arnaub’s first post-government role was in health technology at Merck, where he had been recruited by former colleague (and previous Tech Tonics guest) Sachin Jain; Jain had recently left D.C. for Merck and invited Arnaub to join him. There, Arnaub focused on some of the earliest efforts to introduce real word data into Merck’s clincial evidence and data science strategy. Following his time at Merck, he then reconnected with colleagues at McKinsey where he continued to focus on R&D strategy and data science, serving both biopharma and the major technology companies who were entering the healthcare industry.

After a McKinsey colleague, Sastry Chilukuri, left to pursue some of these concepts at Medidata – specifically, to develop Medidata’s data science entity, Acorn AI – Arnaub joined him. Today, he serves as the SVP of Product, where he oversees all strategy and go-to-market over products such as synthetic control arms, trial design, imaging analytics and the company’s work in the ‘omics space.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with its parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Making It Happen – Madeline Bell, CEO, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Jun 22, 2020

Show notes

Madeline Bell is one of those people who decides what they want and does what it takes to make it happen. She grew up wanting to be a nurse, wanting to work with children and ultimately deciding she wanted to lead. She has achieved all three of these things and so much more.

Today Madeline is one of America’s few female hospital CEO’s, leading Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the nation’s first hospital devoted exclusively to the care of children. She is one of the 13% of female CEOs in healthcare and she is committed to driving that number upwards, saying, “If we want the face of leadership to change, women have to make it happen.”

Madeline always wanted to work in healthcare, though her original plan was to be a nurse. She got her first such role working in a nursing home at age 15 and realized that she wanted to invest her energy in children, where there was more hope for their future. She went to nursing school at Villanova and took her first full time nursing job at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1983, never knowing she would one day return to as its leader.

After returning to school to study organizational dynamics, Madeline took her first hospital administration job at a very entrepreneurial system, Mainline Health, channeling her two entrepreneurial parents. She was ultimately lured back to CHoP as Chief Operating Officer and was elevated to CEO eight years later where she learned how different that job is, particularly when it comes to being the face of the brand.

Madeline talks about how her transition to CEO was questioned both because she was a nurse and a woman, but ultimately her success has demonstrated why her background made her particularly effective in her role. She has developed a passion for encouraging other women to seek leadership roles and has her own blog called Heels of Success focused on this topic. She also hosts a podcast, Breaking Through with Madeline Bell, focused on the amazing innovatioons, such as Spark Therapeutics, that emanate from CHoP.

While Madeline loves her work and her family, which includes 7 children (!), her real passion is the Philadelphia Eagles, having spent her entire life living in Pennsylvania. We loved having Madeline on Tech Tonics!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Heels of Success (Madeline’s blog)

Breaking Through with Madeline Bell (Madeline’s podcast)

Tech Tonics: Patrick Hines – Helping People is in His DNA Jun 08, 2020

Show notes

Since March 23, 2020, Dr. Patrick Hines, physician, scientist and entrepreneur has spent most of his time between the Detroit Children’s Hospital and a nearby hotel room, where he stays to minimize COVID-19 risk to his family. He occasionally drops by to participate in movie night from a backyard chair while his wife and kids stay inside on the sofa. But Patrick is undaunted by this, saying that helping people is in his DNA. From very humble beginnings in North Carolina, Patrick watched his parents, both teachers, mentor poor rural kids at school and at home; it inspired in him the desire to give back.

Patrick’s dad, a classically-trained baritone, accomplished singer, and choir director at the local college, was also his musical role model. Patrick made his way through college on a music scholarship, playing French horn and trumpet. But all the while, he was drawn to science. Having majored in chemistry at Hampton University, a historically black college in Virginia, Patrick set off to get his PhD but soon realized that research wasn’t enough of a people profession to satisfy his desire to serve. So off he went to medical school at UNC Chapel Hill, where he had the good fortune to meet his clinical mentor and learn about the vastly undeserved clinical needs of people with sickle cell disease.

Patrick, now a PhD and MD, ultimately trained to become a pediatric intensive care physician. He worked first at Children’s Hospital of Philadephia (CHoP) and later at Detroit Children’s Hospital, but he also founded Functional Fluidics, a company that focuses on red blood cell health generally and sickle cell anemia diagnostics specifically. The idea for the company came from his recognition that therapeutics to treat the condition kept failing clinical trials because there was no surrogate endpoint and that he could bring a solution to this problem and to patients who had so few treatment options.

Patrick is now in the process of transitioning out of his regular ICU role to dedicate himself full-time to his young, growing company. Patrick speaks on the podcast about his difficulty raising money as a black founder and how these experiences were even more challenging than some of the prejudice he has faced as a black physician. Given our current discourse on race in America, it is an eye-opening first person account of how someone with significant intellect, experience, and education can come up against the limitations of others’ small thinking. But despite those that have told him his efforts were less than, Patrick has made it pretty clear that he is not giving up – he sees his work as a lifeline to people and intends to live out the helping gene passed on from his parents. Says Patrick, “It is my responsibility to be sure people with sickle cell matter and to get them the medical resources they need.”

Patrick has also returned to music, singing publicly with his dad for the very first time last year. As an avid jazz enthusiast (see below for his favorite song) he is excited to be back around music. And he is especially glad to be leaving his pandemic-driven hotel stay and returning to his family for the everyday hugs, skirmishes and all of the things that were once annoying and are now a joy to experience. Welcome home Patrick and thanks for being on the show!

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics. Manatt Health integrates strategic business consulting, public policy acumen, legal excellence and deep analytics capabilities to better serve the complex needs of clients across America’s healthcare system. Together with it’s parent company, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, the firm’s multidisciplinary team is dedicated to helping clients across all industries grow and prosper.

Tech Tonics: Craig Lipset – Patient-Centric Before It Was Cool May 18, 2020

Show notes

As a boy, Craig Lipset thought he wanted to become a doctor – but over time, he came to appreciate that his real interest was, as he put it, engaging in the spirit of medicine at the population level – a pursuit that ultimately brought him to the forefront of digital health at Pfizer, establishing a capability long before most pharmas even recognized they needed it.

Craig grew up in the distinct cultural milieu that is the North Shore of Long Island. A middle child with an interest in music and medicine, he attended Brandeis, where he majored in music, took pre-med classes, and worked for an EMS service in Waltham, MA. In 1992 he returned to New York, and obtained an MPH at Columbia, and discovered he loved thinking about populations, and wanted to learn more about the organizations helping to study them.

After graduation in 1998, he considered consulting, but instead joined a contract research organization, Parexel and worked closely with Dr. Mark Goldberg, who would go on to become the President and COO. He eventually left Parexel to join a VC-backed company in Waltham that was ultimately acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb.

At around this time, Craig’s life changed dramatically and unexpectedly when he was diagnosed with pulmonary sarcoidosis. He decided to make a life change, so he returned to the New York area and joined Pfizer in 2006, where he would stay for eleven years. Craig built their clinical innovation program from a footnote to a core business capability. Within a year of joining Pfizer, Craig began to apply his personal experience as an e-patient and was designing the industry’s first fully at-home decentralized clinical trial – the Pfizer REMOTE study. During his tenure, Pfizer — along with the rest of the industry –would increasingly begin to appreciate the value of digital and the opportunity for patient-centricity that Craig had been championing so passionately for years.

Today, Craig serves as an independent adviser, sharing his experience, expertise, and learnings with biopharma companies, startups, and investors.

Tech Tonics: Tele-behavioral Health – Breaking Down Barriers and Stigmas at a Time of Escalating Need May 04, 2020

Show notes

For 20 years, advocates of telemedicine have been trying to break through to common usage. For all of modern human history, those with mental health challenges have held back from seeking treatment due to the stigma associated with doing so. And then, a Chinese bat opened the flood gates. Today we are seeing record usage of telemedicine, especially for mental health needs of all types.

Regular Tech Tonics listeners know our usual approach is in-depth personal interviews with individuals. Today, in light of current events, we decided to take a topical detour into how the coronavirus pandemic has driven vast advances in the use of telemedicine and has brought out into the open the importance of access to mental health treatment. The combination of these things into what we know now as tele-behavioral health, is our topic today. We invited three tele-behavioral health experts serving different populations to join the show and share with us what they are seeing in the new world order; those people are:

Russell Glass, CEO of Ginger
Margaret Laws, co-founder of Nod (and CEO of HopeLab)
Steve Smith, CEO of NOCD

Notably, all three of these organizations are experiencing skyrocketing use of their tele-behavioral health products and have seen some surprising customers enter their system. Interestingly, the pandemic has driven a stunning rise in telemedicine, but also a much greater openness to discussing and acting on the need for mental health care. Un-hampered by lack of reimbursement or physician/provider reluctance, these companies’ digital approaches are gaining in popularity in a way that may be persistent post-crisis. And not only are patients enjoying their experiences; they consistently report that access challenges have been markedly reduced as compared to the pre-pandemic era. Imagine that.

Never has the need for mental health care been more acute. The Kaiser Family Foundation notes that “More than four in ten adults overall (45%) feel that worry and stress related to coronavirus has had a negative impact on their mental health, up from 32% in early March.” If one needed more proof of the mental health crisis we are facing, prescriptions per week for antidepressants, anti-anxiety and anti-insomnia drugs increased by 21% between February 16 and March 15, peaking the week of March 15 when the virus was deemed a pandemic. The largest increase was in anti-anxiety medications, according to the report, which rose by 34.1% over that month, in contrast to double digit drops in the use of some of these medications over the previous five years, according to this Fierce Healthcare article.

We are grateful to our guests for their willingness to do the show and even more so for their commitment tackling the issues that are plaguing so many people today. Whether you are an adult, a child, a teen; whether you are someone with serious mental health issues or more common ones; whether you are alone, with your family, or in any other situation, know that there is help out there for you – you can access mental health services 24-hours a day by telemedicine by accessing these three companies and many others.

We are grateful to Manatt Health for sponsoring today’s episode of Tech Tonics—Manatt Health is a multi-disciplinary professional services firm that integrates a full-service law firm with a broad-based strategic business and policy consulting practice to help our clients grow and prosper. Manatt Health supports the full range of stakeholders in transforming America’s healthcare system.

Show Notes:

Kaiser Family Foundation report on coronavirus impact on mental health

Great Forbes article about Nod and how it can help during the pandemic

Press Release about Free Access to Mental Health Coaching during the Pandemic

https://abcnews.go.com/US/living-ocd-pandemic/story?id=70237405

List of available mental health resources during the pandemic crisis (not exhaustive and frequently updated)

Lisa’s article on the dramatic rise in digital health as a result of the pandemic.

David’s interview in Timmerman Report with his brother, Jonathan, a psychiatrist in L.A. who was an early adopter of telemedicine. Jonathan discusses his first-hand experiences adjusting to this technology.

Related Podcasts