A few months after Outset Medical’s huge fundraise to support the clinical roll out of its Tablo dialysis system — one of the largest medtech funding rounds this year — CEO Leslie Trigg spoke at Heath 2.0 about how the company wants to transform how we think of dialysis. Aside from adding musical functions and animation and collaborating with the likes of DaVita, it wants to give patients access to their dialysis data.
“We are already transmitting patient data to the cloud. There are multiple opportunities to send that data to patients, providers and payers. I see no reason why dialysis patients should not have access to their own health data since it’s been shown in other areas that when patients have access to their information they do better…”
So what data would be meaningful to dialysis patients? Urea clearance, fluid removal, what time they had dialysis and the number of times per week they went compared with their goal, Trigg said. She added that would provide analysis of the data through medical informatics.
In her onstage interview with Jane Sarasohn-Kahn from THINK Health and Health Populi, something else that stood out was this: “There’s no rule that you can’t include music or entertainment in dialysis. We did.”
Asked to explain that comment, Trigg said: “We wanted to use our technology to break the monotany of a procedure people go through three or four times a week. We wanted to make them chuckle — that is part of making dialysis a consumer experience.”
Through the touchscreen, users can access music files. Music is used when the machine is setting up. In a test that’s automatically takes place as it is warming up, the machine plays a series of animations.
“The winners of the future [in medtech] need to offer more than… life sustaining technology,” Trigg said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Photo: Matt Holt at Health 2.0
