Adam Torres and Sean Howse discuss AI.
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Show Notes:
What is the current state of medicine? How can AI assist? In this episode, Adam Torres and Sean Howse, MD., Chief Medical Officer at Healiom & DopaGE, explore healthcare and AI’s role in medicine.
About Healiom
At Healiom, we believe everyone should have positive care experiences and everything we do is to ensure that positive care experience is accessible to everyone. Healiom is an AI-based real-time specialist care logistics platform that enables access to real-time medical specialist care for mid-level acuity conditions and chronic condition risk assessment. Timely access to specialist care ultimately improves quality, risk scores and healthcare economics. The holistic design of the platform offers longitudinal data access and immediate payments to providers, meets regulatory and billing requirements, and elevates healthcare standards by instituting QA.
About DopaGE
DopaGE delivers comprehensive overdose prevention education based in neuroscience and emergency medicine. Their learning platform is cloud-based for easy implementation by every university and gamified for maximum engagement by every student.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today I have Sean Howse on the line, and he is a chief medical officer.
He is an ER physician, and he’s also CMO over at Helium and Dopage. Sean, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. All right, Sean. So from my audience, everybody’s listening. So I met Sean at a dinner, maybe what about a month or so ago. Would you say, Sean? I think it’s something like that.
Michael Carlin was having some people out and he always brings this eclectic group of filmmakers and, and friends and their friends and me and Sean were sitting there. We just had a great conversation. Was that about maybe like a month ago or so? I don’t know. Time flies. Five weeks ago there was a great time, a good melding of the minds.
Yeah, yeah. So we have everybody, you know, kind of sitting there talking about film, which I’m not necessarily involved in. I’m a podcaster, as everybody knows. And and I’m just listening and I’m here and I hear Sean talking about, you know, his companies and I’m like, oh, this would be some interesting stuff for the podcast.
So I said, hey, Sean, come on the show, man. and here we are. So just to get us kind of kicked off here Some of the things that everybody right now talking about AI how AI is affecting different different niches, different parts of the industry. It’s affecting everything in our lives, I would argue.
And now thinking about how medicine melds with that. So we’ll be kind of exploring that. Exploring that a little bit explor, and also going further into, of course, the company’s helium and do, but I guess just to get us kind of kicked off here, like what led you down this path to even going into entrepreneurship?
Because there’s one side which I, find fascinating, of course, in its own self, which is obviously being in medicine, like that’s a very difficult, difficult role, especially in the, in the ER as you’re, as you’re practicing. But then kind of even adding that. Pressure of being an entrepreneur there to like, like what led you there?
The short version of the story is two different issues. Unfortunately for medicine, it’s all based on a 1950s model. Anyone who follows what’s going on with medicine now we like to call it burnout, but I would call it more of a PTSD issue. There were 1. 4M positions prior to the pandemic in the United States, and now there’s less than a 1M.
And that has to do with a lot of different components, but I would argue that a lot of it has to do with the burdens and tasks that could be automated. Or could be removed from the plate of positions because. Myself and many of my colleagues didn’t go to medical school to spend 50 percent of our time charting calling insurance company for authorization to do the right thing.
you know, kind of like the geography of it all correct and the structures that we have I would argue that medicine is about 20 years behind on the. Push, you know Uber, Amazon, Google, chat, GPT, even cars now use AI industry have been revolutionized by tech. And just now. Are we starting to think about applying it to medicine?
So. There is a need from the physician and patient perspective in regards to efficiencies time and access. The current state of affairs is that the technology is not built for or designed by physicians. There’s not interoperability and so I started off as a. Pretty standard er doctor. And can you hold on, can you use that, is that even a term, Sean?
’cause I heard some of your stories. Is there such thing as being a standard er doctor? It’s a tough gig. . it’s a very difficult gig. A healthcare provider, whether you’re a hmm, a nurse practitioner or a doctor is hard. ’cause we see people on their very worst days. And sometimes it is a blessing that we can help them and sometimes within the confines of the current system getting people the access that they need for their health for themselves.
Their loved ones is extremely difficult. Yeah, so it’s burdensome. And the other thing that I learned that. Why I, why now is that positions are not scalable as they current exist. When I was a regional medical director I learned that I could not scale me past a certain capacity.
It just wasn’t possible. And so and I think if you talk to anyone who has sought out medical care in the last several years, they’ll tell you. Listen, I’m waiting too long. It seems like a pretty simple thing. I’m waiting for authorization, or I’m waiting to see a specialist, or I’m just waiting for this thing to be supplied to me so that I can take care of myself.
And that seems a bit ridiculous in my mind. Mm hmm. And so this next step of I guess kind of dive into, I want to pivot slightly here. So as we start thinking about AI, how this relates to scaling yourself. Take us there. Like, how does that relate to scaling yourself over time?
Sure. So when I see a patient in the emergency room, for example, of course, I have a conversation with the patient. I have a conversation with the ancillary staff, the respiratory therapist, the nurse, the techs who I need to help me provide the care for the patient. More often than not, I’m speaking with the patient’s family.
Sometimes I’m talking with the insurance company and as well as additional specialists, all the kind of orchestrate care. And then I have a conversation with my computer. For And I either type it out, or I dictate it. real, you know, low hanging fruit is let’s record that conversation. And automate it so that I don’t have to spend 30 to 50 percent of my time document.
Okay, another good example. There is a supply demand mismatch of providers. Right? The number of times, unfortunately, that I have diagnosed someone who comes in with a complaint and I have found the etiology to be cancer, for example, is quite high. The problem is, is there’s not a lot of oncologists in rural areas.
Yeah. They are overburdened, right? But there are points in their day. Especially when you scale it up where an oncologist is available, a patient is sick and they can’t get it get to their oncology appointment or they’re tardy. Right, or a doctor who’s an oncologist has, you know. Finishes their task load for the day, and they’ve got an extra hour of time where they’d be happy to see patients or, you know.
In between a day, they’re not working, they’ve got some downtime and they could either, you know, they’ve taken care of their kids and they’ve gone to the gym and they’ve got, you know, 90 minutes to help. We allow access notification of those providers that there’s a patient who could. Seek help, provide them with all of the data.
On that patient. So instead of that provider having to look to 15 different sources for what the patient’s medications are, what their medical problems are, what their biopsy results are, what their imaging and PET scans are, all the data, which usually happens over multiple sites, we pull in all that data, we break it down, we compare it to itself for trends, and then we provide it to the doctor on a one or two page sheet.
All of the information that they could potentially need so that they have a chance to provide decent care remotely or do a curbside consult. Right. So, and a curbside consult in medicine is like none of the hospitals that I currently work at have oncology, right? I diagnosed some poor person with cancer.
I would be extremely happy to order some additional tests. Make sure that they start on their path for what they need to get care. I just don’t know what to order because I’m not an oncologist. I didn’t do that six years of training. But I can get someone with our program on the phone 10 minutes to talk to a patient and also review their data and tell me, Hey, Sean.
They need a PET scan and they need a biopsy and they need these extra labs for this type of cancer which just expedite the entire process and then I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that medicine is really hard One out of five people who visit a provider have a medical error somewhere in their case and By applying AI we do two things for one for the provider and one for the patient As far as the providers, we go, hey.
This is how you practice this kind of medicine, right? Because medicine is not just also an art. This is what you normally order for this case. Would you like this this time as well? And because doctors are busy and they get interrupted a lot throughout the day. So, it’s just a binder. This is what you normally do.
And this is the standard of care. Would you like to do it? Right? Okay, but it also allows providers to say to be educated, right? And the fact like hey, this is the new standard of care This is what other people are doing who do what you do. Are you sure that you haven’t ordered it? Are you sure you don’t want to?
Right, so it’s really a qa component, right? should not replace physicians. It should be a tool to allow them to You know humbly acknowledge some of their limitations Allow them to get when they need help and double check them Yeah, I love having these conversations because when we go through this and, and I mean, I’ve had this conversation in relation to many different industries and this one, obviously, you know, all of us are affected by, especially as we age, right?
Like, I’m one of those people that, man, I, I’m telling you, I, I rarely, I don’t even, I don’t even like to say this, but I’m, but I’m going to put this energy out there, Sean. I don’t get sick. I don’t like, I mean, I, I think I had my first IV when I was in my forties, like I never, I just never got sick really, or never been hurt so going to put that good energy out there.
So, but I know as many, everybody listening knows is as we age, you know, things are going to happen. Right. And when we think about like, when we do need, you know, medical care and other things like that’s one of those things that many of us don’t think about till we need it. Right. So I love having these conversations because I want to see, I want to see individuals like yourself, innovators out there continuing to progress the medical industry and the medical field, because it affects us all.
Right. Absolutely, and it’s not just about you, Adam, but it’s about your parents and absolutely right. And. The system that we’ve designed at helium allows a provider. To have access to a patient’s care circle, so let me make sure I’m clear on that. So let’s say, God forbid. Yeah, your mother gets bill.
And you don’t live in the same place as her, right? If your mom allows you access in a HIPAA protected fashion, and HIPAA is a confidentiality security component of what we do it allows you to not just see all of your mom’s medical problems that she grants you access to see, right? It allows you To not have to fly halfway across the country.
To engage with her specialists, right? She can engage if you are available when she’s meeting with her doctors. You can attend that meeting. Real time, if that’s what she would want. Okay. Now, let’s say you’re just not able to be there at that appointment. What we offer is not just a transcript of. The conversation.
We offer a full note as well as the video. So, mom has something that’s concerning and you say, mom, what the doctor said? She’s like, oh, Adam’s doctor was really nice. And you’re like, mom, with all due respect, I don’t care if the doctor was nice. That’s great. But what did they say you can hear and see it.
Wow, if there are questions. Which inevitably there always are you can have a follow up pre engagement within 10 minutes
Yeah, that’s amazing. The speed, the clarity, when you say that, I think about that old that little kids game, right? Telephone, you say something, you repeat it, and I get it, and I’ve had this conversation before for my long term listeners. They know I talk about my mom all the time on the podcast, and, and I’ll be thinking about it, and I’ll ask her, you know, exactly what you just said.
And I’m like, but what did they say? And you never really know, because everything always changes, right? Ah, nothing, Adam, or ah, this, that, yes. That’s amazing. Sean, I want to spend a couple of minutes here with the time we have left. I do want to talk about DOPAGE, and I’m reading this for everybody that’s listening.
I’m reading this directly from the website. So DOPAGE teaches students how to prevent, recognize, or respond to overdose in the way they like to learn. Drug overdose leading cause of death for Gen Z and millennial Americans, preventable accidental overdose deaths have increased 9 percent each year for two consecutive decades.
And again, I’m reading this from DOPA. ge or the website forward slash about. Sean, tell us about DOPAGE. Like where did this, where did, what was what was the idea behind this? How’d this come about? So this is actually a really amazing story, and I am honored to help this team. It is a crusade, isn’t it?
I just, I just, as I dig in this, it’s a movement, right? It is. So, we have, I mean, think back to your times in university, or even in high school, where parents up to you, and you know, you had a dare conversation at school, and people said, don’t, just don’t do it. Yep, and everyone, or, you know, you do an alcohol edu course and you’d see something horrible happen.
You know, they’d show. Yeah, this is your brain on drugs. And they put the, they put the number of the commercials. This is your brain on drugs. They put the eggs in the frying pan. Right, and, you know group saying, hey you know, my child died of a drunk driver. Alcohol should be, you know, band now.
Yeah. No. As an ER doctor, I definitely do not think that people should use drugs in any form and drive, right? But that education just doesn’t work. It’s not realistic. Right? What do people respond to? They respond to entertainment and they like video games a lot of the time. So. Two wonderful women Madeline Hilliard and Amanda Grennan were at USC doing their undergrad and one of their friends overdosed and died and could have been saved if people knew what to do.
And so it started with Madeline and Madeline says, I need to do something about this. And as she did more research, she found out that that year, 11 people had died of overdose in her college campus and the year before. It had been 11 and the year before that it had been 10. These are kids wow, so She started by handing out trust, test strips to test your drugs and educating people on how to administer narcan and She is able to Show that there has not been a single overdose death at usc since she started Wow, that was a volunteer company which only staffed by volunteers, very comprehensive team of young students.
They’ve expanded to several schools across the nation but at a certain point, that is not scalable, right? So Madeline decided that, you know, this information needs to get out there. That we need to teach people that, hey, you may not want to mix alcohol and Xanax. And if you do, this is what’s going to happen, right?
These are the things you can do to protect yourself. These are the things that, you know, should be in danger. And then, of course, there are different rules in different states, right? Where if there’s a bunch of drugs at the fraternity or sorority or wherever, whatever party you’re at, In some states, if you call the police or 9 1 1 to help you save a life, you can be arrested.
Yeah. But there’s not transparency on that at least not for college students. So, what they’ve done is they have designed an educational program which each drug is basically like a cartoon network cartoon. And then it’s, and then the education. Gamified, right? And so what they do is they offer education in a format that people actually want to, to engage in and so they actually learn.
Wow. that’s a, when you say it, it sounds like such a, a novel idea. And, and the fact that, it’s had that type of effect. And it just goes to show, like, we think about education in many formats and how it affects our day to day lives, right? Like, this is, really the basis of our society is education and implementation.
And looking at this, it’s like, okay, so, Yeah. How many lives can be saved from this, right? Like, that’s the dream, right? If that’s just one college campus you’re talking about, like, as this is rolled out further and further and further, like, that becomes super interesting in combating that, that pandemic, right?
This team have saved over a thousand lives, and that’s documented. Wow. These are a thousand lives of young men and women. Amen. Wow. Who would have died otherwise and because they had the education provided and the tools they needed, right, either drug test strips or reversal agents the next generation of doctors, lawyers, artists, painters, they’re going to make it.
Right? Everyone’s entitled to a mistake here or there, and this allows that mistake to not be permanent.
Well, Sean I want to say thank you for taking some time out of your schedule to come on to the show and to educate us on helium dopage, of course, and the marvelous work being done there. And really just give us an update on what’s going on in AI and some of the advantages and what it’s going to look like going forward.
So giving us that vantage point. That being said, if somebody wants to follow your work and to continue what’s the best way for them to do that? There are 3 formats. For if you want access to the materials for dope, you can go to that’s their website. And learn more about what that team does and how to get that at your university or at your social group.
For helium also website, it’s H. E. A. L. I. O. M. dot com. And if they would like to follow what I’m doing personally, or reach out to me, they can just reach out to me at Sean Howse. LinkedIn. Great. And we’ll put the links up. For everybody listening, we’ll put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on them and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with us and you haven’t hit the subscribe button yet, I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Come on, hit that subscribe button. It’s not going to bite. Get it done. We have many more mission based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing.
Sean, again, hey, I know we’re recording this Monday morning. Early, early. I know you. Thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it, Adam.
