NeuroLex Diagnostics

This week I sat down with founder of NeuroLex Diagnostics, Jim Schwoebel.  A biomedical technology expert, particularly in neurosciences, Jim has been instrumental in fostering growth and innovation, co-founding incubators, NeuroLaunch, CyberLaunch, and more recently, his more focused work on machine learning.

Jim shared how he was inspired by numerous studies showing language analysis can provide healthcare providers with data that can be used to identify individuals suffering with depression, sleep deprivation, bipolar disorder, and others, through evaluation of samples of spoken word.

Blue Flowers

Blue Flowers Org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization empowering women and the men in their lives
against prostate cancer with operations in Georgia, Maryland and Virginia.
Learn more by visiting www.blueflowers.org

Co-Founder and Chief Operations Officer of Blue Flowers Org, Shavonn is committed to living in a
world in which no man is a victim of prostate cancer. Blue Flowers Org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization empowering women and the men in their lives against prostate cancer.
Her organization was founded in 2014 in memory of her grandfather, Gilbert Eugene Crawford, Sr. by
Shavonn and her mother CEO of Blue Flowers Org, Valerie Crawford-Schiele.

Serving as Gilbert’s primary caregivers, Shavonn and her mother supported Gilbert during his stage 4 prostate cancer diagnosis for 12 years until he lost his battle against prostate cancer in 2014. Blue Flowers Org has been
providing prostate cancer education to other women and their families who have faced similar experiences ever since.
Shavonn’s most recent work experience includes working as the Enterprise Business Community Engagement Project Manager at Bank of America executing the bank’s corporate social responsibility initiatives by supporting Atlanta area nonprofits by providing sponsorship and grant support.

She has over 12 years experience in the banking industry working in a fiduciary capacity, preparing financials
and creating and executing corporate strategy at various financial institutions including Bank of
America, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase.  She is member of the Association for Fundraising Professionals and American Grant Writers Association.

Shavonn earned a BBA from Howard University in Washington, DC. She also earned a MBA from The Goizueta Business School at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.  She enjoys practicing yoga and listening to vinyl records in her spare time. She resides in Milton, GA with her husband and son.

Special Guest:

Shavon Richardson, Co-Founder, Blue Flowers Organization

Meeting the Nurse Staffing Shortage

This week I caught up with Carol Robison, of Gifted Healthcare.  Carol has been attracting nurses who are at the top of their specialties in experience, clinical knowledge, and credentials, and placing them with healthcare settings in need of additional nursing professionals for over 20 years.  We connected to talk about meeting the nurse staffing shortage in the US, its geographies, and high-need specialties, and more.

More info soon!

Georgia Tech HomeLab

I caught up with Georgia Tech’s Dr. Brad Fain at the 2016 Health Connect South event.  We talked about the innovative approach they are taking to evaluate how effectively older persons, particularly those with disabilities, are able to utilize a variety of technology solutions.  It is not uncommon to learn that in the real world use-case, the intended user of a technology is not able to understand and/or manipulate the device to be able to achieve its aim.

The HomeLab includes 600 homes across the Atlanta area which gives a cross section of populations.  Its proof-of-concept evaluation data can help developers know their design works as intended or if not, allow them to conduct redesign to address issues uncovered through the test environment.

2016 Health Connect South Event

I had the opportunity to sit down with several presenters and attendees at the 2016 Health Connect South event.  On this week’s show I share three segments with

IBM Watson Health,

VP of Population Health and Cognitive Decision Support, Dan Cerutti

Dan Shook, National Park Service–Kittyhawk

Jim Schwoebel, founder of NeuroLex Diagnostics.

More info soon!

Pharmacogenetic Testing

This week I connected with Vanderbilt University’s Dr. Dan Roden to learn about pharmacogenetic testing.  This tool provides physicians and other prescribing health professionals with individual-specific data about how a patient’s body will respond to particular medications or types of medication.  For example, a popular drug, Plavix, which is prescribed to reduce risk of an additional cardiac or vascular event from happening after heart attack or stroke.  In 2% of the population, there is a genetic mutation that prevents the enzyme necessary to activate the drug from being produced.

This means those patients will take the pill but it never becomes active in the body, leaving them at risk.  Similarly, another larger group of individuals will metabolize the drug heavily, releasing more of the anticoagulant into the bloodstream than is desired, putting them at serious risk for bleeding/stroke.  A simple pharmacogentic test will readily reveal these patients before they are exposed to the drug.  There is a large amount of high quality data around this medication’s drug-gene story to substantiate adjusting the current guidelines for its administration.

Dr. Roden received his medical degree and training in Internal Medicine from McGill University before residency at Vanderbilt where he trained in Clinical Pharmacology and Cardiology, and has been a faculty member there since.  Throughout his career he has focused on conducting studies of the clinical, genetic, cellular, and molecular basis of arrhythmia susceptibility and variability responses to arrhythmia therapies.

Over the last 10 years, Dr. Roden has led Vanderbilt’s broader efforts in pharmacogenomics discovery and implementation.  He is principal investigator for the Vanderbilt sites of the National Institutes of Health’s Pharmacogenomics Research Network (PGRN) and the National Human Genome Research Institute’s Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network.

He directs the Vanderbilt DNA databank BioVU, a discovery resource that as of spring 2014 included >175,000 samples linked to deidentified electronic medical records.  He is a leader in Vanderbilt’s PREDICT project that since 2010 has been preemptively embedded pharmacogenomic variant data in the electronic medical records of >14,000 Vanderbilt patients; as of April 2013, PREDICT displays information on 5 drug-gene pairs and delivers point of care decision support when a target drug is prescribed to patients with variant genotypes.

Dr. Roden served as Director of the Vanderbilt Arrhythmia Service, director of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology (1992-2004), and in 2006 was named Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Personalized Medicine.  Dr. Roden has received the Leon Goldberg Young Investigator Award and the Rawls Palmer Progress in Science Award from the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics; the Distinguished Scientist Award and the Douglas Zipes lectureship from the Heart Rhythm Society; and the Distinguished Scientist Award and the Functional Genomics and Translational Biology Medal of Honor from the American Heart Association.

He currently serves on the Science Board of the FDA. He has been elected to membership in the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, and fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Special Guest:

Dr. Dan Roden, MD, Professor of Medicine and Pharmacology, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Personalized Medicine, Vanderbilt University