Special Mini-Series From HLTH 2024
The healthcare industry accounts for nearly one third of the USA's GDP and yet all Americans can agree that the system is ripe for innovation, heck even just plain 'improvements' would be great.
So, I took Awesome Future to HLTH 2024, one of the largest yearly gatherings for healthcare technology professionals and innovators. As part of the Like A Girl Media podcast network we recorded these four interviews on the show floor, direct from Media Central, to dive into the state of innovation in health IT and startups.
We'll share two episodes starting Thursday, December 19th and two more starting on the 26th. If you enjoy these episodes, could you share them with a friend?
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Dr. Allen Gee is a neurologist, neuroscientist, and innovator who leads the Wyoming Health Innovation Living Lab (WHIL).
Key Takeaways:
- WHIL focuses on vetting and operationalizing healthcare technologies, particularly in neural health.
- Dr. Gee aims to address the devastating impacts of cognitive decline through early detection and intervention.
- The lab uses innovative technologies to assess mobility, cognition, speech, and vision to predict health trajectories.
- Dr. Gee emphasizes the importance of personalized, precision neural health to improve overall wellbeing.
- WHIL is helping to develop and clinically test tools that identify cognitive decline early and empower individuals to manage their health.
Dr. Gee's work at WHIL involves partnering with companies to test and implement healthcare technologies. He focuses on neural health, aiming to enhance cognition and mobility to help people live independently longer.
The lab uses cutting-edge technologies to assess various aspects of health, including speech analytics and vision system digitization.Dr. Gee emphasizes the concept of "neurohealth," which encompasses the entire nervous system and its interaction with the world.
He advocates for a holistic approach to health, focusing on sleep, nutrition, movement, and mindfulness. His goal is to use technology and data to provide personalized insights and interventions that can improve overall health outcomes.
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About Allen GeeMD, PhD, FAAN
Dr Gee is a board-certified neurologist and founder of Frontier NeuroHealth, a private neurology practice with clinics throughout Wyoming.
Dr. Gee also holds a PhD in Psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how your immune system and your central nervous system interact.
With a passion for using technology to improve patients’ lives, Dr. Gee designed WHILL to be an innovation ecosystem that is clinically-integrated and equipped to support the needs of technology companies that are developing, expanding, or launching disruptive healthcare solutions.
Dr. Gee is also founder of Optimal NeuroHealth which pr
A "glow up" signifies a positive transformation, reflecting the journey of becoming a better, more successful version of oneself.
At The Glow Up, we humanize the startup and innovation landscape by focusing on the essential aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Groundbreaking ideas are often ahead of their time, making resilience and perseverance vital for founders and product leaders.
In our podcast, we engage with innovators to discuss their transformative ideas, the challenges they face, and how they create value for future success.
If you're a founder or product leader seeking your own glow up, or a seasoned entrepreneur with stories to share, we invite you to join our guest list via this link.
Hello, and welcome to The Glow Up from HLTH 2024. I'm Nathan C and today I'm here with Dr. Alan Gee of the Wyoming Health Innovation Living Lab. Did I get it? You got it. Excellent. Perfect. I'm glad to be here. Dr. Gee, thank you so much for joining me today. You're welcome. I am so excited, to talk with you about everything, that is on your mind about technology, healthcare, neurology, and more. Before we do that, can you introduce yourself and the work that you do?
Dr. Allen Gee:I'm Alan Gee. I'm a neurologist. I'm also a neuroscientist. I have a PhD in psycho neuroimmunology from 30 years ago when it wasn't cool. I am an informaticist by accident. I'm an innovator and, practice, neurology across Wyoming as well as, innovate technology.
Nathan C:And so today at the Wyoming Health Innovation Living Lab, We
Dr. Allen Gee:can just call it
Nathan C:WHIL will, can you tell me a little bit what your work looks like at Will?
Dr. Allen Gee:great news yesterday. the Will, we've created that to vet technologies. So we work with big companies and small companies to actually operationalize their ideas or their products. It's co localized with my clinical neurology practice. So we can work with patients, we can get feedback. And we can help these companies innovate in sprints. And so yesterday, two of the companies that we had the pleasure of working with in the past, both were awarded, up and coming, companies in the, innovation hub here. It was, fantastic news. and we also are working on other ways to solve problems. Yeah. So what sort of problems, what is the problem space that you're working in? So, I'm focused on neural health, and I'd love to dive deeper into that. Well, many opportunities. So one of the challenges, one of the problems that the Living Lab has addressed is the cost of aging. In Wyoming, in the 2017 Aging Plan for the state of Wyoming, a state of 568, 000 citizens, the cost to care for elderly in long term care was 139 million dollars, with projections to triple in 12 years. And so I looked at that as a challenge. It's like, how do we impact that? And as a neurologist, I can tell you who's going to be in long term care next year based on how many times they've fallen this year and how many times they've been in the hospital. It's a little too late in life to have a major impact on that trajectory. As I was with my neurologist hat on, if we can maximize or enhance people's cognition and their mobility, they can live independently longer. So the benefit of working in the Living Lab is we have access to really cutting edge technologies globally. And I was able to piece together several different technologies so we can assess people independently.
Nathan C:What does, doing testing, in the community at earlier stages, look like? What were you looking at in, in the scenarios?
Dr. Allen Gee:Well, so, I was looking at ways that we could assess mobility and cognition. Right? And so, just how you walk, how you move. And so that we were looking at timed up and go, but it's a little hard to do that remotely on your camera, on your computer at home. So now we're looking at how long it takes to stand up and sit down as an indication of your fall risk, of your mobility. Just an assessment. We're looking at speech analytics. And I chose, speech and vision because of the complexity of those systems. It touches many parts of the brain. So if there is a dysfunction in how you produce language, we can assess that in 45 seconds of conversational speech and pick up problems, perhaps before you know you even have them. Vision system analytics, too. There's dozens of ways that we can look at how your vision interacts with the world around you and how you process information. Of those, we chose three just so we could look at how we can assess, under 15 minutes at home, your status, and then you can track it longitudinally. And we can see what that trajectory is, and the intent is to engage people years before they're at the doctor's office with a debilitating disease, and change their health span trajectory.
Nathan C:I have, all these questions about, like, how do you go about convincing somebody to change, a behavior, or a health outcome, that's decades in the future? Well
Dr. Allen Gee:how do you get people to do anything, in their best interest, right? And so if you approach it from that, the psychological behavior modification story. All the things that people have tried, many of them don't work. Certainly seeing a doctor every three months for your hypertension and getting a pill doesn't really work. The metabolic syndromes that are so prevalent now, we can talk all day long, we can make suggestions. My belief is that we'll be able to engage individuals if we can have contextualized knowledge about their predispositions, about their values, about their culture, about where they live, and then provide them a little bit of contextualized knowledge that we can use to nudge their change in their habits. So it's going to be an ongoing daily touch, if you will it's a daily practice.
Nathan C:It's hard to get people to do anything. It's really hard to get people to do something in their own best interest. that's a challenge for any technology, any solution. Similarly, you're looking at outcomes in The future, that have high costs, that have high impacts in quality of life. and it's, it feels like, from a lay person's perspective that there's a lot of other things that could go in between. How does your work help you understand the signal and the noise, in that sort of predictive, ecosystem that you have
Dr. Allen Gee:many things to unpack there. Yeah. and you know, The first thing that caught my attention was in the future. I'm not talking about, well, I am talking about the future, talking about change in health trajectory, talking about preventing or changing the slope of aging and the disease acquisition and progression. But what I focus on, I call it neurohealth. And so it's the nervous system. It's not the brain, it's not just mental health, it's not just brain health, it's not women's health or body health or a disease. It's maximizing the human's ability to interact with the world. The world around them, outside and within them. Because what the brain does is it really focuses on survival of the organism. So it's looking for threats that are on the outside. You know, you have your outside sensors, and if something is dangerous or scary, you want to stay away from it. You have disruption of your physiology. It detects that and tries to correct it. But we only have so much energy to apply to that survival. And if you're burning it up on unnecessary things, other systems, your immune system is, you know, my PhD is in psychoneuroimmunology. Your immune system Doesn't function as well. Your GI system doesn't interact with a microbiome and nutrition as well. Reproduction isn't as important. Cognition isn't as important when you're running a finding. And so I like the term neuro health'cause it's inclusive. And so it's not just what's happening years down the road in disease that we might prevent. It's how can we help you live the best life now, be the most productive? And so the foundational drivers of neural health, good place to start are quality sleep. Mm-Hmm good nutrition, regular movement, and the right movement and mind. Mindfulness. And mindfulness isn't just the meditation. It's engaging, it's being in the flow, it's learning new things. It's challenging and building an exercise in the brain like you do the body.
Nathan C:I was ready for it to be a big idea, but when you break it down into those core pillars, that feels like what many people are searching for or trying to engage with already, right? The key
Dr. Allen Gee:word there is trying, right? Even those that know what they need to do, it's hard. It's hard to do. Yeah. It's hard to change that habit. And so again, back to the ability to have those frequent touches and the bits of knowledge and be able to deliver that in a way that will impact their behaviors and habits. I was in a conversation with a gentleman who has great experience in changing society's behaviors and he pointed out to the crowd that was there. If he wanted me to do something, it had to be attached to my mountain bike. And so if I had to do that one thing before I could ride my mountain bike, I would do it. Everybody's different. And so, being able to use technologies now, to digitize form and function, to understand what you're putting in your body, nutrition wise, what it becomes in your body, on the background of your genomics, and then know proteomics, metabolomics, exposomics, as well as culturally what means something to you, what your social determinants of health are, what your personal determinants of health are. When we can manage that data and create authentic information, then machine learning and AI can help us develop insights. when we can manage that amount of authentic information, manage it beyond what the smartest brain, neurologist, physician can assimilate, we're going to see relationships that are, we've not thought of before, they're going to be impactful. And then the end game of the informatics is the Performance and how do we use that to change one's outcome and performance?
Nathan C:there's something really specific in the way that you talk about the body systems as almost like inputs and outputs and you know something that I process and really conceptualize as a very like fleshy organic thing i'm hearing you almost see the body as like different channels of data and there's something very unique about your connection between, informatics and body systems.
Dr. Allen Gee:Yes. And, you know, you can't improve what you can't measure, and so looking at ways that we can measure the dynamic nature of that fleshy beast that we call a human, right? And so I'm intrigued by statements that if you take this pill, If you do this surgery, it's going to make, have outcomes. It's like, the system is so dynamic. and I was trying to think of ways to visualize that. because what the background physiology is, at any particular point in time, will influence how that body reacts to recovery from the surgery or from the reaction to that pill. and I'm not sure it's the best visualization, but I'm working with it. It is, you know, taking a cold frying pan and cracking an egg into it. It looks a lot different. It's a little different than when you crack an egg into a hot pan. And so, the environment that we're putting food into or interacting with the environment is influenced by that background physiology. And if we don't take that into consideration, if we can't understand that, our drug discovery, many interventions are going to have mixed results. And one size does not fit everybody.
Nathan C:I wonder if we can get specific just a little bit. You talked about, about couple of your technology partners, and some of the work that you've been doing, are you able to talk about like a technology or a test or, a way that you've partnered, at WHILL to, to learn more about?
Dr. Allen Gee:So I'm pretty excited about the product Zyliant. Mm-Hmm. for a resilient agent. And this is the conglomeration of some technologies to again, assess and identify those that are on a steeper trajectory decline in the wild, if you will and so we make it available through health fairs, through primary care, directly to the consumers, so they can understand what their risk might look like. And so one of the partners is Canary, doing the speech analytics. And as I understand, you know, 2, 500 different markers of how we produce language that we can analyze. Of those, I think there's 13 that are relevant for Alzheimer's. So we can pick that up early. Praxi Vision is another partner that is looking at ways to digitize the vision system. So it's not just eye movements, it's not just visual acuity, it's how well we can track objects, how well we can coordinate the movements of the eyes, how we can understand what we're looking at, how we can respond to what we're looking at. And so while we have a dozen different ways we can analyze the vision in 2D and 3D, I've chosen just three basic screens to include in the Zillion product. We're working on a decentralized digital data solution that puts people in control of their data. So they have to give consent. We can audit the consent. We can audit the use of that data. We can tokenize the use of their data. And so, thank you very much. how do you get people to trust doing a neural functional assessment? People are like really shy. I don't want my employer to know that I can't think as clearly as I did 20 years ago. maybe not even an employer, maybe even family. Family, insurance, so if we can track who uses that data, with your consent, I think it gives them a level of confidence to be willing to Participate and do the assessments. Yeah. Then, the other aspect is if, we use their data and there's value there, we can tokenize them for sharing and being part of that ecosystem. And so another enticing feature, perhaps, of being part of the, bigger picture. I
Nathan C:love, I'm hearing tokens, so I'm thinking blockchain, I'm hearing, I love that there's this mix of like very straightforward biomarkers. Our curves and like, you know, using optical testing to understand people's cognitive abilities and then putting those relatively like, lo-fi seaming signals into these very powerful processing tools, kind of using the latest and greatest of different, knowledge technologies, ownership technologies so that you can, do all those tasks around anonymizing, leveraging, studying, processing. So from the HLTH conference, the theme this year is to be bold. What's one way that you would like to see the healthcare industry be bolder next year?
Dr. Allen Gee:So I'm really pushing you the personalized precision neural health. I want to change the narrative on the interaction of the body with the world around us. Mm-Hmm. take away the. The stigma of mental health, the focus on what it is, and that's neural health and the neural physiology, and how that can impact the health and wellness, and changing the health span trajectory. And, as far as the bold move is being able to embrace disruption. You know, putting lipstick on a pig doesn't work.
Nathan C:So, what's your approach to building trust into the projects that you're doing at WHILL
Dr. Allen Gee:well, it's finding the right partners to work with. And, good people, good ideas, good products, good engineers. And so, is the signal that we're capturing, and again, I'm speaking in informatics language now, are we capturing the signal that they believe that we're capturing? Okay, and then it's, how do we protect that data, and how do we contextualize it? And I'm still looking at ways that we can use, computers and algorithms to contextualize this trusted and authentic information we're creating. I think we're going to see insights that we haven't dreamed of as physicians and how it can affect our healthspan. Amazing.
Nathan C:So, just wrapping up, who are you looking to connect with and how can people find you and the work that you're doing?
Dr. Allen Gee:always looking for collaborators, always looking for innovative technologies worldwide. You know, if it makes sense, if we can operationalize it, if it can change things. It's the insight on function. Also looking at people that want to invest in those disruptive technologies and viewing the world in healthcare delivery in a different way. And aren't afraid to jump in, participate, help build companies, help deliver products and solutions to everybody.
Nathan C:Amazing. What a great call to action. Dr. Alan Gee, it has been so great to talk with you today on the Globe Up from HLTH. Thank you so much for the work that you do.
Dr. Allen Gee:My pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.