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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Summit Highlights Valley Telehealth Firms

The Southern California Biomedical Council held its Coronavirus Digital Solutions Summit on May 14, featuring speakers from four biotech companies in the San Fernando Valley: iKioo, Aligned Telehealth, SnapMD, and Eyenuk. More than 200 people attended the virtual event, calling in to listen to presentations or accessing a platform to take a look at accompanying presentation slides and video. Presentations centered around how virtual meetings were being implemented by health care providers as well as becoming a viable option for biotech companies to continue clinical trials. Many presenters saw telehealth as a strategic move for providers during the pandemic. Those that don’t adopt telemedicine could end up losing patients, presenters said. Dr. Ayman Salem, chief executive of blockchain technology company iKioo in Van Nuys and a neurosurgeon at Providence St. Joseph Health and Dignity Health hospitals, spoke about COVID-19 and how what he called “distance consumption” was borne of the need to stay in our homes. “The last financial crisis of 2008 gave rise to the concept of collaborative consumption. That was represented by companies like Uber and Airbnb,” explained Salem. “The current pandemic created a new inflection point that eclipsed the collaborative state of economic consumption and ushered in a new era of distance consumption manifested by the rise of telehealth in health care as well as online distance learning for education.” While Salem extolled the positives of such a service, like convenience and safety during the pandemic, he also pointed out that telehealth visits pay less for doctors than in-room visits, and that low-income individuals may not have access to a smart device to get care this way. “This is one of the main challenges I see of physicians is that not all patients are equipped at home with smartphones. But they’re willing to invest in a scale or a gadget for their health even with the current socioeconomic situation,” added Salem. “Here at my office I used to see 30 patients daily face-to-face, but it went down to four patients. The rest are via telehealth. I think doctors will need to add another modality, another way of seeing patients to maintain their revenue,” he added, referring to possible paths forward with health monitoring gadgets. Telemedicine companies in Woodland Hills and Glendale, Aligned Telehealth and SnapMD, respectively, made up a panel for another section of the virtual summit. SnapMD Chief Executive David Skibinski spoke first, highlighting the company’s online platform as the safest place to properly triage COVID patients online, especially those with mild to moderate symptoms. “The ability to initially assess and identify these patients that are suspected of having the coronavirus can certainly be managed in a remote care setting,” explained Skibinski. “Even if that patient is in quarantine, we can have members of the family participate in those visits as we can manage multi-participant visits.” Patients could go from the online triage process right to a testing site without having to set foot in a doctor’s office, Skibinski said. Dr. Nitin Nanda, chief executive of Aligned Telehealth, spoke briefly about the spike in telehealth demand, especially when it comes to telepsychiatry and neurohealth — the company’s focus. “Back in March where we initially saw the pandemic roll in, 67 percent of folks said they did not see an impact in their mental health,” said Nanda. “As of a couple weeks ago, almost 60 percent of folks said they were very concerned about their mental health.” To put those percentages in perspective, Nanda said Aligned, as a subsidiary of Boston telemedicine company Amwell, serves patients across 42 states now and works with 250 providers. Last was Frank Cheng, chief commercial officer for Eyenuk Inc. in Woodland Hills, who spoke about how the company’s diabetic retinopathy detection software is making it easier for physicians to diagnose patients remotely. The company’s EyeArt technology uses artificial intelligence to read retinal images and screen for diabetic retinopathy through its large database of images. “Our role is we have separated the locations where some of these things can be conducted while shortening the duration for patients … from 20 minutes to two minutes,” said Cheng.

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