TECHNOLOGY AND PATIENT CARE WITH KIMBERLY WILSEY
Christina: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of I Am Christina DiArcangelo. And today I have a guest on that y'all should know. She's been on before, my friend and colleague, Kimberly Wilsey. Thank you so much for joining me today, Kimberly.
Kimberly: Oh, you're so welcome. As usual, it's always a pleasure to be part of your incredible podcast. So I'm really excited to get to talk to you and everyone else today.
Christina: I'm so excited to have you on because for once, guys, we're not talking about glam and we're not talking about women empowerment. We are actually talking about technology today. And you guys are probably wondering, what do I mean by technology exactly? What we're going to discuss today is Spectral Analytics Precision Telemonitoring. I am so pleased that we have added Kimberly to our team, and she has joined us as an Executive Director of Business Development. So, Kimberly, would you like to say hello from that extent this time?
Kimberly: Yes, absolutely. Again, I'm really excited stepping into my new role as the Executive Director of Business Development. It's a mouthful. With Spectral Analytics Precision Telemarketing. It's really wonderful to be able to use my experience past years being in the corporate world, management, recruiting in various different industries, and have those transferable skills and experiences to really connect and build those relationships within the pharmaceutical and biotech space. So really grateful to Christina for seeing the potential and really educating myself and now being this new role, hopefully educating everyone else with this call and hopefully making those really valuable connections so we can get our Spectral Analytics, percentile modern platform out more into the world to help leadership, which is really important to us.
Christina: Thank you so much. And as you guys see, we're wearing our team color, which is black. For some reason, all the teams, we wear black all the time and we don't coordinate it. We just show up to our meetings and we're wearing black. So I think what's really awesome about this, Kimberly, was that you and I had a pre existing relationship prior to you joining SAPTM. And we'll just call it SAPTM because Spectral Analytics Precision Telemonitoring is such a long word. It's just easier to call it SAPTM. So Kimberly had heard about SAPTM because we have been friends and colleagues prior to her joining our team. So she was aware of the Angel Award that we won, which were the winners of the most impactful tech platform across the world a couple of years ago. And since then, we've done clinical studies in the system recently. An example of that is the Zalera study, where we did a cannabinoid study mainstream pharmaceutical protocol in our EDC and our EPRO and our EDC. Sorry, because the words just go together. I apologize. Maybe I need more caffeine. I don't know. Yes, always. But the cool thing is that you got to talk to me about some of these things. Obviously non confidential, right? Because we can't talk about the back end technology and some of those things when you were just my friend and colleague. Now that you have joined the team, I think it's been about a month and a half or so ago. I think now that you've seen the system, you've seen the telemonitoring side and how that works versus the EDC and the ePRO side versus the bots because they all kind of have their homes, if you will, across the enterprise. And so now that you've actually seen it and you've been on dev calls with our team at SAPTM, what do you think about the system and why are you excited about joining and serving patients and selling this platform?
Kimberly: Yeah, well, I just think it's really fascinating kind of bringing together that technology piece with the patients. What you've always been about within that whole ecosystem of SAPTM is making sure we are providing that holistic view, I guess, to the patients. We're kind of that head and heart as you say. And I love how advanced the platform is. It's powerful and it's also empowering. It's capturing so much vital information that is there to help the patient and providers really in real time. So just the immediate responses that we get. So I just think, again, it's just really fascinating how we're able to take this platform and use it so we can kind of get a step ahead and really be kind of that forefront in terms of the competition, right? I think this platform is so unique. There definitely are those out there, but nothing like SAPTM. And just keeping the patient and their well being at the core of it all and having everything talk to each other so we can continue to make it better as well because we're always improving. So, I love that. I love how it's immediate access and response and just how much it captures. I think it's pretty incredible. Long winded answer.
Christina: No, that's fantastic. And I think the other thing that's awesome about this is that we have a proactive approach to making sure we take care of our patients right rather than reactive right now in healthcare. And I mean no disrespect to my healthcare colleagues, being in this space now over two decades and being a patient advocate on top of it. When we built our system, I never skirt the fact that I'm not a tech programmer, I'm not a tech CEO. No, that's not me. However, I am a biotech pharmaceutical device CEO as well as a patient advocate CEO. So for me, when we were building this system, thank God we have amazing tech staff that knows how to execute what's in my brain because I think differently than technical people do. And we've learned how to talk to each other where we don't have a gap in information. But our system is always worrying about the patients and our entire tech team. That is their focus. Right, Kimberly? Like they worry about the patients. We don't want to leave anybody behind. We can't leave anybody behind if they've signed up for SAPTM through their provider, because they're always with us until they withdraw their consent which is important to say. If a patient doesn't want to be part of the program anymore, they can withdraw their consent, just like you can withdraw your consent in a clinical study. The cool thing about our platform is that we had a trifecta when we built it because we came from the clinical trial site side, because I've actually worked and managed clinical trial sites, as my CRO, Affinity Bio Partners was hired to do in some instances. But then the clinical study aspect of what does the biotech companies worry about from a sponsor perspective and then the CRO perspective, right? What does the CROs worry about when they're managing clinical trials? The visibility factor with our system, the EDC and the EPRO, we can fire queries directly out to those providers that had a data transfer into our system. What I mean to say for people who don't understand is that imagine in clinical studies, we have labs, we pull blood, right? Just like when you go to your doctors and they ask you to go see a quest or whomever it is you go to. Well, clinical studies, we do the same thing. So we did a data transfer agreement with one of the labs that we were working on, a recent study, and we were able to fire queries to them out of our system. Most EDC companies do not do that. They don't have the capacity, they don't have the tech side to be able to do it, or they don't have the clinical ability to do it. So with us, yes, we might not be the CRO that's working on the project. We don't care, right? Because we're not coming through. Affinity Biopartners. We're coming through SAPTM. But what our clients get is they get that clinical knowledge where we're going to tell you, are you sure you want this at a check? Because this is what it will mean from a clinical standpoint. Most tech companies can't do that in this space.
Kimberly: Yeah. And what I think is so important with being proactive, as you say, and kind of having that competitive advantage with SAPTM is being able to track and trace all of the patient care. It's what we've talked about, is kind of having a window into that patient's everyday life. And we're also being very transparent to all those individuals that are collecting that information for that patient, patients.
Christina: I totally agree with you. And what we've learned in COVID, right, with patient treatments and some of the misinformation that was out there, and patients were doing all kinds of things because they're reading stuff, there's all these things coming out. Do this, do that, take this, take that. And they're doing it because they're desperate, right? Because they didn't want to die. Then once we get through the COVID thing which we're still in people. There's still traces of COVID. It's mutated. It's still here. People are still getting it. We then saw an uptake in opiate abuse and mental health because of the isolation that COVID caused all of us, because we couldn't leave our homes, because we were not allowed, because we were in lockdown. You know, luckily we're in the United States. We weren't in a country where it was well worse for them. Eventually we were allowed to get out at least in Pennsylvania. You know, the Commonwealth kind of went back to sorta everyday life, if you will. But even still we see things. You know, restaurants that used to have lunch buffets don't have them anymore, which is odd because we're not in COVID anymore, but they did away with it. We see a lot more remote working. Right? People don't have to go into the office every day because COVID taught us we can work from home. All of these things perpetuate mental health issues, right? And so when you have patients that are in an acute state from a mental health standpoint, whether they're having an anxiety attack or they are very depressed and are feeling still very isolated and are considering, God forbid, suicide, there's no way to track patients today. No way. The doctors don't have that connection. The only way they know is if the patient calls on the phone and tells somebody, which these types of patients aren't going to do that. Right. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of stigma attached to mental health patients. There's a lot of reasons why they choose not to. Our system doesn't allow for that because they are connected to the wearables. So whatever wearable they're wearing, whether it's a Garmin, Fitbit, Apple, Aura ring, Whoops, you know, all the different devices we're hooked into. We get all the data transfers that come in per patient as they consent. The doctor and the doctor's staff then gets alerts if the noise in their home is too loud, if their blood pressure goes up, depending upon their device now folks, not everybody's device does this. Depends on the generation. Even with your Apple watch, your 02 steps, your oxygen, not every watch does that. If you have an older watch, it's not going to do that. The newer watches do. Like, I don't even have the newest one. I have one of the newer ones, but I don't even have the newest one either, and I'm a tech person.
Kimberly: You got to get on that Christina.
Christina: I have the Aura ring here. I have to hook it up. Yeah. Let me know how you like it. Yeah. Because the battery life supposedly is three to seven days, which that's part of the problem, right? If your watch dies, then you lose connectivity with our system because your watch died, you can't have it on at the same time you're charging it. So that's a little bit of a problem. So back to that. So if you're having some sort of issue, acute issue, an attack, whatever, or you're not sleeping, your doctor automatically receives that, right? And if the bot is set up because that client wants the bot to be set up to ask questions to the patients directly, these patients will get information directly on their watch or on their phone from our bot that says, are you okay, yes or no, and are you in a crisis, yes or no? So we, again, are being more proactive rather than reactive. And maybe if more people subscribe to our telemonitoring, there'll be less people that have been left behind.
Kimberly: Right. We could have gotten to them a lot sooner and provided that care that they were needing. It's really a full holistic lifecycle of patient care and incorporating the technology. And I think that's why to me, it's so fascinating to continue to learn about and want so badly to be devoted to SAPTM and get this platform with all of these benefits out to our providers and doctors, physicians, to get to these patients that are in such need of our help.
Christina: I agree, and I think what's been cool, too, is that you've been able to be on calls with us, like with potential clients, and to hear directly from them the stuff I've been telling you as we've been onboarding and showing you the system with the team. I think what's been really cool is once we get in there, we start showing people and we're not sales people. I mean, Kimberly is our salesperson, not me. In my younger years. Yes. You know what I mean? We're not sales people. My tech people are not sales people. They're going to explain that tool inside and out. They're going to demo, they're going to show you misfires on purpose. So you see what happens. So you see the preventative measures that we've built in there with the checks that we've built in automatically. So you've had that opportunity to talk to clinical trial sites, talk to CROs so far, hear feedback from biotechs that have used the platform, who have fallen in love with it. They actually like to use it. Most biotech companies are like oh my god, there's this one. Now I have to learn this crap. And I know because I've been on that biotech side for the majority of my career. It's only been 13 years that I've been working for myself in the CRO space. So I still get hired in house a lot of times for biotech companies to do what I do best. Right? So I have critiqued so many EDC and EPROs throughout my career. So that was another thing that we took into consideration when we were building this thing because we wanted an interface that was easy to use and graphically a pleasing thing.
Kimberly: Yes. Easy to navigate. That's what I recall very vividly coming into this position and getting to demo the platform and having you and your team walk me through it is I was able to see a parallel alongside of my recruiting experience with multiple applicant tracking systems and bringing that over and seeing how we're able to use that information for the patients, which is randomized, right? And for me, stepping into this, I'm like, wow, I can get through this too. I understand this. So it's such a benefit for those providers and physicians. They were to decide to make the decision to use our platform to feel comfortable and confident using it as well, because it's so important. I always say a confused mind says no. Right. So we want this to be user friendly for everybody involved.
Christina: Yeah. And then we have these awesome bots that everybody wants to talk about. I was talking to one of our colleagues, one of our ex generals, who is a colleague, as you know, Kimberly, earlier this week, and he was so excited because there's a potential opportunity for us to work on something together to help veterans with PTSD. And that's huge, right? Because that's where we're focused, is to help people, especially mental health. And when he asked me about this, let's get working on this. Do we have time to work on yes, of course. We always have time to work on things to help people. Right? We will make time. Even if we're busy, we're working on the Miami event or something right now. This is patients. We stop and we focus. They're at the forefront.
Kimberly: That's right. Most important.
Christina: We don't close down during the holidays like other people do. No, not us. So what was cool was I was like, yeah, the bots are ready to go. They're out to play. We use the bot in the Zell study for prescreening. But what I want to tell people about the bots, besides what I already alluded to, that we can send messages through the telemonitoring system. We can also do that in clinical studies so we can retain patients, because we all know how expensive it is to get the patients in the study, because you have to pay for the study coordinator time, CRO time, biotech time. Right? Everybody's touching these patients to recruit them. You want to keep them once you have them. Right? You don't want them going away. The bots is the easy way for that to happen because they can be in communication constantly with the patients. Right? Don't forget you have an appointment tomorrow. Because they don't show up. Especially indications like DN when they have brain fog, right? Yes. And they forget. Did they brush their teeth or not? I'm not making fun, but that's what happens with those patients. Right? So this bot gives you an opportunity. Even Slade's excited. He popped up on bots.
Kimberly: I know. He's chiming in that he loves those bots just as much as we do. Really, really vocal about it, by the way. So sorry about that.
Christina: That's okay. It's great. He's excited, we're excited. But the other cool thing about the bots is that we can program them to do anything if you need to find more customers, right? And you have a company where you're trying to attract people. We have a meta crawler bot that crawls behind the actual all the infrastructures website wise. And they can throw people customers to you because we have that ability. You know, I like to explain it like when you're on Facebook and all of a sudden you see an ad pop up and you were talking to your friend about a pair of shoes you want and the ad shows up. So that's an example of what we can do but not be intrusive, right? Because we're not those types of people that are intrusive but, you know, say you have some sort of teaching company and you have a bunch of things that are handbooks and information that you have to convey. And you have to deal with this from a human to human level. Well, that doesn't have to happen anymore. You could do it with our bots. So our bot would sit on your website. It would talk, we would program it to the rules and the regulations and whatever you're trying to do, so that that way somebody could go ahead and put a question in there and the answer appears, and they can keep going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. So we have that ability as well. As Kimberly knows, we have a potential client that's in a completely different it's not a healthcare provider. No, it's not. At all. But that's the beauty of our system, the way we built it. It's agile. That's what Anil always likes to talk about, is the agility of our system and how we can just plug and play a lot of the standards that we've already built in the system. So we come up faster than the competitors because we built out everything so mindfully, during COVID we were building this infrastructure while everybody was complaining and we were still running studies and working with the White House, but we were building the system, and that's why the list system came up so quickly.
Kimberly: Yes, I really loved speaking to the individuals in the different industries, how these bots can be customized, like you said, to whatever they're looking to use it for. And I think that's a huge capability to be able to do that. Slade's really excited.
Christina: She's really excited about the bot. But I think it was just important for us to share that type of information with everybody so that they understand the full capacity. There's a lot of things we don't talk about because we can't talk about it because it's proprietary and so we're not allowed to talk about it. But if people want to learn more about us, Kimberly, what's the best way for them to get a hold of us?
Kimberly: Yeah, absolutely. They can reach out to me on LinkedIn, which would be fantastic. I think it's a great way to network and connect and also learn more about SAPTM. And all of our other companies within our heart and head centered ecosystem for our patients. So first and foremost, reach out via LinkedIn, and then that way I can follow up directly with a personal call or even a Zoom call or email. There's so many different vehicles to communicate. But you can reach out on LinkedIn. Yes, you can find us. We're out there.ready to help and serve
Christina: We're there, And I know the tech team is going to be a little upset about this, but I think that it'll launch before this publishes our podcast today. But we are revamping our website, and Kimberly's been working on that with me and the rest of the tech team now for the past four weeks. And you're probably wondering, why four weeks? Like, they're tech people. Why is it so slow? No, no. It's not because we're slow. It's because we were redesigning and refining the type of information that we are happy to share now that we have become more of an established company. Before, we didn't want people really to know too much about what we were doing. Right? Because we didn't want somebody else to get ahead of us in our good work. And in the tech space, just like any other industry, people steal ideas and run down the street you know, and especially if it's good. And ours is. So we have the new website coming out so everyone should pay attention. We'll have a launch, and Kimberly and I will definitely be sharing the new website. But I think the other thing we should tease them with, Kimberly, is Miami, right?
Kimberly: Yes. Need to talk about Miami.
Christina: We'll talk about this for just a couple more minutes folks because we're heading to the end almost with our time, and my production team tries to keep me centered and focused for just a 20 minute clip sometimes I don't always do that. So today I'm trying really hard to. So we are doing a huge event through our sister company, Affinity Patient Advocacy. And as you guys know, that is the nonprofit firm that advocates for patients. And so our patients go through SAPTM when they come in through us, for obvious reasons, right? Because they have access. So to that point, if you have a nonprofit advocacy firm that needs help like this, working with a telemonitored company like ours, please reach out to us because we're benign. We're not going to say, oh, well, APA is the only one allowed in our system. No, no. The goal is to help people. If it's another CRO, well, yeah, we have a CRO in our family of companies, as everyone knows, Affinity Bio Partners. But that doesn't matter to us because, again, it's patient care that is number one. So we're happy to work with other CRO companies. We're happy to work with anybody who comes to the table that wants help, because we're here to help. So with all that in mind, that's why I'm bringing up Miami, because it's with Affinity Patient Advocacy, and it's going to be a huge medical cannabis event where we are teaching I shouldn't say teaching we're trying to provide education regarding clinical research for medical cannabis and the developments of that advocacy and how that looks and how that works. Because we advocate for so many patients on the cannabinoid side through APA. Basically since 2016, when I got in the space through the CRO, they figured out who I was because I'm the same name. I don't have a Jill Smith for a name. So that's how they found me. So we are also going to be talking about technology, right. And how a tool like ours is one of those things that can really help track the patients. Dispensaries. Dispensary owners, growers that have products that are regulated through the state and they push them into the dispensaries for sale. They should be signing up for our telemonitoring because we can track any adverse events that may happen, or god forbid, a serious adverse occurs because the patient has to be hospitalized. We can see all that. And we can help those people as well, better manage how their product works right, therapeutically. Because they would get listings just like anybody else would, and we could help guide them if they didn't have professionals that understood what these listings meant because you can tap the CRO, which PS is the same CEO, Christina. So, our event is going to be big time. It's November 4th. It's going to be in Miami. We found our place. We're very excited about that. We're going to launch very soon where it is. We're still trying to keep it quiet because you know how it works with these events. And we are seeing sponsorships come in. So that's important to mention is sponsorships. It's a great way for companies similar to ours. Again, we're not competitive. We're happy to bring in companies like ours that are integrity based companies so other people can then interface with them. Because there's lots of opportunities for networking, but there's lots of opportunities to learn. And so our tickets are up for sale as well. So you can find this information on the affinitypatientadvocacy.org website. So it's affinitypatientadvocacy.org because we're a nonprofit it's a .org not a .com. I know sometimes it gets a little confusing. Even I do it. And I'm the CEO. And under the events tab, this is the only event right now that we have under there. We're going to open up a silent auction early so people can participate in a silent auction. Again, that helps us raise money on the APA side because we do that work for free. We do not charge our patients because we believe patients already pay enough.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Christina: So you'll get to see us down there prime time. So if you have questions at that time, we're happy to set up meetings and things like that because there will be a VIP networking event, this invitation only after the core conference, if you will, which is from 2:30. Check in at 2. It starts at 2:30. It ends at 6. We have a half an hour switch, and then the VIP comes in, and then we're really going to have I mean, it's going to be glam, glitz. Come on. It's CD style.
Kimberly: That's right.Go big or go home
Christina: That's right. My superhero will be there. Maybe the bot would come in play.
Kimberly: It's a great way to introduce everybody all the different the teammates across all of the sister companies. It's going to be a really great time.
Christina: yeah. For people to see we really are a family. I know y'all read my articles in CEO World Magazine or you read them in the DArc, or you see my posts through my brands, right? Family is important to me, not only personally, but professionally. So our companies are one big family. We just have brothers and sisters, that's all, throughout all the different ones. I mean, even Sparkle Sisters is going to be down at that event. And so Sparkle Sisters obviously works with all the other companies as well, because that's an empowerment company. We're trying to create an online sisterhood for women so women can feel empowered and they have a safe place to be one. Wow. We covered a lot today.
Kimberly: We really did. Yeah. We're like're like well.
Christina: we'll just talk about SAPTM. But, you know, like Kimberly said earlier, they all kind of interchange, so no one, I don't think, feels in all the companies. Oh, well, I'm an SAPTM person. Like Kimberly's an SAPTM person, right? But she also works on CD as well. The brand. Yes. But then, you know, we have the CRO, right? Bio Partners, and we have a whole bunch of team people over there. Right? We have an office in India, but it never looks like a divide when we show up on Zooms. We're all one. No one knows who's SAPTM versus, except for when we originally introduce ourselves and we say, oh, I'm here, and I'm here. No one would know.
Kimberly: There's synergy. There's so much synergy across all of our different family of companies, and it's just wonderful that everyone's so passionate about the cause and just the patience. First and foremost.
Christina: I absolutely agree. All right, we've got to stop talking, everyone. Sorry. It's a perfect time to end, because first off, I'm going to thank Kimberly for being on again with me today and taking time out of her busy schedule to be on to talk about all this stuff. But as we always say in every podcast and we end this every time, we always say we are the same. And so hopefully today, you got to see how much similar Kimberly and I are. Now, as we opened up Pandora's box here, we talked about SAPTM, so now, you know she's part of that crew, too. But seriously, we are the same and I think that is really important that we always remember that in society.
Kimberly: Yeah.
Christina: All right, well, thank you again for joining us today. I am Christina DiArcangelo.