SXSW 2025: Step Into the Future of Healthcare

Thank you everyone for coming. Welcome to Real Chemistry’s Healthcare Innovation Weekend. Excited to have you here. We’re really excited to go through a topic that I’m very passionate about. Allison is also passionate about. I do wanna acknowledge we One of the speakers that was supposed to be here, unfortunately, they couldn’t make it. So, Allison graciously jumped in and we’re excited to have her and we’re excited to have a great conversation with everyone. So what we’re gonna talk about today is the name of the panel is called the Pop Culture Rx, right? And some of the things that we’re really gonna focus on are three different takeaways. Number one being, is like what is the role of technology in creating, interactive and personalized healthcare experiences in the pop culture space? And also, how is data also informing how we’re creating these different strategies? And then how are you thinking about how and when to harness the art of storytelling, right? And really create narratives that drive societal impact with under the lens of being in the pop culture space. So everything from celebrities, influencers, licensing, event sponsorships, like how we’re really thinking about how we can craft narratives that really make an impact for the patients and the consumers that our clients are looking to reach. And then last but not least, what like we’re gonna talk about what it means to really merge healthcare and pop culture and the challenges and the opportunities. Like obviously we’re working in incredibly regulated, you know, conservative environments and we have to be conscious of all the regulations, but there are ways to do it and we can innovate and we can we’re gonna go through just like how we approach things and make sure everything’s compliant and really make an impact and innovate because at the end of the day, if we wanna innovate, we can’t do things the same way we did it in twenty nineteen and twenty twenty five. So we’re gonna talk about that. Just We’ll also have like fifteen minutes at the end for questions. So feel free to ask any questions. You know, excited to connect. I’ll give you like a little bit of intro on myself. I did the spiel on the setup, but I’m Chris Lieber, an executive vice president, at Star Power. We are part of Real Chemistry. We do the influencer and culture, partnerships on behalf of all of our clients. And then Allison, go over there. I’m Allison Hager. I lead, social media for Real Chemistry, which is the largest, most specialized in health care social media in the industry. So great to talk to you all today, and it’s a topic that, is very exciting and very dynamic as well, always changing. Totally. So, Chris, talk to me. What what is the role of pop culture partnerships in, in our industry? Yeah. I mean, I think the pop culture partnerships are really important because we’re thinking about patients and we’re thinking about how to reach them. And there’s so much out there right now with social media. There’s so much going on from a communication standpoint. But really, how do we think about the way that we’re gonna meet patients where they are in an interesting way and talking about topics that they care about. And we want people to pay attention to it. And it really does drive an impact. And it’s it’s really interesting because it’s not just where you would think traditionally, okay, we’re gonna work with the celebrity because they’re gonna get us earned media and like that’s gonna be, you know, a great KPI. And we do those, we do them really well and they’re really effective. But it’s just like looking a little bit more broadly in the pop culture space and thinking about, obviously, influencers and the creator economy has been continuing to grow as, you know, the industry has evolved and it’s a huge marketplace. But there’s even like more of an opportunity for the HGP influencers and also the patient influencers. And we’re gonna like dive into that a little bit more because the patient influencers are super interesting. Like, a lot of them really are like micro and nano influencers, and the micro influencers are continuing to rise. Right? This is a growing area of the industry, and they’re hitting niche markets. They’re really hitting a niche patient population, for example. So, like, even like in the rare disease states disease space, we will work with patient influencers who may only have, like, less than ten thousand followers, but their audience is the right audience that we wanna reach. So, we wanna make an impact. We wanna have someone who their followers and patients can relate to so that they’re engaging in the content and it’s actually driving impact. Yeah. And we always talk about social media as like think of it as walking into a party, right? You wouldn’t walk in alone and just announce yourself and say, hey, like, I’m Allison. I’m here. I’m ready to hang, right? Ideally, right, you’re making introductions. Maybe you have a friend with you, someone credible who knows people there, right, who can introduce you. Think about sort of your social media strategy the same way. And I think in many ways, like, TikTok has upended the way that we view, both our owned and shared channel strategy because, think about when you’re going up through your TikTok feed. Right? You’re seeing third party voices front and center. You’re not seeing a message come directly from a brand. Audiences are sniffing that out now more than ever. And to Chris’s point, we see, you know, patients rising up and filling a void of credible health information, in feed, and it’s highly, highly resonate resonant. So when we amplify that at scale with paid, we see that that can really move the needle, and causes a lot more impactful metrics than perhaps an own message or something really broad. The other thing you mentioned that’s really important is the role of the HCP influencer. Among some of the top professions on TikTok, and other platforms are HCPs and nurses. So think about it. A lot of, you know, millennial HCPs and nurses are rising up in the ranks. They wanna create their own professional brand, and they’re realizing that they can both, you know, help, you know, their patients and serve them in a different format, but also, you know, build up their profile as well. Yep. Totally. And it’s, like, it’s interesting. Like, we’re obviously talking broadly about influencers, but it’s, like, it’s not just the lifestyle influencers anymore. Right? Like, they’re very they’re also patients. Right? Like, a patient is a patient, but it’s just like a different way of thinking about it and it’s super targeted. And actually it’s like perfect segue to like the one of the main topics we wanna start in leading off the conversation is the role of data and technology in helping create these healthcare experiences. So, the data that we are able to uncover now, you know, from even just from like ten years ago and like what we do in the pop culture space, it’s just been like absolutely incredible and such a difference. So I’ll like give an example. Back in the day, one of the only metrics that really existed when you were like working with a celebrity, and this was like pre influencer day even, was an e score. Right? And e scores are still an effective metric. Right? They look at marketability of a celebrity. You could look at their top attributes. You can filter them to certain audiences. But the way that the technology has evolved over time allows you to go a lot deeper and understand who their audiences really are. So the first part is, like, just looking at the audience data of like an influencer, making sure that whoever we’re like looking to target their audience is actually the people that we’re trying to reach. Because at the end of the day, like even though someone may have, you know, millions of followers or you know, they have great content, if they don’t have the right audiences, it’s not going to drive an impact. But like even a step further from that is the data is also informing our strategies. So, what we’ll do is we’ll do like a really deep dive into an audience and what are their interests? What do they care about? What type of media are they consuming? And that informs the road in of how we’re going to approach a pop culture strategy. And the pop culture strategy could be multifaceted. It could be, okay, we’re going to sign this type of talent because, you know, it’s actually interesting. We’re doing something recently. We looked at the data and surprisingly, like, the audience was really into Love Island. And we were just like, that is so interesting. So, we’re like, we need to like find a way to like create some sort of a campaign that’s gonna reach that audience. But it’s helping us get to where people are in the topics they care about and also the people that they care about. Because if we’re trying to get their attention, we need to make sure that we’re going to the right places. And it’s really amazing of what you can really craft and, like, be super targeted. And to your point, like, something like an e score is, like, pretty static. Right? Yeah. Now we have, the opportunity as things are so volatile, especially in the social media space. Right? We don’t know what platform here tomorrow or, you know, how the conversation is going to shift at any given moment in time. So, our technology now allows us to be so much more dynamic. Right? Totally. Yeah. And also, like, the use of AI. Like, obviously, AI is a hot topic. Right? And it’s a hot topic across the entire world, across the health care industry. And AI, like, obviously helps with workflow efficiencies. Like, we have a we have a technology, like influencer marketing platform that we have AI ability to identify influencers at scale. We have the ability to actually, look at their brand safety scores. Like, we do like a deep dive when we’re we’re doing these partnerships, but we can just quickly look at their brand safety. It like looks at their content, it pulls press mentions. But we’re also like looking at technology and AI, like, in different ways as well. And it’s interesting. We were able to use AI before to actually look at a patient, see what challenges they’re experiencing in their symptoms that are not visible. Right? Like, patients, you don’t always see their experience, like, their their symptoms. And we worked with influencers. What we did was look at sorry. We took their symptoms, put it through generative AI and created, like, art basically that showed their symptoms. And they were niche patient influencers, but it was just an amazing way to just give the patient experience to an audience that was like looking to them anyway because these patient audiences, you know, their followers are looking at them because they dedicate their channels specifically to their disease state. And it’s just like it was just an incredible groundbreaking way to, like, really reach people. And, like, there was an impact on social. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. Because the the thing that a lot of times that’s missing on social is empathy, right, and a deep understanding of somewhat of someone shared experience. So having content that can really illustrate that burden of symptoms in this instance was Yep. Really impactful. And you see the patient community, like, responding, in turn and really valuing and appreciating, like, being seen. Right? Yep. Totally. So, like, obviously, the, you know, the data is helping inform strategy, but like when we the way that we look at how we approach these partnerships like in the healthcare space is we say we get the art and the science approach. So, the science is the data, but the art is just like understanding pop culture and the nuances in pop culture and how to create like really amazing campaigns And we look at it from like a multitude of different ways. Like first, it’s like, okay, making sure this person is gonna resonate with their audience, but it’s like what else is going on like in pop culture and like the zeitgeist that’s gonna make them relevant and like how are you identifying people when they’re just about to pop. Right? And we wanna make sure that we’re, like, riding the wave with them and working with them, growing, having a relationship. And, you know, what we always say is our approach is we say, like, we view talent as like a media platform, if you will. And it’s not just like looking at them and saying, okay, you have great followers, you’re going to get us great in our media, or you’re going to be great for this event. It’s like, what else do you have going on in your orbit? Right? And when you look at a talent or influencer, for example, you look at all the other things that have going on. A lot of them are in movies that they’re gonna be promoting. A lot of them have a production company. A lot of them are in TV show. They’re executive producers. So, like, how do we then go and think about how we can leverage those to make more of an impact for our campaign. So, like, we’ve done campaigns before where we, you know, sign the talent and we sit down with them or like, okay, what else do you have going on? What else can we partner on? How can we really just make this bigger? And there’s been times where we’ve had talent who’s like I mentioned before, they’re an executive producer on a TV show. And they’re like, you know what? I actually wanna have a show, an episode of the show written, about the disease state. And we’ve actually done that where the talent we had an episode of Blackish with Anthony Anderson who is one of our, spokespeople for our client. And, we wrote he wrote an episode of the show that was about his character being diagnosed with type two diabetes and he himself was a type two diabetic patient. And just the whole course of everything that came together and just like looking at the talent that way really just helped make the campaign even bigger and provide more of an impact for patients quite frankly. You know what’s interesting too? I think I’ve seen a lot more, pairings of like different celebrities or celebrities plus content creators. Can you do you have examples of that that you have? Yeah. Well, it’s it’s interesting because like what we’ll do is when we’re creating a strategy, we’ll look at the what’s the objective of the campaign, right? We have to really look at that like how it’s falling within the funnel. And a lot of the times, we’ll use the big celebrity as, like, the awareness driver. They’re gonna be the one that’s gonna go on the Today Show. They’re gonna be the one talking about the campaign, the condition, or or the drug. But then we also have the influencers that we’re trying to reach, like, the other audiences as part of it. So sometimes they’re on the content, with the talent, but I think when we’re talking about influencer, it’s not just like the lifestyle influencers, it’s the HEPs. Mhmm. Right? And there’s like a really big opportunity when we’re talking about working with like a celebrity and having them tell their story and then include an HCP with them because they’re the ones that are gonna give the medical information and they can give the eyesight and all that type of stuff and they’re the ones that are gonna be a little bit more in that lane. But it’s very common practice and it’s super effective. Yeah. That’s interesting because it can help you scale up your content too. Right? Like, there’s so much more opportunities when you’re actually starting a dialogue. I think we see a lot of times in our campaigns and our patient communities, there’s, you know, a lack of dialogue oftentimes is a barrier to treatment between a patient and their HCP. So I think, you know, have showing, and a pairing of an HCP influencer with that, you know, with a patient and showing that, you know, it’s okay to have these conversations especially on, you know, topics that maybe are taboo, especially in certain, communities. You know, we talk about, you know, some of our marketing as, like, being below the belt or, some of the topics that, you know, maybe are, like, you know, unseen or, not talked about. It’s it’s better to show and demonstrate like breaking down those silos. And then, the other thing I think is interesting that you’re as that you’re talking about is, how to scale even the partnership itself. Like, you’re not just doing a one and done commercial or, you know, one press tour with these celebrities. Right? You’re like sustaining that partnership? Yeah. So, we this is a great example of, like, how some of these come, to fruition. So, like, one of the things we’re talking about is like strategy. Right? Like, how do we think about the data leading into strategy or just like, how do you think about strategy in general? And, one of the things that we’ve done is, like, you know, we sit with clients and we’ll say, okay, what are your objectives for the year? Right? Like, what are you thinking about? What’s important for you? What are you trying to accomplish? And it’s not necessarily like, hey, here’s a brief. We have this campaign. We need to do x. And we’ve done that before. We one of our, our Bayer client, they were like, okay, here’s our three pillars of the company. Here’s the three things that are important to us. Here’s one area that we wanna lean into. And it was just like, you know, great insights, great things to know. And, I’m having lunch with Luke Bryan’s agent and she jokes to me, hey, do you have any clients in the farming space? And I was like, I do, actually. And I’m like, what’s up? She’s like, Luke has a farm tour. He’s looking for a sponsor. Like, here’s, you know, the details. And then, presented to the client. There was obviously a lot of conversations. And we now are in year ten of the partnership with Luke. And the reason I bring it up is, like, in terms of, like, growing the relationship, we started small. Like, we sponsored his farm tour. I think it was like five or six spots, stops. It was really important for the business because we were reaching the rural communities that they were trying to reach on the ground with their customers, and, you know, with the different populations. There was food deserts, they had partnerships with food banks. It was an amazing moment. And as the years grew, we grew with Luke, we expanded the relationship, beyond just the the crop division to be across the whole organization, and it’s really made an impact. And it’s continued to grow. And it’s really important to think of things that way because when you wanna, like, work with someone and you’re talking about something that’s, like, really personal, like a health care topic, like, you wanna be able to have more of a partnership than just someone going out and, you know, being, like, a voice, if you will. Right? It’s it’s just like a really great way to think about these partnerships. Yeah. And the challenge though in doing that is pharma is very regulated, obviously. Right? And we need to make sure that we’re doing it the right way and compliantly because it’s not just like talking about lipstick or something like that. Right? Like there’s obviously regulations in those industries as well, but there’s a lot of considerations. And a lot of what we do with our clients is actually help them navigate those conversations. And I know, like, that’s like a common challenge that you have as well with like social because like pharma never wants to be first. Right? And we want we need to just then think about how we present things and have a conversation with the regulatory teams and why it’s so important for us to do that like in the beginning of the process because we never wanna be in a situation where it’s we’re too far down the road and there’s concerns that we could have mitigated like early on. Yeah. We have a joke that, yeah, everyone wants to be first to be second. Right. So, there’s always a need to, you know, just as we talk about meeting our audience is where they are, you know, we need to meet our internal stakeholders and partners where they are. So our legal and regulatory teams, like, making sure they’re signed on and onboard and kind of holding hands with you in the journey of doing an influencer or celebrity partnership or do it innovating on a social media channel is really important. Partnership or do it innovating on a social media channel is really important. We, you know, have in the past have had to be really creative with things like scenario planning and concepting. Now we can use AI to even help with some of that scenario planning. So we don’t need to be maybe at we can be as creative as we can take ourselves, but, you know, ask generative AI. You know, can you help? Is there are there any blind spots here? Are there risks that I’m maybe not thinking of? Just to make those, internal stakeholders more comfortable, with the campaign and let them know that we thought through every, you know, every risk possible and and really are managing it proactively. Yeah. And I like I don’t know if it’s weird. I like love having these conversations with the regulatory teams. I think it’s like the lawyer to me. You know, I love having the conversations and just when we get a no or we’re like, there’s concerns, there’s risks, I’m always like, okay, let’s like really dive deep into the reason why, right? And getting to the bottom of the why is always important to like help innovate these campaigns, right? Like we’ll do concept reviews with regulatory teams and we’ll go through what the concept is. We also go like a step further and we’re like, here’s precedent of all the companies that have done this compliantly, right? And here’s all the things that we’re gonna do to make sure this is compliant. Here’s all the disclosures. Here’s all the things that contracts are gonna say because a lot of times when we’re working with clients in the influencer space, they’re a little bit nervous to do it because they don’t maybe they don’t have the full three sixty understanding of what goes into it. It’s not just, hey, influencer x. Let’s hire you. Let’s have you create content and let’s see, you know, how it goes. It’s like very buttoned up. It’s it’s it’s we make sure we have a very firm process of how we do it. And that’s actually a perfect segue to talk about, like, the creativity and thinking about how we’re looking at creative in this healthcare space. So, we say like when people are zigging, you have to zag. You have to create content that’s gonna be meaningful and stop the scroll. And how do you do that? So the data actually does help, create the way we’re in for the creative. And it’s really interesting to show clients, like, okay, this is all the things that we’re hearing and this is how we’re gonna approach it from a creative standpoint and it’s gonna drive an impact. We’re not just kinda like guessing of like, oh, this might be a cool way in, right? But the other piece which is important to just like think about and discuss is like letting creators create, right? A lot of these creators are well, most of them, they’ve created their followers because people like the content that they create. They know how their audiences are gonna resonate, right? So it’s really important to allow them to do it. That said, we have to do it compliantly. And you can still allow a creator to do what they do best, but in a compliant way. So we’re gonna like talk through a little bit of like a real life example of one that we did, based on an insight from a study that one of our clients did. So, one of our clients, MiraLAX, they saw that women were twice as likely to experience constipation than men due to stress. And they dubbed this the gut gap. So, the other thing that they realized was like, okay, a big stress release or relief for people is laughter. So like, how do we think of a way to communicate that message? How do we get people’s attention? And how is it really gonna drive an impact? So we, we’re looking to reach millennial women and we’re like, what’s the way to do this? I was like, has anyone ever seen the show Broad City? Anyone in the audience? Okay. We’re like, we have to bring back Abby and Alana. Like, we’re going to talk about like poop quite frankly, right? Like not the most, you know It’s not a sexy talk. Not not the most sexy. But hot girls the most not the most have IBS, right? But we’re like, this is this is gonna like, let’s do it. So we like went to the to the girls and we’re like, you know, would you be interested in doing something? And they like pulled their friends and they were like, everyone loves MiraLAX. They were like really excited to dive into it. So, they’re like, we’ll do it, but we have to write the script. So, imagine like you know, conservative pharma, they’re like, how are we gonna do this? Like, we’re gonna let these girls, these comedians just write a script and, what’s what’s gonna happen? So, what we do is we brief them and we said, listen, we’re gonna tell you all the things that you have to do. Like, you can’t talk about this. It’s a highly regulated product. You can’t make these claims. Make sure we avoid x y z things. So, they listened. They wrote the script because they wrote the show. They wrote Broad City. Right? They know how to like bring these people to these characters to life. We weren’t like actually doing a Broad City episode, but, we thought, you know what? Let’s let’s give them a shot. They wrote the script. We worked with them very closely. Like, they were like, we don’t want our agents involved in this. Like, we’re gonna work with you guys directly. We’re so excited about it. They were, you know, just really into the whole creative. They thought it was so cool and just raising awareness for women. And they even, like, chose the restaurant where we shot it, which was they were, like, really, really, like, in the weeds in creating it. And the impact that it had from just, you know, mentions of MiraLAX, there was like a significant increase in searches for MiraLAX after the campaign launched. And like this sentiment on social was like wild. People were going crazy. They were like, oh my gosh, this is the best ad I’ve ever seen. Like, I love MiraLAX and like, it was just so great. We’re gonna play the clip just so you guys can see it. It was really great. If you know like Broad City and just like how they do things. It was just like a great, great, great moment. So Gabriela, if you could if you don’t mind playing the clip, that would be awesome. Grow up, Abby. Literally, everyone enjoys talking about poop or not poop. Thank you. It’s art. Excellent. Yes. It’s beautiful. Oh, why aren’t you eating? You flew in just for this, our quarterly Jewish food feast. Yeah. No. I you know what? I get pins and needles on the plane, so You don’t wear compression socks? They’re for old people. You can borrow a pair of mine if they’ll fit. I I you know what? I feel kinda full. You ate? Okay. No. I’m not full. I didn’t eat. What’s really going on is that I’m Sorry. What? I’m on top Girl, what? I’m constipated. Sorry. I’ll give you this to say. Oh, I don’t wanna talk about it. Grow up, Abby. Literally, everyone enjoys talking about poop or not poop. Okay. Everyone does not enjoy talking about poop. Cuckoo. Okay. You have conservation? Oh, my God. Never. Great. I am so uncomfortable. Dude, I feel like a Thanksgiving blimp, like, stuffed with packing peanuts. And not the cool ones that, you know, melt when you put them under water. Honestly, this is perfect. Perfect? Why? Flush. Wait. Why do you have MiraLAX if you don’t get constipated? It’s literally how I’ve made friends and a couple lovers. Because women know we have much more stress. Stress can cause constipation. We ladies are hold, hold, holding it all in. Women are more likely to be stressed than men and twice as likely to be constipated. I read a headline saying a lot of women poop less than three times a week. Less than three times a week? I mean, I I call my sweaters more than that. Gut gap, baby. First comes the stress gap, and that can lead to the gut gap. So even my gut is sexist? Dun dun dun. This is like women work so hard propping up the entire infrastructure of the world, but but then we have to fight for equal pay? And now we have to fight for for poop equality? You’re preaching to the pooper. And if it’s not work, we have to be everyone’s best friend. I mean, Alana, I have six weddings in the next three months. I can’t afford friends. Always the ballast and have the bread. Okay. Get this. On the flight over here, a man asked me to switch seats with him because he said he couldn’t fit in the middle seat. I said yes. I switched with him and I sat in the middle, Alana, because I didn’t feel the need to make everyone comfortable except myself. Mhmm. Exactly. Although men’s tolerance for pain and discomfort is so low, you did the right thing there. But I really get it now. Why I’m so backed up? The stress of being a woman in the world. No. Stress. No. Yeah. Stress. Cheers. And get to Abby, put all that food in your mouth on your broken bill. Come on. I’m gonna watch it. So just a little fun video. Now these things come together. And it was it was it thank you. And it was great. We we launched the campaign. We did an event actually where where they shot the the spot. And we had a gastroenterologist do a panel with them. And they talked about it. They did our media and it was like it was so great. It was just a great conversation about something that is stigmatized, but it’s reality of of life. Right? And it was it was it was really But imagine if some if one of us tried to write that, like there’s no way. Like it has to come from There’s nuances, right, of like how they know how to punch up the jokes and speak to the audiences and it was it was really incredible. But it’s interesting like the the opportunity in this space is is vast. Right? And there’s so many different ways in from a pop culture standpoint. And the thing that’s really interesting is we, like like, in all seriousness, we get phone calls from agents and managers and publicists, like, every single day. And they’re calling us and saying, my client was just diagnosed with, you know, x condition. It’s not public. And they they take X drug, and they really want to do something to raise awareness, because they themselves, X celebrity, who has, you know, considerable resources, and they, you know, presumably have access to the right doctors and the best doctors, they can’t get the right diagnosis, or they don’t know how to navigate their symptoms, and they didn’t know, like, even just where to go. And it’s become like a really important topic for people to want to lean into and talk about. It’s not taboo. Right? It’s it’s something people are actively wanting to do to help patients. It’s it’s amazing. And there’s really no way to do that other than, you know, kind of like I was saying before that you have to be, like, do it through an authentic voice. We’re also working, on a campaign right now for, the first oral treatment for postpartum depression. Again, a topic that for so many years is overlooked, taboo, and now, like, thinking about the power of influencers, like, that we had to work with creators as that as part of that, campaign because, you have to hear it from someone. It’s a shared experience that you only understand if you’re in it. So you have to hear from someone who’s really lived that and gets it. And now we’re seeing, to your point, yes, this can you said this campaign drove search results, right, for MiraLAX. But think about the conversation shift, like, since that moment in time, there’s so much more about, you know, gut health and, you know, not giving you too much credit, but you’re you have the power to shift that cultural conversation with an initiative like that. Hopefully, similarly, with the postpartum depression campaign that we’re working on. Right? There’s so much more, you know, aptitude to actually listen, when, you know, you have these other influential voices Yeah. Just at the home. And, like, it’s it’s really amazing to actually see the way it does actually make an impact with for people. And we recently did a campaign where we had someone going, and, you know, it was a full campaign about a health care condition. And I remember we were getting emails forwarded to us from this person’s manager saying, you know, I’ve been at FannieView for, you know, x years, and I saw you did this campaign for this condition, and I was having those symptoms. I didn’t realize what it was. I went to the doctor, and that saved my life. And, like, just it was just an amazing thing to see that, like, someone saw someone that they idolized, that they look up to, and they could see that they were like, it caught their attention. And then they went, and they had a conversation with their doctor, and they went and got treatment, and they said it saved their lives. Like, that to me is like that’s just like an incredible thing to hear, because it’s more than just like, you know, it’s obviously great all the results that we get, but once you hear, and you can see in the comments on social media Yeah. From these influencers and the way in which the patient population is like, oh my gosh, I’m so glad that I have this resource. And someone’s talking about something. I thought I was the only one who was feeling this way. It’s Mhmm. It’s really incredible. Yeah. And they feel open, you know, in a forum or a channel like an Instagram or TikTok when they see someone else, you know, show it leading by example. Otherwise, a lot of times, really important dialogue about health care condition is relegated to private forums and Reddit and Facebook groups. And it’s like, we can do more to shift behavior and to educate people when we actually, you know, can Yeah. You know, talk and frankly and speak in these public more. And it’s cool too because we like I was saying before, like, we have to allow creators to create, but like, obviously, we do it compliantly. We get the briefs and we get the concepts from them and it goes through LMR and we make sure that, you know, every box is being checked and every FTC disclosure, FDA disclosure, like, everything is included. But the, like, thing about creators and influencers, like, that is a term that gets used synonymously, but we do look at it, like, a little bit differently. Like, the influencers are using them for their influence on their channels, whereas the creators, we’re using them for their ability to create. And we’re even, like, from the social standpoint, right, like, what we’re doing is we’re working with influencers that are patients. They are creators. They create dynamic content for their their audiences. We’re not always just like having them post it. It’s actually going on the brand socials, and it’s a really cost effective authentic way because a lot of times people want to patients wanna hear from people. Right? They don’t always wanna hear from our brand. And just, like, maybe talk a little bit, like, how that has really Yeah. I mean, I think that’s helpful. We’re always thinking about, you know, how we create content at the speed of social. So we need to be, like, very agile Yeah. As fast as possible, authenticity. You know, the day we’ve seen a shift, right, in health care social media where or just social media in general where first, you know, there was a lot of organic discussion. We had the role of community was really strong. Right? We could just put stuff out, and it would get a ton of reach. Then we shifted and pivoted towards a more of a pay to play model. Now we’re somewhere in between where communities have risen back up. We have organic playing a really important role, but also, you know, complimentary and need paid to operate at scale. But, you know, we need to fuel that content engine with a lot of content. Right? So, we need to a lot of times what we’re doing and I think with the design of really the the content team of the future is embedding a content creator within your social team, to be that to serve as, like, that maker, right, who can create a high volume of content. That’s something we do all day with that layer of authenticity. So we’re partnering more and more and encouraging our clients to work with, a variety of influencer cohort, right, not looking at their influencer partnerships as a one and done for a moment in time, right? Think beyond the awareness day and sustain your content with, someone who can make things on an ongoing basis. And we found that to be a really successful model. And the other thing too, like, Allison’s point about, like, going beyond the one and done is these influencers now, and I’m including, like, the HGP influencers as part of this too, they live beyond their social media platforms. They’re living beyond their platforms. They there’s now opportunities to use them in earned media, use them at events because if you’re doing, you know, a launch and you wanna have people come by the booth or whatever, like at ASCO, for example, like maybe getting an influential HCP that has a strong following, has some sort of resonance pop culture to get people to be talking about your drug. It’s like really Yeah. A true extension of the brand just like you would in a with a consumer ambassadorship like why not, sustain that engagement? Yeah. And I would say like obviously like, you know, I’m sure a lot of people here are working in the healthcare space and it’s highly regulated. Like we for clients, we will even before they’re ready to do something in this space, they might say, listen, we’re not ready to do something for six months of a year. But what we can do is we actually help them set everything up, work with all their internal teams to put together like SOPs. So that like, first of all, there’s like a consistent way of doing everything across the organization, both from like a process standpoint of like, even just like contract templates. It’s kinda wild. Like sometimes there’s different divisions that use different templates, but we like need to be consistent in the market, be consistent in the deal terms, but also like how are we thinking about measurement, right? Like we’re gonna have to measure the success of the campaign the same way across the organization. How are we thinking about payment, right? Fair market value, big topic, right? Especially when we’re thinking about working with HCPs. How do we look at fair market value in this new world, right? Like these HCP doctors that we’re thinking of working with, they’re not the same as it was back in the day, the k KOLs where you just look at their CV and say, okay, here’s, you know, the hourly rate and this is where we’re gonna pay them for the work that they’re doing. There’s all these other market factors that are going into the fee that they’re that they’re charging and the market dictates the fee. So we’re contextualizing all these things for clients so that we’re in the beginning saying, here’s how we’re gonna think about this, making sure compliance is all aligned so that when we do wanna go and create one of these campaigns, we are able to do it efficiently, as fast as we can. Obviously, you know, things take a little time. But it’s, you know, something I have a lot of fun doing, so. I have to love a challenge in this industry. Oh, love a challenge. Love a challenge. I think we have like like we have a little bit of time for questions. If anyone has any Oh, there’s a mic right there if you wanna. To. I could probably hear you. So for, you mentioned about the HCP influencers on social and then you just got a little bit more. Yeah. Find that the influencers that are on social that you’re pulling in from outside of the traditional KOL kind of network zone, are they mostly, are their followers mostly, patients or are they ever h That’s a great question. It’s a good question. I think it depends on the platform. Yeah. I was just gonna say that. Yeah. Right? So we see a lot more, like, peer to peer dialogue happening with HCPs, for example, on a channel like LinkedIn. We used to see it a lot on Twitter, now x. That is awesome. We’re still seeing them present there for Yeah. At first certain moments in time, mostly medical meetings to have that, like, dialogue and exchange. But then on a channel like TikTok, we’re seeing more patient engagement. Yeah. And it’s we would approach the partnership totally differently. So if we were doing like an HTTP and an HTTP campaign, it would be very different if we’re doing like an HTTP to consumer campaign. Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Of course. Any other questions? Yeah. Sure. Yeah. So, it doesn’t have to be millions of dollars, right? I do just wanna say that. And especially when working with these patient influencers and it I’ll explain. So, these patient influencers, they may have seven thousand followers, some of them. And like, you definitely wanna amplify with paid like Allison was saying before. Yeah. But because their audiences are so niche and the micro influencers in particular, which they’re like more like a nano influencer or so niche, with our like data and technology, we can actually go in and say, okay, like say you’re saying my target market is like Milwaukee, right? We can go and look and see which influencers have their most followership in that market and you can like hyper target it and like we do campaigns that are like scrappy with clients that they’re not always like the five hundred thousand dollars budgets. So there is a way to do it, to make an impact. It doesn’t always need to be this like huge huge thing. Yeah. To add to that, I’m a big fan of the approach of like pilot and then proof of concept and scale, right? So for example, you know, working with, a more of a micro influencer, let’s call it partnership, for a birth control band. We tested that with a small pool of influencers and found that the, the influencer content had much stronger, like, down funnel metrics. So, like, in deeper engagement than, the owned content that we were producing that was, you know, frankly, the cost when you look at it at the end of the day, you know, for us to produce an original piece versus what we’re able to just commission the the content creator to create, it was more efficient and more impactful for us to work with the content creator. So we’re able to say, like, okay, proof of concept, and then let’s scale and ramp this up because we’ll have more impact, and better ROI. Yeah. Totally. I’ll ask another question to you that was made me think of, you know, what are kind of the barriers or have has anyone gotten a big no when they’ve tried to execute something? And what are those barriers that you all are experiencing? Does anyone? I I guess the number one, one is, especially with unscripted communication is somebody who is outside of, you know, we know the normal peer to peer. Yeah. They’re they’re guided and trained in order to, you know, not go off unscripted or to pull that and have a private meeting for that discussion. And with, there’s always a worry, like, if we get a patient or or a creator that’s maybe not so used to a regulated environment Yep. To network in an unscripted zone, which is sometimes the best zone we wanna be in. But are they gonna say something that, in our industry would be mind blowing or Yeah. Yeah. So the first part of it is, just from like a legal standpoint, the contracts, right? Like we have like make sure that there’s very clear and like firm language and it depends on the type of campaign. So if we’re doing a branded campaign, now it’s gonna be very different if we’re doing unbranded. That said, what we do is a lot of our, spokespeople that we work with, they have to go through a form of vigilance training. So that’s one of the first things. And then the other one is we do message development calls with them. So essentially, what we do is we’ll do like a one or two hour training where we have like media trainers that will go and take the spokespeople through like the key messages that they need to really be hitting, the things that they can absolutely not say, right? I think there’s a big benefit in like branded instances you have in HTP there to really be talking about more of like the FDA, like Fair Balance information for example. But we like really media train them like pretty hardcore. And the good thing is is like we also are making sure when we’re vetting someone like in the upfront, because like we go through like a really deep dive of brand safety vetting. And we also make sure that like these people that we’re gonna be working with that are gonna be a voice for your company are good at communicating these types of messages. So like look at past interviews that they’ve done for brands. How are they communicating? Because we wanna make sure that whoever we’re gonna partner with is going to be safe and within that realm. So it’s like very like rigorous process to make sure that it’s like being done the right way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. I have a question. We work at a woman like Denmark, so everything is different. Yes. Yeah. How does it work when you’re a global campaign? Yeah. So we actually, we do work sometimes in the global space. And what we’ve done in the past is like, say a campaign originates in North America, for example, we will then create global toolkits. Right? So it could be something where, you know, we have a global campaign with someone and and we have like a full advertising campaign, for example. Right? Then the toolkits, the teams will work with, like, the local market regulatory teams because there’s also a time where we have to, like, create different types of content that are gonna work in different markets. So it’s basically what ends up happening is, like, toolkits, if you will, will get built for, the individual markets to make sure that they’re compliant. I think in that end In fact, I think we can’t do a lot of things. Yeah. I mean, it depends. Like, honestly, sometimes maybe it doesn’t make sense to do it. And like, we’re we’ve also done campaigns where, like, maybe the the general campaign will be global and like the talent piece is just North America, but you’re still getting the message out. So, and also just think about global resonance for certain people. Like not everyone’s gonna resonate in every market, right? So you may need to tailor, each of the individual markets to something different. And like through our tools, we can actually look and see where the people’s followers are in different countries. So that even if you were like, you know what, this person has like a really big follower ship in France or Germany or whatever, maybe you just focus on those and not the others. Because like you wanna make sure if you’re doing this, there’s cultural relevance within, you know, those different markets. Yeah. Yeah. Here. I work for a health care tech company as a UX designer. Our users are health care professionals. We have a digital tool belt, basically, that empowers our users to make their jobs easier and more efficient. Have you ever worked with a health care tech client like that, that our users are the health care providers themselves? You’ve spoken about it on our team before a few times, but we haven’t really made any moves. In that regard, I’m curious if we have any thoughts to share on that. The health tech client. I guess the closest would be, more some of like the peer to peer sort of, medical education initiatives we’ve done that we’re talking about about, right? But I think when you’re trying to this is actually an interesting way to maybe think about it is if you’re trying to explain something, right, to like, to an audience and it’s maybe a little technical and you want to like do it like in an educational way and like a fun way is we’ve also worked with these like tech, like modern Bill Nye type influencers where they actually take a topic that’s like, could be very complicated to understand. It could be, you know, a technology, it could be a disease state and they break it down in a really digestible entertaining way for people to like really understand it. And like they are experts at doing that. They have millions and millions of followers. It’s really incredible. So like there is ways to do that. I mean, you could do it from like a B2B perspective. It can be consumer facing as well. There’s a multitude of ways to do it for sure. Working it down. Yeah. Good question. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and that’s where in most rare disease communities, that’s where you’re seeing all like we’re seeing the richness of like content creation because they’re not being, you know, heard or seen, right? A lot of the content is falling flat. So I’d say, like, the first thing is, you know, making sure we have the right data and then, partnering with the patient advocacy groups, associated with that rare disease. Like, we’ll have them review our concepts, and make sure that our programming resonates. We see, you know, a lot of campaigns sometimes. We’ll just see feedback that, okay. This is very splashy. This is very exciting, but it doesn’t it it doesn’t reflect my day to day lived experience. Yeah. Right? So it’s really important. It’s critical to get that right. Otherwise, you know, there’s no point really in doing it. Right? Yeah. And these obviously like these patient influencers, you know, particularly in rare disease like they’re you they wanna you wanna have them show like the patient experience, right? And, they’re able to do that like in an authentic way for sure. And I think like we don’t always have to go over like to the obvious insight or I think there’s like places where you can talk about a heavy topic on social, but also, not forget that we’re all human. Right? We talk about this with with our HCPs. You know, you have their lab coats and their BlueJeans moments. It’s the same as patients or people. Right? So, you know, we actually had a condition the other day where we built out creative. It was actually, based off the the Love Island insight. And, you know, for a fairly serious condition, we acted like it was your bad ex that keeps coming back, an ex boyfriend, and you could swipe right to get to the relief, you know, on of the of the drug. So, like, there is a way that the audience was talking about their condition with humor that made us, like, go in that direction. It actually did resonate because they’re like you know, especially now, right? We’re all doom scrolling. There’s always something negative happening. So I think like going after a non obvious insight, like using something like humor in a tasteful way and kind of like testing a concept like that can sometimes work and be your way in. Still have a few minutes. If anyone has any other questions, I’m happy to discuss. Yeah. Brett. Yes. Are there any particular campaigns that either you either had a ton of fun on or just Yes. Very tactical that you’re probably It’s like you asked me my favorite child. I have no children by the way. But, Our dog married children? Fair. Fair. Fair. Fair. I mean, I’ll tell you one that I actually loved working on. It was the the Pfizer campaign that we did a couple years ago for no plan go. And that one was really fun because we were, you know, trying to raise awareness for high risk factors for COVID. And there was, you know, multitude of risk factors. But it was a really fun campaign to work on because we were able to create, here’s the segments of entertainment we wanna reach. We wanna reach diverse populations. We wanna reach people that have a variety of different risk factors. And it was an unbranded campaign, and we need people to, like, tell their stories in an emotional way so that people know that if they get COVID, they have to make a plan, and they have to go to their doctor and action the plan. So we’ll first know the risk factor, make a plan, and then go action. And so, like, we identified, four different spokespeople, based on, like, the priority risk factors. So we had Jean Smart, who at the time was, like, super hot from she still is super hot from Hacks. And, she has diabetes, type one diabetes, and she was also the age of over the age of fifty five. We had Pink who has asthma and was really vocal during COVID, like the struggles that she had. We had Questlove. He is overweight. So he was another risk factor and he was really reaching the black community. And then we also had Michael Phelps who had mental health as his risk factor. So we had this course of people who we did like a really fun, great creative, TV commercial. But like the really fun part for me seeing is their stories. Right? You see someone like Pink, who is she’s Pink. Right? Like, she’s like a legend. She’s strong. She told her story of when she got COVID and she has severe asthma. And I would like, I’m not even joking. Like, I was almost in tears Yeah. Just like watching her tell the story on set. And it was just it was it was just like an incredible campaign. I loved it. Yeah. Yeah. I think COVID was an interesting time for Ulta. I one of my first forays into health care was on, Merck for Mothers actually, which is, a program by Merck to end preventable maternal mortality. Really exciting to I was working on mommy blogger campaigns and got recruited to work on this program. They’re like, do you want to run the social media for this? And I was like, okay. And again, very difficult topic to discuss, but a huge issue especially in the US and rising here despite falling globally. Right? So, we needed to, like, break the taboo of talking about something that’s really upsetting. Right? No one really talks about the challenges that women face during in childbirth. And so that was one where it was just we used the shared connection and sense of community that comes with motherhood, and shared birth experiences to raise awareness of the risk factors and to encourage women, and their, you know, their entire family, their whole community to speak up about, you know, you know, when they’re postpartum, especially, that post six week period. And I’ve seen just the conversation shift over the years to a place now where it really is in the zeitgeist and there it is more you know, there are people talking about it. So it’s just one of those things that’s, like, really rewarding to see, long term and, really Yeah. That we use influencers in the next And also, like, some of my favorite campaigns too are when it’s something that comes together just, like, in an authentic way where I was mentioning before we get the phone calls of, you know, diagnosed with x and, you know, I wanna raise awareness for a campaign with the clients and have a conversation and talk about how it could fit their marketing objectives. And, you know, there’s a lot, obviously, that goes that goes into it. And when they come to life and you just see the impact that it can have and it was someone that was really passionate to wanna do something, those are just great and they’re amazing. And you know, it’s not like one specific one, but, just the approach and the way of doing it is awesome. So great question, Brett. Thank you. Cool. Yes. Hi. Sure. Yeah. So, everything’s always learning, right? And we try to actually think about like how we’re gonna optimize performance like throughout the process, right? Like we’re not just saying, cool, let’s see how it went, like for like an influencer campaign and we’ll measure it and and we’ll see what the success is. We actually like stopped in like mid campaign. We’re like, let’s look at all the content. Let’s see what worked well. Let’s see what didn’t work well. And then we’ll pivot and we’ll make optimizations like in real time. And it’s always good to see like, you know what? Maybe this didn’t work because of x reason and we’ll give the recommendations and say, you know, in the future we should probably do it this way. But you know, in terms of a campaign networking like well, like things do happen, right? Like people are people, things happen and we are always like conscious of like even just like contractually, like every contract has like a morals clause in it, right? That we have the ability to determine if there’s like an issue for, you know, someone something bad happens that’s unexpected. But do you want me to talk about like from how you kind of experience it in your side too? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s a great things fail in social constantly. Like every other post we put out is a flop, right? It’s you have to kind of hedge your bets on the post that’s going to be a win. So I think it’s just a matter of, to Chris’ point, kind of like being agile, also like bringing for us like our clients along on that and saying like, okay, it’s a little bit of a risk, but that’s why we kind of AB test and Yeah, like we were going back earlier, like talking about like the data informing how we’re gonna do things. Like if we’re following the data, right, it’s mitigating that risk. So we can be more successful over being like super precise on how we’re approaching it. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Well, I could talk like the so the opportunity though in doing a lot of times is to combat misinformation, right? Especially in today’s world, you have the ability to control the message and put it out there. Like, people are going to make comments, right? And people are gonna have opinions on things. But do you wanna just, like, talk about the kind of the community management of that? It’s it’s all about managing risk and scenario planning. Right? So first off, you know, to like, we, you know, never chase after the detractors and it’s almost like how do you I mean, especially in, let’s like, the elephant room vaccines can there’s a strong anti vax community online. And it’s just a matter of, like, filling up the correct information, right, to fill the void, because you have to understand you know, a lot of times we’ll look at our social listening data, and it’ll say, like, you know, if you’re not going to talk, all you’re doing is letting this misinformation run rampant. Right? So the opportunity to come in and correct, and course correct that conversation and fill share of voice with something that’s accurate, and positive, I think is the way forward. Definitely. Cool. We have two minutes if anyone else has any other questions. No? All good. Well, thank you. Thank you for, you know, chatting and I hope you found it interesting of how to merge healthcare and healthcare and enjoy the rest of the weekend. Thank you.

Hello, everyone. Welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. We have a packed house, and I am so, so thrilled that you’re here. We’re gonna have a really phenomenal discussion about all things health care, leadership, and how we try to tackle some of the issues that our industry is facing right now. And we’ve got so, so much to cover with two very dynamic leaders. Let me introduce them quickly to my right. Right? Is this my right or my left? We have the amazing Mu Thomason, who is the CEO of Vituity. He’s going to tell us about the organization and what he does, and he’s also an author. You have a copy of his book, Less Than One Percent, on your chairs. And for those of you in the back, come on up because the the books are up here. And he also just launched a podcast yesterday. Congratulations. So we want to hear all about that. That’s awesome. And we also have Joel Burvell. He is a medical myth buster. He is on social media tackling health information, educating people. He’s a medical student himself, and he brings a whole fresh perspective about how we disseminate information, how we tackle mis- and disinformation, the role of influence. We have so many things that we are going to talk about. And as you can tell, I missed the memo, the fashion memo, clearly. I got the wrong memo. I got the pink memo, but that’s okay. But anyway, cool. We’re going to dig right in. And while we usually wait for questions at the end, I don’t want that. I want you guys up at the mics, raise your hand, let’s keep this interactive, and energetic throughout, okay? So I wanted to kick it off with both of you to briefly introduce yourselves, but more so, what is your why? Why do you do what the heck you do? Well, I guess I’ll start. But, you know, I I want to say your your bio is longer than mine. So we have to talk about that. Because obviously I gotta get I gotta get to work. But no. Yeah. So, maybe I’ll start with my my why. I got a chance to work with Simon Sinek. I think he’s my friend, although he ghosted me on our last text. But we did a why. He does these why sort of studies. He sits you down and tries to find out your why. And I didn’t believe him at first because I’m disagreeable, but what he found out was that my why was is I inspire people to do the work to be greater than they ever thought they could be. And that was pretty cool because that’s not something you think about yourself. So I’m the CEO of Vituity. It’s a we call it a healthcare solutions company, but we basically work with hospitals. We provide emergency care, hospitalist, anesthesia, sort of a multi specialty physician practice. We feel we’re unique because we’re physician owned. There’s no PE. We have no, you know, it’s just the people doing the work, which which makes the incentives a little different. We took care of about eleven and a half million patients last year. Our revenue is about two and a half billion dollars which is which is pretty amazing and, you know, our number one goal is to improve lives. Right. That’s awesome. I love that. Joel? Well What’s your why? I love this question. Yeah. It actually, when I was in college I used to ask this question when I ran this thing called the Leadership Institute. And that was our favorite question to ask, what’s your why? Yeah. I think about this a lot. So I my name is Joel Breville. Known online as the medical myth buster for creating content about health inequities, medicine, and really trying to reimagine what healthcare could look like and getting that education to people. But I started creating content a few years ago and I think as I’ve created content, I thought about my why a lot. And it always came back to family for me. Both my parents are from Ghana, West Africa. First immigrated to Canada and then to the United States afterwards. And my grandma used to be my main caretaker while my parents were out there trying to make a better life for my siblings and I. And I remember in sixth grade, grandma ended up going home because she didn’t speak any English, was only there taking care of my siblings and I. And quite literally within a year of going back to Ghana, she passed away. We found out later that it was because she contracted malaria, but that she’d been told at the hospital she was supposed to bring her own tubing, her own materials, and that led to delays in her care of getting the care that she needed in that moment. Remember for me, that was my first ever time realizing that healthcare disparities, albeit at that point on a global perspective, existed. But I continued to have experiences with the healthcare system in the United States with my sister who has a chronic condition. She has lupus nephritis. And I remember being in and out of the hospital all the time wondering how could this system work better? And specifically, how does it work better for marginalized communities who often haven’t been thought about, in the healthcare system? I feel like when I got to medical school, I really started to tackle these conversations especially with the COVID pandemic where we were talking about healthcare inequities and differences and outcomes of who was being able to get a vaccine or communities that were getting access to resources. So I think back to my why, I think it always connects back to my grandma and family, but the greater story there is understanding how do we make healthcare more accessible for everyone so that these stories aren’t something that’s common. And unfortunately, I’ve realized that everyone in this room has a story like that when it comes to healthcare. So true. It’s so true. People could call me JPAG, my full name is Jennifer Paganelli, but I go by PAGG. And I work at Real Chemistry which is a healthcare communications firm. All we do is health care and storytelling, and I run our media relations team. So something that keeps me very inspired is similar. It’s meeting these patients who are dealing with really, you know, in some cases, very horrific diseases who may not have hope, but maybe new medicines are here to help them, and how do we get their stories out there, and how do we impact others? And I really feel every day I might not be developing the medicine, but my team and I feel very strongly that we’re doing something to pay it forward. So anyway, our health care environment right now is nuts. Understatement. It is crazy. Regulations, the RFK of it all, you name it. I guess my question is, what do you think is going well in health care? And also what is keeping you up at night? And Mu, I may ask you first. Go ahead. Alright. So, let me start with what keeps me up at night. Yeah. It’s probably my kids. Yeah. To be honest, you know, I’m one of those parents that ride the wave of, you know, up when they’re up and down where they’re down. So my daughter just lost in the in the ACC tournament. So I’m I’m pretty sad. That’s why I got to have more energy but I apologize. Wow. But you know what’s what’s going well in healthcare? Yeah. I think what’s going well is the fact that we’re moving to a place where patients have choice. Mhmm. Which which again, it it all patients, right? Because at the end of the day, if we give all patients a choice, that’s why you’re seeing the consumerism of healthcare and that ends up being largely people couldn’t afford it. But I think if we can pass that ability to choose, that ability to get the right provider, the ability to get the right medicine, and it ends up holding the insurance companies accountable. It ends up holding the pharmaceutical companies accountable by the ability for us to say, you know, that’s not a good service. This is not the right service for me, and I want to be able to tell you that. And you know, whether it’s NPS scores or whether it’s being able to choose. For those of you that can’t choose, we want to make sure that we have the appropriate, you know, sort of safety net for those individuals. But I do like the idea of us having an impact on how we, how we approach the care we receive. The second thing I would just say is that moving from healthcare to health. What do you mean by that? Well, you know we all have Oura rings or maybe you have an Apple watch and and we do things everyday that make us healthier. But the only time they call me is when we need health care, when there’s an acute problem, there’s an illness. And you can find especially in America, you can know in other countries. I’m I’m from Canada. Mhmm. That that the focus on health is is much greater. So I do see a slow progression. It’s not as fast as we’d want it to be, but a slow progression to moving to health instead of just health care and treating people when they’re well and not just when they’re ill. Right. Interesting. Yeah. What’s keeping you up at night? Oh, man. Oh, go ahead. I feel like there’s so much chatter. I’ll start with what I think is going right right now. I think one thing I do like is we’re bringing more voices to the table right now. I think there’s been a more concerted effort at least conversations to figure out how do we bring people that have chronic conditions into whether these pharma companies working more with community based initiatives or hospitals saying how we hold patient advocacy groups to actually hear from individuals. And so they have a community centered approach. It’s something that I’m seeing more of throughout the United States which is something I like a lot. But at the same time, on the flip side, I feel like I feel like as a medical myth buster, a lot of my job is to look at the things that aren’t going well. And so, I run a podcast called The Dose, and I use it as my way of talking with policy experts that are thinking about how can we make the world better. And so when I think about things like climate change, I think we haven’t hit the mark on how do we actually protect climate change with health more and actually prepare for this new future we’re going to see where we need to understand how climate, climate disasters actually are impacting people in terms of health. So you think about the LA fire that just happened and I think a big narrative that I saw left out of the media was what happens to people that are in the hospitals there? What are the lasting effects afterwards when you have smoke inhalation and now increases in asthma in those areas? And so climate is one thing I’m thinking about that I think we need to do better on. Big one for me is misinformation and disinformation which I know we’re gonna jump into as well. And I feel like this landscape of social media will allows individuals to be able to get health information, in ways that they never were able to before. At the same time, it can foster misinformation, which is just incorrect information or disinformation, where there’s bad parties out there really trying to say, let’s push this specific topic out there. And I think right now, if we look at government, even the administration, there’s a lot of confusion from the physician side of how do we make sure that we keep evidence based medicine out there and do our patients the best service while making sure we’re keeping misinformation out. But now we’re in a time where we’re actually having to fight against a federal government which is supposed to be actually putting out accurate facts and actually having to debunk things. And so whether it’s about measles vaccines, right, vitamin A can be helpful for preventing mortality from measles, but it’s not a cure. Yet I’ve been seeing so many things out there and even individuals saying that vitamin A can be a cure, even though we know vaccines are the best, safest way to prevent measles. So I think that’s a great example of showing how there’s unfortunately this misinformation, disinformation landscape that’s been transforming how health care is happening right now. I think the last thing I’ll I’ll say is also just health equity, because I think that’s where my heart lies. I think we’re doing better in terms of talking about health equity. I’ve seen medical schools trying to implement this even within curriculum, weaving in conversations about race and gender and climate change, in ways that I hadn’t seen before. I think we still have a long way to go to figure out how do we translate that information into actual change when it comes to the hospital and seeing patients, in the office. But I am hopeful that we’re moving in the right direction to try and figure out how do we have these conversations in a way that brings everyone to the table, that includes patients, not just providers. It’s so interesting that the curriculum that you’re experiencing in medical school is probably different from, you know, the curriculum you had, right? We talked a little bit about the need for, health literacy curriculum in general for people and also maybe even social media, literacy, when we were talking about our kids and stuff. You know, that’s such a big thing. So, I mean, how do you think about content creation for your audience knowing that, you know, you are a voice, a trusted voice, and people are looking to you for guidance, for debunking myths. Like, how do you think about that and how do you decide what you’re going to cover at any given time? Yeah. Well, I’ll kind of take you back to the start of even starting to create content, which was about five years ago for me. And what launched it was really the COVID pandemic. In my medical school, I went to Washington State University, for medical school. I actually just graduated this past December twenty twenty four, and I’m gonna be matching this later this month in residency, so super excited for that. Good. But I started five years ago posting content online about things that I was hearing in class that didn’t make sense. So we often talked about that COVID was more likely to impact black populations. We just left it at that, making it seem as if it was something biological as opposed to realizing that there’s a history of policies that have harmed black communities or just marginalized communities from redlining to pollution that’s nearby with factories when it comes to exacerbating asthma, which been worse than COVID outcomes. And so I started talking about those types of things online that I wasn’t really seeing, and I realized that no one else was really sharing these conversations that weren’t really happening in the classroom or the new cutting edge research in health equity that could impact patients on the ground. One of the first videos I made was about this device called a pulse oximeter, and it measures what’s called your blood oxygen saturation level. Pulse oximeters, everyone’s probably had one when they go to the doctor. But I saw a study in December twenty twenty that showed that pulse oxes are three times as likely to lead to inaccurate, overestimated oxygen saturation levels in patients with darker skin tones. And the reason why is because it uses infrared light that reabsorbs light back, but melanin can interfere with that light, and so it artificially increases that number. What that meant during the COVID pandemic was that more patients with darker skin were likely to be turned away from the hospital. I remember I read that study. I had my cardiology unit, my pulmonology unit, but I’d never learned about it in school, in class. And so I jumped on TikTok and did what any Gen Z slash Millennial would do And I said, let me make a thirty second video because that’s all you can do at the time. Yep. About this device that we all use in medicine. But for some reason, I never learned about it and I’m sure doctors that are practicing right now never learned about either. In less than twenty four hours, it had over half a million views. Wow. And there was nurses and doctors and PAs and every single type of healthcare professional saying, I use this device every day and I never knew about it. Wow. And then there’s patients asking, is this why my loved one passed away? Why they were sent home instead of getting supplemental oxygen? And that became my way of realizing that the best way to figure out the story to talk about are one, to find the gaps in health care and medical education. And I feel lucky that I was going through medical school at this time because I was able to see what was I learning, what wasn’t I learning, what’s the research out there, and then fill in those gaps, and then actually to get real time feedback from people in comments. So that video now sits at over five thousand comments, and I use that to figure out, okay, what are my next racial biases gonna be? How do we debunk myths about race or climate change impacting care or how do we actually start reaching out to people in novel ways to get them thinking about these issues that I’m not necessarily solving the problems, but I’m alerting people to where the problems are so the right person can find out how to fix it. That is remarkable. I mean, the fact we talk a lot in our company about like pick up the paper, right? Like act like an owner, if you see something, do something about it. And it’s just remarkable to me that you saw this disparity, you learned that you were paying it forward, and you’re using it, you filled in the gap. Yeah. You’re like, I’m going to help and do that. That’s incredible. Moo, we talked a lot about breaking. In your book, you talk about it too. And everyone, please get your copy. It’s an awesome book. We talked about breaking boxes, right? And I want you to talk to the audience a little bit about that. Because in health care, there are so many problems. They seem insurmountable. It’s overwhelming, and we’re often stuck in our ways, right? Well, this is the way we’ve always done it, right? Especially in some larger health care organizations many times. How do you Tell the audience a little bit about breaking boxes and how that helps guide you and, lead your company to do new things, new technologies, new approaches. Yeah. And I think you’re As I was listening, I knew some of the story but I was captivated. I was like, Can I go to the audience and ask you a question? Good. I mean I think it’s brilliant but it’s the same, sort of disease I have which is my first instinct on everything is to be disagreeable. Okay. And You seem like a very disagreeable. Yeah, you know That tracks. If you tell me, you know, the sky is blue, my first instinct is to say it isn’t. Wow. But that’s actually the best way to learn, right? I got to take you back. It wasn’t TikTok at the time. But I was, I went to an all boys Jesuit high school. And any of you that were in that environment know that that is a very strict environment. Fortunately, I was educated by priests and I was disagreeable and everything that I They loved you. Oh, they did. I said a lot of, anyway. But what they did allow me to do was to disagree. So everything they told me instead of just believing or just taking it at face value, they said, Moo, go ahead. Disagree with that and then get information that refutes or supports that fact. And that’s what you did. And so I think that’s my my my issue with boxes is that we create boxes in healthcare and frankly all of us, right? Whatever we do in our roles, what we’re supposed to wear, how we’re supposed to dress, how we’re supposed to respond to things. There are all these boxes that are created by society. Some of them are created by ourselves. But wouldn’t it be great if we lived in a world where we could break those boxes and be one hundred percent authentically ourselves? How much more greatness would there be in the world if we could do that? And how much, more care could we provide? How much more illness could we prevent if in healthcare we blew up, what’s preconceived, initially be disagreeable, but also be optimistic about the fact that we can get to an answer, and then relentlessly focus on making sure we find out that answer. So that’s kind of the way I approach everything, which doesn’t work all too well for my marriage. But disagreeing at first is probably in this environment when we go back and going back to empowerment, social media, patients being empowered, and the fact that they can find out what’s going on with them even before they come to see me means that their disagreeableness will actually lead to greater truth. So in misinformation I’m not I you know, it frustrates me a little bit but I’m seeing an empowerment, a patient empowerment, a student empowerment, an individual empowerment where they can use tools, chat GPT, all these things, they can use tools to get to an answer that maybe isn’t one hundred percent right, but refutes some of the foolishness that people are saying. Yeah. Yeah. So Well, that’s interesting because to your point, they’re more engaged And so now they’re already they’re they want the help. They want to, have that conversation with a doctor. And I feel like in the past, doctors have probably you know, people brought in something printouts from Google, you know, about their condition. They kind of rolled their eyes like, Oh, God. All right. They’re trying to, you know, be the doctor. But now I think it’s different for physicians, right? They expect that. They expect the dialogue. Right? I would say more than expect. It’s an encouragement. Yeah. For somebody to come in and have reams of printouts or have on their phone all the things that they’re concerned about is amazing. Yeah. Because now I know where to go. Now I know how to communicate with them, what fears to leave, what places to dig in a little more. Yeah. I think that’s really, and, you know, the more information again, you know, I don’t know what I am if I’m a I’m kind of a X er, right? You might be giant X. You might be You’ll be You’re being very nice to me by the way. I appreciate it. But but yeah, but I think that, I think moving in that regard was sort of an old card Yeah. Frankly where you said, No, I’m the doctor. I know everything. No, I’m not. I’m the doctor, but I should help facilitate your journey and and you have to be empowered to lead that journey especially when it comes to something as personal as hell. Totally. Totally. Oh, my gosh. I want to ask you guys about AI and new technologies. I don’t even know where to start. I mean, hope versus hype, it’s everywhere, it’s all we hear about. It’s a huge theme at our conference, this week. But how maybe I’ll start with you. Like, how do you get your the physicians that are part of your organization embracing new technologies? How are you actually putting AI to work in a way that’s give me an example. What’s it able to do today for you and your organization and where do you hope maybe it can help? Yeah. Have any of you all worked with physicians? Yeah. Yeah, we have five thousand of them. So, know that they are very strong, very intelligent, very, creative individuals. So, they’re be they in some ways in the way we work, all of our five thousand physicians own equally. So we there’s nobody the physician that joined yesterday owns just as much as I do. So, it creates a level of equality. So it’s not so much that we are taking AI or these, technology tools and giving to people. It’s actually people are using them and what we do is we, you know, an individual might say, Hey, I have this amazing tool. We look, we look, we evaluate that tool, we share it with other physicians, we all get together and say, That’s the right tool. Or, That’s the wrong tool. I think it’s we have always embraced innovation, so none of that really scares us. We do think that there is some governance and that’s probably a different panel. But there needs to be some governance around, for example, with Hatch GPT. It’s an amazing tool, but where is the information getting curated? How much is that data vetted? Right. And so we we that’s where we the bigger organizational support comes in. People have tools, we want to make sure those tools are being used the right way. But I think I think it’s amazing. Yeah. I’m optimistic about all these tools. I think whether you embrace it or not, these AI is going to be built into everything you do anyway. So you might as well jump on board and have fun with it. Yeah. How are you thinking about all these tech advances in AI? Yeah. Is it helping your life in any way? Are you using it to, you know, help create content or, analyze comments from your followers? How are you using it? Absolutely. Well, first, I love the idea of what you’re saying in terms of breaking the box open and need to break it open in order to get to that next step. I think when it comes to breaking it open, the biggest way that we can do that is through making sure we balance the patient physician relationship, which is everything that you’re talking about. Right? The idea that patients have more autonomy, more education, are able to get additional information that even if it’s not all correct, are they’re able to take to the physician to start a conversation. And I feel like I always am trying to teach my followers not necessarily about medicine, but how to ask the right questions in medicine. So how do you ask your doctor what’s my differential diagnosis? You know, how do we actually start asking, okay, if it’s not asthma, what else could it be? If it’s not cancer, what else could it be? And getting those conversations for education. But to AI, I used a lot in different ways. I think from the creator side, I of course use ChatGBT. One of my favorite ways to use it actually is to make sure I’m level setting. If I’m creating a script about cardiomyopathy, I run it through Touch EBT and actually say, can you make this at a fifth grade level? Because most people, when it comes to health literacy, don’t understand, I mean, the majority of the United States just doesn’t have isn’t health literate. We don’t get it in schools necessarily. So figuring out how do you actually level set information that people are getting and then entering that into normal vocabulary whether I’m seeing a patient or whether I’m creating a video online. But I think from the physician side, and I’m curious if you guys use this, open evidence is one that’s become a lot more common. And so it’s essentially an AI website that is working with the New England Journal of Medicine to have the most up to date research in there. So you could literally say something like, what dosage of ceftriaxone do I need to give to my patient that has these specific comorbidities? And it actually runs through and will find the most up to date literature on that. So my last rotation in medical school, it was an ICE rotation, intensive care unit, and we were using that all the time because it was really the best way to figure out is there research that we’ve missed? And you asked about kind of integrating AI into the everyday services for physicians who are stubborn and do things in one way and don’t wanna change it. I think the best way to get it to be integrated is by making it emulate the things that we already did in the past but quicker. And so with something like Open Evidence, the cool thing about it is all it is is kind of sourcing your research which you do naturally as doctors is going and reading an article and actually having to read through and figuring out do statistics make sense here. But now it just quickens that process by allowing me to go online, write in the article I wanna find, but it actually quickens up that search process for me. Awesome. And so I think that’s one of the best ways I think. And it’s a validated source, right? It’s coming from the New England Journal. Exactly. So that’s it’s not just coming out from anywhere. That’s great. Exactly. That’s very cool. Very cool. Yeah. I mean, do you think that misinformation and all of that is like a public health, like, issue? Like, how are we supposed to tackle it? Whose job is it to tackle this? Like, do companies that make medicines need to play a more hands on role in getting the right information out? Do we need to be partnering maybe more with influencers and experts like yourselves to get the right information? How do you think about that? And how can we challenge, you know, my clients are pharmaceutical companies in large part and biopharma companies, challenge them to step up and take a more kind of active role in fixing what’s wrong, you know? Yeah. I think it takes everyone. I think it’s gonna take institutions from pharma companies to hospitals to community organizations to patient advocacy groups. It’s gonna take individuals that are physicians or even lay people as well sharing their own experiences. But I think one of the I wouldn’t call it crisis quite yet. I think it is, I think there it unfortunately is getting to that level in terms of misinformation and actually connecting it to AI. One of the scary things I’ve seen out there, a lot of my friends are online doctors creating content in the same way that I am but in different fields. And one thing that we’ve started noticing is that AI is actually being used to take people’s likeness. It actually use someone’s, face and actually start moving the mouth in a way, a deep fake essentially, in a way that says, I’m supporting this specific product, but using someone that’s reputable source, someone that a Doctor. Mike that everyone recognizes and has them saying something that’s not true. Wow. So I think that is one scary thing about the side of like where I could see us going with misinformation and disinformation. Right. So think thinking about the healthcare ecosystem, getting on top of that and making sure that we have guidelines and regulations around that would be really important. But I think it’s gonna take all of us in order to combat this misinformation. One of the organizations I think does a really good job with this, and we talked about this on the phone, is Johns Hopkins. I think what institutions haven’t done well enough is finding that brand voice in medicine and figure out how do we actually connect it to people. So if I were to Who’s on social media just in general? Okay. Who knows like the Wendy account on Twitter or like threads? Do people know like the kind of the tone of voice? Tell people, for people who don’t know explain it. Okay. So Wendy’s, we know Wendy’s as a brand, right? That like sells burgers and fries. But if you go online and you follow the Wendy’s account, it’s the snarkiest like person that you’ll ever meet. Like someone will be like, hey, can I take you out on a date Wendy’s? And Wendy just responds, no. Like buy me fries first or something like that. And so it’s like really feels like human and I feel like there’s ways for health institutions to do that in terms of finding a personal brand voice that connects with audiences that hasn’t been done right now. Johns Hopkins does pretty well by posting content online that really follows trends that are happening. And so whether it’s something that’s funny happening on TikTok or on Instagram, connecting what is pop culture with medicine is a way to bring in people who never would be thinking about healthcare in the first place. Yeah. That’s so cool. I have to follow the Johns Hopkins and see what they’re putting out there. I think that’s great. And Wendy’s I guess too. And Wendy’s, I’m writing that down too. If I get a free burger for it, I’ll tell you. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Shout out to Real Chemistry. Yeah. Right? I mean because this, you know, what you’re doing here, I mean I am Yeah, as you guys have seen I’m beside myself that I’m just meeting you. I told him stage what I’ll say in front of everybody, I’m so proud of him. Aww. You know, just I mean, just to Yay. Sorry. You know, it’s it’s emotional. I mean, I you know, a lot of the things you’re doing, I’m supposed to be doing and not doing. So no, I’m I’m just super proud of you, knowing your history and, so we’re going to keep we’re going to do more. Yes. Yes. But I think what you’re doing, Real Chemistry is doing is really the way I think we think of how do we combat it like it’s out there, like it’s the you know some big beast in the universe. But it’s actually it’s actually all of us. And by you connecting different parts of the healthcare ecosystem, that’s how we’re going to combat misinformation. You know, my team, one of the things I say with my I have a pretty big executive team, which some of them are actually going to go, but that’s a different thing. But I’m joking. I’m joking. Somebody else’s. Jeez. He said he went to Jesuit school. What’s wrong with them? No. No. But, I asked them that question. How many of them are in Instagram? How many of them are in TikTok? And they sheepishly kind of put their hand up and they know they’re not really on there. But the fact that they aren’t on there means that we’re probably leading people who communicate and interact in a way that we don’t. Mhmm. And that’s how the misinformation is spreading. You’re getting your information from a very different place Mhmm. Than I’m putting it out there at. And so, what you’re doing here is amazing. I think others we need to get together. You know, Johns Hopkins, Wendy’s all need to get together. And then now as we start to share information, people who are searching for that information are going to go. Our Our partnership we have in the last three years, we have more people who have joined the partnership in the past three years, than we have that have been there for a long time. Wow. So we’re going to have a communication problem. Right. Because the way they receive information is very different than we’re used to giving it. Right. So I I think what you’re doing here in others, I mean that’s gonna be the best way. At the end of the day, if everybody is speaking the right truth Mhmm. The misinformation can’t can’t can’t, you know Perpetuate. Perpetuate, yeah. It’s a great point. I mean, I was at a session yesterday. It was about podcasting and it was more about political podcast but it was relevant for and they were just talking about how that, channel is just so influential. People trust these hosts. I mean, I listen to some podcasts, and I would trust anything they say, right, about leadership, about buying a product or whatever. And, you know, how do we convince clients and institutions and others to, you know, maybe advertise on them or engage with those hosts or give them the right information? You know, we really are trying to expand the net of media understanding and influence and engagement. And, you know, in health care, that’s scary. You know, it’s a highly regulated industry, and sometimes companies can be really scared. I don’t want my content alongside of something that could be negative or whatever. It’s like, but that’s where your audience is. Yes. And you can’t, even if people have different views, whatever you believe, it’s your responsibility as an organization to put the right information out for everyone Yeah. At where they’re already living their lives. Yeah. You know, and that’s going to look different for different generations too Yep. Of people. Yeah. The one thing that, again, I’m going to shout out to you guys. One thing that I think everybody in the room needs to do is merge merge your leadership position and your, company’s brand. That’s super important. I was not comfortable with that. So, what do you mean by that? Yeah. So, you know, when I first got this job about eight years ago, just so you know, CEO of a, you know, we went from eight hundred million to two and a half billion. So the I really thought that the CEO of Vituity was a separate person from Mu. Right. And so what it did is it created this dichotomy, where, Yeah. Two boxes, if you know. Two boxes, two different boxes and the way I wanted to impact the world was split. And by merging those brands it gave me an opportunity to really, level up. People want to see who you are, before they follow you, before they listen to you. And I think that’s what you’ve done so fantastically is really let people know who you are, what your story is, what’s important to you. And now what you say is more valid than just putting out a statement on a website. Great. People know exactly what you went through as an individual. People know my son had seizures for two years. He was in the hospital all the time and I’m devastated to this day and he’s twenty one. Yeah. And I’m still sad about that time. People need to know that to now then listen to what I have to say. Absolutely. You start your book with that, and it’s powerful. I think you’re totally right. When we talk about storytelling, and connecting people and inspiring them to take action, especially with their health, life or death decisions, we have to do it with stories. We have to be human. A press release with jargon is not going to do it. Mhmm. It’s not rocket science, like, hello. And I think, you know, the pharmaceutical industry and health care in general, I just think, you know, our speaker earlier said, like, they don’t want to be first in anything. They like to be second or third, make sure it’s okay first. But we’ve got to push the limits a little bit, you know? It’s just a different time. What are some things that you did not learn in school but are leadership lessons that we can all kind of learn from? I’m at least I’m at least sorry about that. Why you letting me start? No, you go. You’re so brilliant and happy. Thank you. No, I’m I’ll give you some time. I’ll give you some time. What I didn’t learn, I didn’t learn how, oh, your drinks your drinks spilling. Yeah. Oh, you’re such a good guy. Yeah, I know. I just didn’t want to catch. Nice. If you see something, say something. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So I guess what I what I what I didn’t learn is is again going back being repetitive here. I didn’t learn that you could be yourself. I didn’t learn that if you look back at medical school, you were taught algorithms, you were taught, you know, this when a patient presents like this, this is what they have. And I and I struggled with making sure I was that amazing physician, that amazing leader, but the truth is, I mean, everybody read the seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Right, put your hand up. Amazing book, except I read it and I was like, I don’t have any of these. And then like, you know, like six years later he came up with the eighth habit. I was like, why don’t you tell me about this, you know, we’re mad about the seventh. And then I probably have like nine through thirteen. And so, I struggled with that and I forced myself into those seven habits or into that box of what a leader should be. And I finally realized, you know what, I’m Papa, I am what I am. Yep. And I have some amazing things that I, you know, and I have some things that I need to work on. But if I can lead with those strengths, if I can instead of constantly focusing on what I’m not and lead with those strengths Right. How much more amazing could the world be? And then, as people come into my team or come into the partnership, if I let them be themselves, how much more amazing we can be? It’s the introversion, the, you know, the anger, the sadness. There’s different skills that people have that give them energy that we suppress. You got to look a certain way to be a CEO. And I want to, you know, if I can, maybe it’s just the people in this room, I want to blow that box up completely. You can be you can have a bunch of different skills and absolutely impact and influence the world, impact and influence healthcare. And that’s I think something I hope y’all leave with today. Oh, that’s awesome. I love that. I think for me, it’d be something that I’d heard a lot, but didn’t really conceptualize as I got to medical school and started kind of trying to be a disruptor, is that medicine is just as much of an art as a science. I think we all hear and kind of similar to what you’re saying that we There’s these algorithms that we learn or that science is kind of set in place, but there are so many ways that is impacted by our history, by the things that we’ve been told before, and there’s still ways to disrupt it to make it work better for people. And so what I think the leadership lesson out of that is, we should be willing to bring ourselves into the workplace and wherever we go and be able to be disruptors. To bring the things that we have from our past, the lessons that we learned, our identities, whatever that means, whether that means mother, son, sister, someone that has an illness, someone that is disabled, bringing those conversations into your full self at work, at your leadership, I think that’s what changes things. I think back to like why I got started and I brought it back to my grandma. And I think for me this whole journey began with understanding that why, and understanding that you can bring that why into your workplace. I think it’s hard Medicine’s harder sometimes because we want it and for good reason sometimes. It needs to be evidence based, it needs to move slow to make sure that we’re doing the right things for the majority of people. At the same time, I think there’s places where because of that we’ve just kinda stepped back and been, I guess, I don’t wanna say lazy but lazy in terms of pushing the needle forward. And so, what I’m excited for I think is to see more people that are willing to go into their workplaces, that are willing to ask questions and say, why have we done it this way in the past and does this make sense? I think one thing I learned earlier on when I was in high school is just to ask why, right? And it’s fun to ask those questions because you start to realize often there is no answer. And those are the places that we have opportunity for innovation, for disruption, and to make the system better for people who haven’t had the chance to ask those questions. Yeah. Yeah. You talk about that a lot too in your book, Mu, about curiosity, asking why are we doing it this way? Is there a better way? Like trying to challenge ourselves to do that and maybe it comes from your disagreeable nature. But I think that’s really important because I would think that we get stuck a lot in health care. We get stuck in the same old ways of doing things. But if you could stop, question, What’s the point? What are we trying to do? Is there a different way to get there? Bring in other people to solve it. I mean, I don’t know. Yeah, I think the idea, like I said, disagreeableness, which is, I don’t believe anything until I validate it, look for information. Optimism means that I feel like no matter what that I can have an impact on things that, you know, people don’t think I can have an impact and then it’s relentlessness to never to never give up, never say die, always work at it. And I think that combination, not a combination of skills or gifts or things that you should normally put together. Yeah. But I think that’s the way that we get to the future. You know one of the things I wanted to mention too to combine maybe this question and the last question was, and you’ve done this so fantastically is that in healthcare we want to interact with each other. Right? We want to I’m the CEO of Vituity. Let’s get together with the CEO of CommonSpirit. And the truth is I need to be getting better with Kendrick Lamar. Yeah. And I need to be getting better with Serena Williams or with Taylor Swift. I think that’s what I try to do in my podcast is really bring people not from healthcare. Right? Get information because that world is moving so fast. Mhmm. In healthcare, I think we’re constantly like, oh, healthcare is disruptive. I’m like, no it’s not. It’s kind of been the same way forever. Right. So how do we take those other industries, you know, whether it’s entertainment, whether it’s business or whatever, whether it’s start ups. Take information from them and apply it to medicine in ways that are different that will move that dial, towards creating a better product for patients. I love that. You know we haven’t done that yet and so that’s I try to bring We can go So Kendrick Lamar is going to be on your Kendrick goes to me too. He might be around too. Yeah, but I mean the idea of bringing multiple genres in together because everybody is really concerned about health. But if you’re just It impacts everyone. Yeah. It’s like one common denominator. Exactly. Exactly. But if you’re just talking with each other you’re not getting a broad perspective. Perspective. Oh, that’s so interesting. And it kind of goes to this idea of influence and where we’re getting our information from. And many times, you know, again on this podcast, event I was at yesterday, they were saying, you know, You’re listening to a podcast about news or politics, but they might be talking about health, or they’re talking about culture or art. It’s all intertwined. So again, as we look at trusted voices and who can be conveyors of health information, we should be considering thinking more expansively about who those voices are. Yes, doctors are super important, like for sure, but other people are too. And sometimes there is distrust among the medical community and regular people, but if you could find voices that are credible, that speak to But I’m going to pick up a word. Yeah. Doctors are not super important. Okay? Doctors are here to serve and so that’s a very different model. And that’s one thing we all The servant leadership, that ability to for me to be there to support the patient, to support the community, to support healthcare in general, get to where it is, is very different than being an important person. And I think if I just pick on doctors and some of you all know what I mean but that’s Yeah. Pretty fundamental to I think what we do is that you’re part of the team, you’re not the head of the team. Right. And that’s a very, it’s a tweak and it’s a very different mindset. Yeah. Yeah. I think at the end of the day, like when I think about the role of physician, like as I’ve gone through medical school and tried to be like, okay, where have I wished I would have been taught a little bit differently? I wish that the doctor was thought more as a translator. Really someone that’s trying to help guide health and so that’s why I love everything you’re saying about the intersectionality with media and with sports and with entertainment because we in medicine should be translating it for everyone using these mediums then translating out. And so if you’re thinking about sports, everyone in sports can get an ACL tear at some point, right? But you can use that as an to expand out and actually connect it to musculoskeletal system and like how is movement, is health important and things like cardiomyopathy or HOCAM which is hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy. Why that happens more in younger populations. That’s always how I’m thinking like how do we take this one thread? People love sports, but did you know all these other things exist and that your favorite athletes probably had some experience with it or did something there and using that as an intro point for people to learn more about themselves. I think when I got to medical school, you asked before about what was the most surprising. The biggest surprise actually would probably be that I got to medical school and was learning things. I was like why doesn’t everyone not know this? Give me an example. Diabetes, as simple as that is. Why do we Why did I not really understand it? It’s complex when you get down to it, but at the base of it, it really isn’t, right, in terms of how do you take care of yourself better or blood pressure, why it goes up or these common things that I would go home and tell my mom and my dad and they’d be like, Oh, I never knew that. And I’m like, why don’t we know this though? I think the more we infuse it in the everyday conversations and the TV shows that we watch, whether it’s Grey’s Anatomy, which is a more health show, or if it’s like, I don’t know, ninety thousand two hundred and ten or community or Abbott Elementary. Any anything that you’re watching right now. But any show that you’re watching already, I think it’s there’s ways to talk about these so that we’re naturally getting the information. I think it’s fun to be able to get information without even realizing you’re learning. I think that’s why TikTok was so effective. It’s a space where people are going for entertainment. You’re watching someone dance on a video, then suddenly the next video is about a pulse oximeter. And you’re like, I’ve never heard this device before, but maybe I’ve seen it’s been put on me before. Yeah. And when you’re able to disrupt disrupt the spaces people are in with information they didn’t realize, touch them, I think that’s the most powerful place healthcare should be going. Preach. I think that’s amazing. Yes, and I’m glad that you’re doing that. You know, you’re playing a leading role in that, so, excellent. Let’s take some questions. Oh, yes, go ahead. And I’ll repeat the question for those in the back. Go ahead. Go ahead. Summarize the question. I’m giving you I’m giving you two dates. No, no, no. The question was, the question is, if I’m understanding it, how how do we help people who are just maybe a little uneducated about health topics and will just kind of accept whatever information is out there? How do we change that? Right? And how do you make it easy for them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So, a lot, a lot in there, and we have sixteen minutes so I’ll try not to be long, at least I’m interested to hear your thoughts too. I think the uneducatedness of, you know, sort of America or even the youth, I think is over over said. They’re actually much more educated than I was at that age, but their education comes in different ways. And I joked in the green room about my daughter and I were sitting right next to each other. The way I communicate with her is through reels, like right next to each other. So, I get my phone out and I’m like and then she giggles and then she sends me back another Reel. So, even though we’re not talking and so in my old brain, I think that, Hey, we don’t have the best relationship. But as far as she’s concerned, we have an amazing relationship. So, I think that the idea that, we have people who are uneducated, it may be just that we have to educate differently or look and see where they are getting that information. The second thing we have to and I don’t want to get political at all. I’m Canadian so there’s three parties as far as I’m concerned. So, don’t like, you know, just but the thing I would say is that we can’t confuse education with being on a team. And so, that’s very different, right? We’re saying people are uneducated, but they know they’re not educated. They’re on a team and they want to believe what that team believes. So, that’s not education and so we just have to be careful not to conflate the fact that number one, we can’t get to people. Number two, that they don’t have the information, right? And then number three, that they’re not just ignoring certain details on whatever side you’re on because I’m on a scene. So, to your point about Johns Hopkins, to the point about the health care community, we need to create, I don’t know if it’s even it’s unpartisan. We need to create a very objective source of information. It’s kind of like BBC, right? Like when you go, I want to find out something, so let me go watch British television. Right. You know, we need to get to the point where we’re giving people information in ways that are not, connected to politics and not connected to something weird. Yeah. So it’s very complex but that’s my thoughts on it. Yeah. What do you think? Yeah, I think I’ll start with I’ll talk about social media because that’s kind of the world that I live in where I see a lot of this happening. I think for me what it really comes down to is like figuring out I’ll actually ask a question. So once again, I asked the same question before, but raise your hand if you’re on social media, any platform. Okay, almost everyone in the room. Keep your hand raised. Keep your hand raised if you were taught how to use social media. Okay. I see like maybe five people in this room. I think we’re everyone is online in some ways, but we’re never taught how to use it, how to quickly evaluate the information we’re getting, taught us to ask how can this be paid for. So one thing that’s kind of scary that, I talk about often is there are people that are online that are paid to talk about specific topics, right? Similar to a way that maybe a journalist is paid to write write an article for a specific topic, but in the same way that you don’t have to disclose it as an ad because it’s an idea. And so I’m always thinking as someone that’s online, how do I know if this is a paid advertisement or it’s actually someone that someone believes? Even if it’s a trusted figure. And that’s a kind of a scary world to be in. And so I think the move we need to be making is teaching people more how do you critically evaluate the information you’re getting. Who could be a funder behind this, right? Or what is Who is benefiting from this information? Or, how do I critically evaluate and look at a study, be able to say, do these statistics make sense? I think those are things that we don’t often think about are for the everyday person knowing, but I wish that I got in when I was a middle school student to have more of those conversations. And I credit my my ninth grade, English teacher, Miss Russell, who was amazing at when we would ever like read a news article, she would force us to think about that. Think about the ethos, logos, pathos of an argument, but then look at what could be the people behind it actually fueling this. In the same way that journalists look at articles, we need to be looking at our social media in the same way. And being able to enjoy it, of course, still and say, okay, this is awesome, but being able to take it a step further and not just take take everything we see at face value, but being able to think a little bit more about, I wonder if there could be another alternative motive to this. I I think it hopefully would make us a little bit more critical to things we’d see, but more willing to go go out there and figure out real trusted sources, right? Right. Once again, I said this in the beginning and it’s I think it’s just hard because now it’s like what is a trusted source? Right. And that’s that’s the scary part that comes in is like Right. What is a trusted source in these days? And I think there’s going to be a vacuum of trusted sources and going back to the question you asked, I think it’ll take all of us again. Institution, individuals, influencers, doctors. I think that’s why we’re seeing a step up of individuals wanting to fill this misinformation void. Yeah. Well, son. Yo, really? Yep. That’s great. We’re talking about the curriculum. Right? These these types of lessons, health literacy, social media literacy should be part of, you know, the kids’ community. And when it’s taught early, like, the reel that’s sent to you, that is about maybe your daughter sending you, oh, I found this interesting topic about how to combat misinformation online. Right? And so when this when the education starts young, it bleeds out to the entire society. So, I didn’t really feel it in that, so I’ll have to definitely look into it. Interesting. We have another question. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So, for those in the back, how do we elevate the voice of the patient in respect to medicines but also just advocating for the right treatments. So, we’ve already had I mean we said it earlier, we already had an example of it. My kids, I think it was like eight or nine or I don’t remember the age, but they still sing the Ozempic commercial. Oh, oh, Ozempic, right? Like, you all know it. Right? So, when you go into the office, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what it’s going to do for me. That’s the thing I want. And so, I think what we Yeah, right? It’s true though. Because you’re laughing because you know that. Right? So, I think that if we look at other venues to your point, other genres to in a way that’s safe, to push out information, we would see the ability to get to greater audiences. And I joked about Kendrick and Drake, but everybody knows about Kendrick and Drake. I have to support Drake because I’m from Toronto. Clear life. Right? But at the end of the day, everybody, people who don’t even like rap, who would never listen to rap, understand that this thing went on. And they’ve mastered the ability to get information to people. You know, maybe you and I have a battle and you’ll Oh, that’s an idea. You know, but I think that we need to find other ways to get that information out there so that people are appropriately empowered to ask for the right treatments. But I do agree that it’s a gap. And when there’s a when somebody hits a note like Ozempic, everybody knows around it. But if there’s an amazing medicine out there that could really change lives, if they don’t market it the right way, patients don’t know. Yeah. Maybe that gets to the idea that patients taking medicines, you know, we should work harder to get their stories out there. Yep. You know, and their experiences out there because maybe I trust someone that’s living with my condition more than, you know, if I’m looking for information versus a fact sheet or or prescribing information. Mhmm. Another question? Somebody need them. Yeah. So just a little bit of a different direction, how do how do you all think that Oh, we’re going we’re going money. How do we improve the costs, and access to health care, right? Just overall, yeah? I’ll let you start since I Yeah. I mean, I think people, policy makers have talked about this a long time, but Medicare for all would be significantly important in terms of making healthcare system that’s not necessarily totally based on private insurance, right, but access and so making sure that everyone has it. The Affordable Care Act began doing that a little bit. A few years ago, actually, in two thousand sixteen, twenty fifteen, so somewhere around there, I worked at the Urban Institute looking at Medicaid policy and what happens when you expand the federal poverty level of Medicaid to four hundred percent of the poverty level. And you see increased utilization of services like emergency departments for people that often weren’t going to the hospital, and these were sick patients. And so I think the simple answer for expanding access is making a system where everyone actually has health insurance. Right? The cost side is more difficult, and I think right now this might be, I don’t know, this is unpopular to say, but I think private equity is coming in, I don’t think that’s a solution, I think that’s making cost increase for a lot of places and I don’t know if that’s a debate at all, but I think there are ways that we should be thinking about the healthcare system to make it more lean and improve overall. But I think for me starting with Medicare for all would be somewhere that everyone gets access to healthcare. So, this is our first Kendrick Lamar moment. So, so I’m from Toronto, from Canada. We have healthcare for everybody. Access is still a problem. They’re moving towards consumerization, so they don’t they didn’t have private insurers and now they have private insurers. You guys have heard of people jumping across the border to get their knees repaired, to get things. My sister who was actually a dancer for the Toronto Raptors tore her ACL and it’s still not repaired because they said you’re really not doing anything, you’re no longer a dancer, deal with it. Whereas, and if you’re here in America and you tear your ACL today and as out of shape as I am, I’m going to get it fixed tomorrow. Right. And so, there’s a level of consumerism tie into access that Medicare for all doesn’t necessarily help because we know that things that people want over ring, watch, other, you know, things I won’t say, you know, surgeries. People will get them and then they won’t treat their blood pressure or they’ll want their medication for the blood pressure to be ninety nine cents. That piece we have to address and I think it’s the patient empowermentconsumerization how do we get when I go to dinner tonight I’ll pay the restaurant. If I get healthcare today I’ll walk out. And somebody else will decide what my care was worth. That feedback loop on whether I got the best dinner at the restaurant is lost. So, we’re receiving care that’s terrible and someone else is paying a lot for it. We’re receiving care that’s amazing, that someone’s paying a little for it. So, how do we disrupt that box? How do we how do we do some direct to consumer which is loaded because now people who don’t have money, how do we make it direct to consumer in a way that takes socio economic things into account? I mean, there’s there’s still complexity to it. But the idea that just saying everybody gets to go is the answer in America is not the best. It’s a combination of consumerism, making sure nobody falls out, nobody should not receive care, but everybody should be able to, everybody should be able to go on Google and say they saw Moo and he was terrible. And my compensation should be less if my care and my connection to patients is always terrible. We don’t have that feedback loop yet. And so like yeah, talking like value based care systems and I think those are all really important too. I think jumping off of that one thing that you were mentioning is like price transparency. Yeah. And I wish there was more price transparency and more conversations in medical school about that as well. As a doctor, most doctors get no business information, right, or like even understanding how health care system works. Oh, is that right? Oh. You don’t cover that at all? No. I don’t think I learned anything about that actually. None of my classes. Interesting. Maybe there’s like one class class on like literally the difference between Medicare, Medicaid and like, but very brief. And most medical schools don’t talk about that. Yet, doctors are the one prescribing medications, thinking about things, while understanding the cost. And I talk about this a lot because my sister, when she had lupus, it became really expensive to take care of medications and I was always thinking about this. My entry into thinking health equity was from a financial perspective, how do we make it more affordable? And so I think price transparency would be incredible to understand more about what am I getting, how much is this ambulance costing and I think you’re seeing that more on TikTok especially where people are now calling their hospitals and saying get me an itemized bill list of every single thing on here. Reading through it and being shocked by how disparate Yeah. The prices are. And here’s the I know we’re almost at time but here’s the perversion of that system is that my cost is different based on who’s paying. Yeah. That’s the perversion. The perversion is not transparency. You can actually go and see how much an emergency visit cost. The problem is that we have to and any of the providers in the audience are dealing with this. If it’s a blue, if your patient has private insurance, you have to charge something different or at least they’re going to give you something different to offset a patient that’s only going to give you ten percent of that. And so the whole reinforcement of the system is perverse in a way that transparency me saying, Hey, it’s fifty dollars to see me. Well, it’s Moo. So it’s probably twenty five dollars to see me, right? But yet in that twenty five dollars the patient will walk out of the room and then someone will give me twenty four dollars and someone else will give me two fifty dollars and someone will give me eight fifty dollars and then with that I’ll have to manage my cost. So, it’s very, very, very complex. Yeah. And I think getting a room like this where you get all the payers, providers, everybody together, lock the door and say, You guys figure it out. You can’t leave until you do. Otherwise, you’re going to have to listen to the Kendrick Drake battle. That’s the only way we’re really going to get incentives around shared incentives around all the different players. Wow. Well said. Gosh, we are I know we have so many other questions in the audience. Unfortunately, we don’t have time for them, so find, Nhu, and Joel outside, please. But I did, as we wrap, we covered so much. Thank you so, so much. We got a lot of territory covered there. I would love for you to remind our audience where they can learn more about you, follow you, listen to your podcast, what is it called, so we can all do that as an action item. And a book, a podcast, an influencer that, you know, you recommend that we follow or read or enjoy. So I know I’ll be quick. Less than one percent of podcasts came out yesterday. Hasan Minhaj is a comedian. It’s going to be It’s a pretty cool conversation. Great. Health care adjacent, not health care. Yeah, I like that. One hundred percent related. The book is called Less Than one percent. And again, if you’re interested in in trying to be your authentic self and breaking out of boxes, those are the kind of things. LinkedIn, social media, Instagram, all those things. So connect with me if you just want to say hi. If you want to tell me I was horrible today, I’d love to hear that also. Never. Because I do like all kinds of feedback. I love it. It’s a gift. Yeah. You can find me at joelbruvel, it’s just my name all over Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, you name it. My podcast, I work with the Commonwealth Fund. It’s called The Dose. If you like policy conversations where healthcare is going, you can check that out on anywhere in your podcast. Then a book I would suggest is called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, incredible book about storytelling and how do you make ideas sticky? I think that’s all what we’re trying to do in medicine and pharma and everywhere, and they have this great model called success that you would all find interesting. I’m nodding my head because it’s called made to stick and I just ordered it on your, recommendation and it’s awesome. It can help as if you’re a communicator professionally or not. All of us are communicators in some way, shape or form. So that’s a great suggestion. We’re gonna read your book, of course, Moo. Just Thank you both. This was an awesome discussion. Thank you all for making the time and joining us, and, you have a great rest of your conference.

Good afternoon everyone and thank you for attending this panel. As you can see, we’ve, we’ve packed it today. And we know that this is an important topic for everyone in this room and everyone outside of this room. We know that obesity and GLP-1s are dominating the US culture right now. Everything we see across every social media platform, across every healthcare conversation, is really dominated by the GLP ones and this focus on obesity. And because we know that this is a medical turned social phenomenon, we wanted to tackle it here today. We wanted to tackle it because we believe it’s a really important consumer focused discussion. This is less about a healthcare discussion even though it’s incredibly important one, but it’s also about consumer empowerment. At the end of the day, this is a health story. And so we have an incredible panel today that I would love to sort of take a moment to have them introduce themselves. We have Shelby Gardner, Doctor. Courtney Ihlove and Jeff Cook. Each one of them is going to take a minute and introduce themselves. Shelby, I’m gonna start with you. Hi, everyone. My name is Shelby Gardner. So I am an influencer, primarily on TikTok. And my channel kind of focuses on fashion, beauty, and I’m very big on body positivity, and I’m a huge GLP one advocate. So I kind of wrap everything, into one, you know, how to love yourself but how to be the best version of yourself. Thank you. Jeff? Great. I’m Jeff Cook. I joined Noom as CEO about eighteen months ago really with two aims, to reinterpret Noom for this age of the GLP-one, both by rethinking the whole program from a lens of the GLP-one and and then also improving access to GLP-1s. Prior to this, spent eighteen years building a company from nothing, taking it public, and then selling it. Thank you. Courtney? My name is Courtney Younglove. I’m a physician. I’m dual board certified in obstetrics and gynecology and obesity medicine. I’ve been practicing obesity medicine since twenty fourteen, founded the first insurance based obesity medicine clinic in Kansas City, grew that, have since, because of the landscape that we’ll talk about a little bit, shifted it to a fully cash pace, cash based business. And they’ve really been spending the last couple of years talking about health care reform and what GLP ones are doing in the marketplace and all the things that need to be talked about publicly. Wonderful. Thank you. So we want this to be interactive. So if there are questions, I have been instructed that if there are questions, if you could please go to the mic in the middle of the room and ask your questions, it would be great. We’re gonna take some time for it at the end, but if you have burning questions that you want answers to based on these incredible panellists, please feel free to get up and head to the mic and we will make sure your question gets answered. First, I want to start with Shelby. And the question I have for you is the question that I have asked you probably what feels like eight million times now, which is you didn’t intend to become an influencer as we know. Tell us a little bit of how that happened, how that came about, and how your advocacy has really grown, recently. So it’s funny. So I became an influencer by happenstance during COVID. I was that borderline millennial that did not wanna download TikTok. I was working from home. My husband worked out of town. I was lonely. Finally, I was like, you know what? Let me just download this, give me myself something to do. And then I just started kind of posting videos, and I I did my first fashion video, and I think it was huge because people started to see a woman who was that I call mid size, you know, size eight to twelve, and that wasn’t really, you know, portrayed on social media at this point. And I just started growing from there. And then, I had my son in June of twenty twenty two. And if there are any moms in this room, you know, your body goes through a huge change. And I just I mean, I ballooned in weight and, you know, I never had, like, a super strong, and healthy relationship with food in the past. You know, I’ve tried every single diet. I I’ve tried phentermine. I’ve tried everything possible out there. But I I got to a point, I was, I think, two hundred and twenty five pounds. I had a BMI of well over forty. I was prediabetic. And when I got my labs back, that told me I was pre diabetic and I had a a six month old beautiful baby. It was shocking. It was scary. I wanted to be around as long as possible for him. So while I was still kind of promoting loving yourself on social media, at the end of the day, I didn’t love myself and I knew I had to get healthy and it wasn’t necessarily about the number on the scale, but about how I felt. So my coworker at the time, she was going to, like, a weight loss clinic and she’s like, there’s this new medication out. It’s called GLP one, and I was really curious. So I was like, well, can you just bring me back some, you know, some information? And she did, and I it was a free consultation. And, at the time, I was, you know, dead broke. So I went to the free consultation and, you know, had bare minimum information, and I started the shot the next week. I had no idea what was in the shot. I had no idea what the shot did, but I just knew that I was desperate. And by the end of of month three, I think I was down twenty pounds, and I started losing significant amount of weight to where my followers were they kept asking, what are you doing? What are you doing? But it was almost kind of shameful. I was like, oh, I don’t want them to know. It’s like I’m cheating. And finally, one of my friends actually started working with telehealth which really opened me up to the world of telehealth, and I started getting it through telehealth. And, you know, I sat down one day and I was like, You know what? I just need to be honest. I need to lead with integrity and I need to tell these people what I’m doing because I don’t wanna set any unrealistic standards for anyone. So I made my first video and it went semi viral. I had, you know, five hundred plus comments and messages about women who were in my same situation, who had a baby and were dealing with hormonal weight, and it really made me feel like I wasn’t alone anymore. And at that point, I was like, wow, there’s there’s a market for this. There’s there’s a need for this, and I need to learn everything I can about it. So it kind of started my deep dive into the GLP one world, peptide world, and that was two years ago, and I I haven’t slowed down since. I’ve been repping with, LEMD. They’re a telehealth company. And, you know, I’ve helped, you know, hundreds and hundreds of women now. I think that the totals of almost two thousand pounds lost combined, which is insane, and I’ve I’ve been able to change lives, and this medication has changed my life. First and foremost, we’re so glad. Now, I do want to ask a question of how have you seen your following grow in that? Because I’m assuming it’s exponential. Correct? Yeah. So, when I got pregnant, it really started to grow because, you know, all the moms, we have to stick together. And then I just kind of found this niche little community of, you know, moms that were struggling with their self image and self love and I really grew. I mean, I think I jumped like a hundred thousand followers just from being open and honest and talking about GLP one and, you know, being able to help others. And, you know, I’m still growing and still attracting new followers and, you know, you have to kind of have thick skin in this industry. And some people are very anti GLP one and there’s lots of conversation around it, but it’s never gonna stop me from talking about it. Well, we love that by the way. Geoff, as Noom is one of the first sort of digital health companies that really, not just entered the GLP-one business but really sort of innovated within it, as you sort of listen to Shelby and as you sort of think about this, what is really different about this market that’s paved the way for this to be possible today? So, you know, I think we come at it from our mission, right, empower everyone everywhere to live better longer. And so, you know, I think with Noom, we are trying to create this place that, you know, really makes health a habit, like this daily habit, right? And we create tools to kind of to bring you in, to improve movement, get more steps, to eat nutritiously. And we, for a long time, of course, have focused on this caloric restriction aspect, right? And with the GLP-one, we realized, you know, it’s really a really turned the whole model on its head. And it becomes less about caloric restriction and more about, kind of getting enough protein, right? So, rather than, Oh, this is your protein bar, and this is this is it for the the the day, it’s make sure you actually can get this amount of protein. Because, when that food noise goes away, which of course is what happens on these medications, if you don’t change underlying habits, you may well not get enough protein, and encounter lean mass loss. And ultimately, if you then fall off the medications, regain the weight, and potentially end up kind of with conditions like sarcopenic obesity, kind of an increased fat mass versus, lean mass content. So we saw Noom and our behavior change program as kind of the perfect way to complement a GLP-one course of care. And so that’s ultimately the program we rolled out. I would say we certainly saw the frictions along the way, right? Which was, generally, you know, obviously the shortages are ending, but, for a long time and even today, the medications were in short supply. And what we found was, many folks, even if we were writing them prescriptions, they couldn’t access Could get them. Right. So Courtney, I want to ask you this question also because as a physician and as an obesity specialist and through the clinic, what are you really seeing in terms of, this accelerated adoption? And your experience, Ano, is could be unique, right, as you’ve just drastically changed your entire business model because of this. So can you describe for that as being a physician and just give us your perspective on I mean, I think it’s changed everything. Probably a big part of it is patient expectations. So it used to be that patients would come into our clinic and say, I’m struggling with this problem. How do I fix it? Mhmm. And that’s kind of the patient doctor relationship. Right? Help me figure this out. And it really, on its head, flipped to where people were coming in the door saying, this is the thing I want. I don’t really want to talk about anything else, which really changes the dynamics quite a bit. And then we had to come back and say, okay, I mean, we can do this thing, but it will cost a fortune, or you can’t get access to it. And so it really put a lot of friction between what patients wanted and expected and what we were able to deliver, which made it really hard. I mean, we never dove into the world of compounding, because I really have put my feet in the ground and said, This is evidence based medicine. I want to stick with what’s really out there proven, not because I love Big Pharma, but because it’s the right thing to do as a physician, and my med mal depends on it. So we were working on getting meds from Canada, from Israel, like really trying to it became kind of a paperwork nightmare. And then the insurance companies really created a lot of drama and started denying And so we got a lot of retractions and then denials, and then and we ended up just dropping the insurance companies and saying, now we have to bring this direct to consumer, which is good and bad. The expectations were very different, though. If I’m paying cash for this, then I really want this thing that I want, which just changed it all. So it’s it’s different. And we used to really focus on all the four pillars of obesity medicine and behavioral interventions and nutrition and movement, and it flipped on its head to where a lot of patients were like, I don’t want to talk about that other stuff. I just want this thing, which really made it hard to practice good solid medicine. So it’s really How are you seeing them progress though? Even though they came in sort of in that moment of demanding this one certain thing, were you able to then go back after they begin to have that experience and sort of begin to rep the others? Not all. Yeah. I mean, I I will say we’ve been pretty rigid in saying if you are losing lean mass, we watch that every month on a body composition analysis, and if you’re losing too much lean mass, we’re done. We’re not going to continue this intervention because your risk of sarcopenic obesity is so high that it scares me to death. So some do, some don’t. It’s kind of all over the map. And I would imagine, across the three of you, we’re not seeing demand go anywhere. -No. -What up? Correct? And how I would love to ask this question to you because with the deep level of experience each one of you have is what are some of those misconceptions about the GLP-1s and or around the sort of consumer experience that you would love to see sort of corrected or evolved in this sort of general space? Because we also know that there is a tremendous amount of misinformation out there as well. So, Shelby, I’ll start with you. Yeah. So I think one of the main misconceptions is that GLP-one is a cure all, that you can rely on this medication and, you know, in six months, you’re cured, you’re fixed, you’re skinny. GLP one is a tool and, you still need proper diet and exercise. Like Jeff was talking about your protein intake, it’s so important. And a lot of people think, okay. Well, I I can just take this medication. I can I can pay this money a month, and my problems will be fixed? But that that’s not true. And there just needs to be more education around it because, I feel a lot of these large telehealth companies, they’re kind of seeing consumers as a dollar sign, and they’re not putting the information out there. And they’re, you know, they’re promoting, okay. Well, six to nine months, you’re gonna lose twenty percent of your body fat, but they’re not saying, you know, how to do that. They’re not following up. There’s no patient oversight. There’s a lack of it. So I think that’s one of the main misconceptions is that, you know, it’s going to fix all of your problems. Thank you. Jeff? Yeah, I would add on to that misconception with, you know, the label on the medications is to be used as an adjunct for diet to diet and exercise, right? So, the medication is supposed to be the adjunct to a diet and exercise program, right? Like that’s not it typically functions in the wild, right? It’s just the medicine, and maybe habits change, but probably not. There likely was no habits program prescribed along with the medication. And if there was, it may or may not have been followed. And so, you know, I think the It kind of feeds into another misconception which is that the folks are going to be on these meds forever. That may well be what, the clinical opinion is, but it’s not anything like what we see in real world data, right? Studies are showing as many as eighty five percent of people are no longer taking the medicine at month twenty four, right? So, maybe a third after one month, right? So there are significant gastrointestinal side effects that people encounter along the way that may or may that may stop adherence and persistence. There’s a very, and so, you know, without some form of intervention that leads to, some behavior change, in a landscape like that, you’re just going to see, maybe two years later kind of being in the in the same place. And so like like I I think that’s that that the so, you know, the the the main misconception being the meds are all you need. You know, I think that’s that’s that’s probably one. But the other I think is is is kind of that this is only about, obesity or overweight, right? Like I think what we’re seeing is this medicine class is, helping with Cardiometabolic issues, heart disease, kidney function, you know, you kind of name it. You see that kind of med kind of research report almost every week, suggesting that there’s benefits beyond, just weight. Courtney? I mean, yes, all of that. I think the other misconception I see a lot is people look at the hyper responders and say that’s the normal. It’s not normal to lose seventy pounds in a year. It’s lovely. But there’s a lot of expectations now, externally and internally, that people come in, and I want that. And as a physician, I have to say, well, the average weight loss is going to be twenty percent over seventy eight weeks, and And it’s it’s boring to hear that. It’s it’s not what people want to hear, and then they get very disappointed when they are not a hyper responder. Correct. And some people don’t respond at all to these medications. Right. And, you know, so I think the expectations for what we should be able to achieve have skyrocketed, and our ability to fulfill that demand is not there. Well, and I know you and I have had this conversation too, and this goes to a little bit more of the virility across the social media channels too, which is what we see is the testimonials of before and after, right? So we’ve had long conversations around, like, is before and after, is it before and now, right? I Before and after, yes. I refuse to do any of that in my world. It’s, yeah, we can do before and now, before and now, but now doesn’t mean forever. Right. Yeah. And I’m sure you’re witnessing that too, right? Which is sort of people coming through. And we know this, right, because we’re paying attention to the sort of social channels because it’s where it’s all happening. And people are sort of posting videos and sort of really talking about this. And I know that, Doctor. Younglove, we’ve had this conversation around, are we doing the right things along the lines of these narratives because we’re sort of going back to this thinness narrative, right? When you think about the before and afters versus the health narrative that we’re really trying to create. To your point, Geoff, that we’re really getting into the the sort of transformation here around how we’re really treating cardiometabolic differently. And while we know we’re still early and at sort of still the front edge of that, so our data would only tell you that, you know, we only have about seven million patients in the US, right, that are on. So that’s we’re still scratching the surface there. And I guess we should have been in Vegas today because it’s all sevens, right? It’s seven million patients, seven percent are what are being ultimately denied through insurance, and the persistency we’re seeing is about seven months. And so it’s interesting for us to sort of look at this from this purview, around this sort of social phenomenon, yet we’re still so early. Where do we anticipate that this will go in terms of the next I don’t know, if you want to put two years, three years because it’s moving so fast, how will we know? What do you see coming in the coming years? I’m happy to jump in. So, you know, I think right now you have two big drug makers, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, who basically have a monopoly on, the molecule and charge very high rates, right? You’re going to see dramatic entry because there’s basically a number of other pharmaceutical companies are in phase two or mostly phase two and phase one trials. And by twenty twenty eight, you’ll see folks like Pfizer with Danaglopiran kind of come out, AstraZeneca has a molecule. But there’s at least six or seven, right? And so, what this will almost certainly do is drive down the price because the you know, new folks will need to enter in order to get share. They’re going to cut the price. There’s not no reason to really suspect significant price decreases, until then. So for the next few years, it’s going to be expensive. But then as you as you go even further out, you’re going to get, you know, generic Semaglutide, by, you know, two thousand and thirty one, two thousand and thirty two. That’s when things can actually get, interesting. It’s hard to imagine there’s a tremendous bending of that obesity curve until you have much more inexpensive GLP-one And that probably is still seven or eight years out. But I do think it improves dramatically, twenty twenty eight, twenty twenty nine. Doctor. Yamas? I think we’re going to get yes. We’re going to get more and more adoption of these medications to a lot more people, and I think we’re going to keep hitting ceilings. I mean, I think if you look at massive drug explosions in the market, if you look at what happened with statins, if you look at what happened with antidepressants, they got mass adoption, but we still have the problem, too. I don’t think we’re going to cure obesity. I think, you know, the average person is going to maybe get twenty percent, maybe twenty two percent, maybe twenty three percent. We don’t know how long that’s going to last. You know, if you start off with a BMI of forty five, twenty percent weight loss, you still have severe obesity. I mean, we’re not going to make everything go away. And so I think the discussions are going to get more and more nuanced of the economics of this versus the long term validity of it. I think it’s going to get messier before it gets cleaner. Shall we? I think we have many more years to see the height of this coming from a consumer standpoint. Really, once the price goes down, the affordability goes down, it’s gonna skyrocket. I mean, I get hundreds of messages a week saying, I I wanna take this medication. I can’t afford it. How how can I get it? Can I get it cheaper? And, unfortunately, it’s leading people to ordering it online from very sketchy places. I have a very good friend who just ordered it for twenty five dollars from China. Who knows what was in that vial, which is scary. So, you know, I hopefully, you know, everything gets safer within the next, you know, five to ten years. I would love to see it more accessible to the masses. For me, it’s it’s been, you know, life changing. It’s it’s really helped, and I think it’s something that’s gonna help and be a great tool for lots more people, but we have that price does have to come down first. So I would always ask the question of what advice would you give those companies who are coming into this space? Add a companion program. Yeah. But on Shelby’s point That is a good point. I think it’s going to be worse before it gets better in terms of potentially having the reasonably, kind of lower priced, supply become unavailable, and kind of fly by night folks kind of come in from wherever promising, some molecule. And obviously, what I’m talking about is, you know, 503A, 503B compounding pharmacies in the United States. They are probably supplying anywhere between two million and three million doses, a month. That’s what various analysts kind of believe. They’re about to be disrupted by, the removal of the shortage status. Now, that’s currently the only way to get these molecules at, like, dollars one hundred and ninety nine to two ninety nine a month, which is much less than the five hundred dollars to one thousand dollars a month, you’d have to go for branded. As you remove those, like a five zero three pharmacy, I’m aware of one of them that’s doing a million or so doses a month by themselves. That’s an FDA inspected facility. Those sources of supply are going to go away. All that demand can now either go to one thousand dollars you know, five hundred dollars to one thousand dollars branded, which, of course, if that’s if they could afford it, they’d already be there. They’re already there. Right? Or if they had the coverage, they’d already be there. Or it could go to any number of fly by night folks promising something, who knows what it is. And so it’s about to get dramatically worse, you know, over the next three to four months, I would say. And Doctor. Yamile, we’ve had this discussion too around that sort of what happens when this sort of compounding is enforced for one way or another. What does that do to sort of your clinic and how you need to sort of handle patients? I mean, that’s what we’ve been spinning our wheels on for a while here, right? Because we can’t take the volume, and a lot of that volume is going to have expectations that we can’t fulfill. I mean, it’s I don’t know how we do it. We’re trying to figure it out. As a physician who has a license that depends on practicing evidence based medicine, if I have somebody come to me and say, Well, my BMI is twenty two, it was twenty seven, but it’s not now. Can you keep me on my medicine? Without a medical record, I really can’t. I mean, I really can’t. I’m putting my med mal at risk, I’m putting my license at risk. So it’s going to be really hard, and then that creates patient dissatisfaction, which then you get a bad Google review, and, I mean, you can skyrocket it down a bug. Right? So I don’t know. We’re trying to figure it out. Are there funnels? Are there ways to really find ways to make this happen? It’s the Wild West. This field is truly the Wild West. So tell me some hopes for it, right? Because we can all point to barriers, we can all point to challenges, right? So tell me some hopes because this incredible woman sitting next to me, like, you’re an incredible hope for this category and literally a voice that, that has found a way, right, to get that story through. So tell me about what your hopes would be for this. My hope is and kind of my platform, you know, that I advocate for is, one, education and safety. And I hope that in the future when this market does expand that we’re, one, we’re doing so safely. And I would love a lot of these large companies and telehealth providers that are offering this to be honest and be straightforward. With Courtney, like she said, she’s not If a patient comes in and they’re not, you know, a good candidate, they’re not gonna do it, but you see a lot of, you know, people, companies online that they don’t do that, they don’t care. And my hope is that, you know, people start these companies start to see people as real people, you know, people weight loss is very personal. Mhmm. You know, someone like me who started this medication when I couldn’t afford it when I started it. Okay? I was I gave up my nails. I was selling clothes out of my closet. No more Starbucks runs, because it was working, and I was going to make it work. But, you know, the clinic I was going to, they didn’t care that I was doing any of that. They they saw, you know, my check every single week, and they said, Okay. Keep keep coming in, and we’ll keep upping your dose. And, my hope is that kind of behavior goes away and that it becomes more about health and not being skinny, but about how you feel, making sure that we’re focusing on longevity and being our best selves. So And thank you for sharing that because it’s really important because we tend to talk about this in sort of system language and we need to get more humanised. When you talk about that education, who is best, because we’re gonna talk about a room full of communicators too, who is best to deliver that education? That’s that’s really hard. So a lot of patient education nowadays is coming from social media. One, providers, they’re either not accessible, It’s expensive. So a lot of people will message me asking me, and granted, I’m I’m not a medical doctor. I’m not legally allowed to give any sort of medical advice. So it’s how am I promoting correct information without, you know, breaking the law. There’s a very thin guideline that you have to kinda walk with FTC compliance, and I’ve seen many influencers online that they don’t care about that. They wanna make money because they make commission. So it’s it’s it’s really tough. I always tell people, you know, when they come to me for advice, I can tell them my personal story, but I always say, you know, do your own research, talk to your doctor, get multiple opinions, which I think you should do, you know, with, you know, any health care situation that you decide to get yourself in. But just because it has been so prevalent on on social media that’s, you know, a lot of days people just they go to TikTok and it’s how do I do this, you know, What is this? And it’s kind of almost become our new Google. So, yes, it’s tough. Jeff? Yeah. I’d say I’m far more hopeful than pessimistic in general and about two things. So one is, you know, the bending of the obesity curve is absolutely, you know, happening. It’s just started to happen and ten years from now, it will be lower, right? Like, if you zoom out to a long enough time frame, you know, it’s clearly the case that progress will be made over the next ten years and is being made now. I mean, these medications are remarkable. You know, the other, area is you’re seeing at least the FDA start to have processes. We expect finalized guidance around something called prescription drug use related software, PDERS, which is kind of an extension of, the SAM D software as a medical device. And I think what I’d like to see over time, and I’m somewhat hopeful that maybe we’ll see this, is the medication is prescribed with a digital program rather than just say, to be used as an adjunct to diet and exercise, but we all know, wink, wink, you’re not going to do that. You know, to say, Well, and here is something that would actually be that. Right. You know, I think that, I think you’ll see that over the coming years too. And I Are we seeing that moving in that direction, right? So we’re seeing on the sort of employer side of this, right, that benefit design is changing on the commercial side where we’re looking at more holistic benefits which are sort of being carved even carved out for obesity. Do we believe we’re going to see more of that? More Yeah. So I think as you have these habit programs maybe prescribed alongside, that’s an even better reason for the payer to cover it, right, especially if proof can be if there’s an evidence base for, that, weight maybe staying off longer term, better health outcomes, you know, generally the payer is willing to, that’s going to improve the likelihood of coverage. I think that by itself won’t. I do think that ultimately it’s the price coming down that will enable more widespread coverage. Sounds great. Well, it gives me hope. I think we are finally talking about obesity as a disease instead of a moral failing, which is something we’ve been fighting for in the industry for a very long time. And I think that’s a breath of fresh air because it’s, I mean, I always tell patients we’re moving out of this realm where obesity was being treated with math and motivation, which never worked, but we kept shoving it into this morality box. And we’re finally having large conversations about how this is socioeconomic related, it’s related to the food environment, it’s related to oestrogen. I mean, there’s there’s a lot more acceptance that this is a multifactorial problem that is not an individual personal responsibility problem, and I love it. I mean, I love that we’re having that conversation. And I also think this has done so much good in disrupting the health care ecosystem and the way payments move and and demanding transparency and what’s happening between big pharma and PBMs and insurance companies and doctors. And I think it’s blowing open a lot of closed doors where people can see inside the system and see how it’s broken, which I think is overdue. It’s time. And messy before it gets cleaner, but we have to make messy. But that there are outside solutions that could actually help, right? Right. And we need to talk in human language, not system language, right? Right. Because The system doesn’t help the patients and the doctors very well. And now it’s starting to be seen why that is. Yes. Well, thank you all so much. I could talk to you all day and I will, but I want to make sure that if there are questions we can answer them. I’m really sure. I’ll just take a Timothee Chalamet moment here. Okay. Thank you very much. Hi. My name is Linda Scarazzini. I’m the former chief safety officer and head of pharmacovigilance and safe patient safety at AbbVie. Former, I say I am no longer there as of a week ago. So, here is my question. Not coming at this from a pharma perspective at all, but it’s just it’s the perfect time to ask this question of the three of you because you’re right. Thryv Digital Therapeutics, Jeff, are being developed now. Right? And I I think that that tool is a critic is going to be critical moving forward, not just in treatment of obesity, etcetera. But the problem I see with all of these tools is that I would love to see each one of you having your input into the tools that are being developed by pharma for real world people so that we can, right, collect real world evidence and then continue to tweak what we’re learning. Because I think it was you that said, what’s the persistence of patients that are remaining on these therapies? Not just these like, we’re focused on these therapies, but all therapies. All therapies. Right. You brought up antidepressants. You brought up many other areas. And and and one of the most challenging problems that we face as physicians today is persistence. And now, more and more people are getting their information from from you, Shelby. Mhmm. And so I think we have a shared accountability as physicians, as influencers, as CEOs, particularly to tackle this this this this this incredible disease. We’re going to need to come together. We have shared accountability, but you’re going to need to come together and and hopefully not just talk at a panel, but talk to each other in developing the tools and the education that we need. Right now, I see pharma developing their education. I see Novartis developing their prescribed digital therapeutics. I see FDA finally coming around to sort of getting with the times in terms of what those, you know, regulate what the guidance is for these prescribed digital therapeutics. But I guess my point is, can each one of you share how you would envision each of you coming together and what the next generation of those right complementary tools would be? Because I’m I’m I’m I’m struck by the fact that we haven’t had, right, yet a safety conversation, right, in terms of where people are getting you know, you said it was scary, Shelby. It’s really scary. Mhmm. It’s really scary. And a and a shortage declaration goes away and prices go back up, we have no idea where these patients are going to be obtaining this this from. Where are people talking about what adverse events they’re they are they’re experiencing? Why aren’t they staying on it? You know, if I go on TikTok, I can see five thousand people talk about, you know, different injection sites lead to different adverse events, lead to different tolerance from a GI point of view. But I feel passionate about this, so I’m gonna stop the question. I wanna hear the answer. I wanna hear the answer. I wanna I wanna I wanna I wanna give up my cheer for you right now. I wanna hear the answer more than anything. Right? Because I do think that the future is how we come together. Right? I used to be a former regulator, patient, physician, you know, working in pharma, etcetera, but it’s people we need to come together to develop what the tool of the future is. Well, I will just say that we all completely agree with you too because what we’re seeing here is this microcosm of how we should be operating for the future. And so we, like, agree with your question. And I would love each one of your perspectives on how would we do that? I think because we’ve just not done it before, right? How would we begin to sort of come together to contribute to what a solution could look like? Yeah. It’s definitely a tough subject to tackle, especially being on the influencer side of things. I mean, social media marketing is, you know, crucial to almost every single business now. And I think, one, I think we need do need to bring some regulations in on this. I know it has started, you know, you can’t talk about certain things. Like, specifically, Meta is blocking a lot of, GLP one conversation from the influencer side. But, I mean, I’ve had large telehealth companies approach me. They’ve seen one video where I talked about GLP one, and they offer me a large sum of money to promote their product. So when you see an influencer online promoting a product, how do you know they’ve personally used that product? How do you know that they understand what that product is? I mean, when I started taking it, I had no idea what it was. It wasn’t until, you know, that I I felt like I was influencing other people that I had to take a step back and do my research and understand because I’m never gonna push a product that I don’t know what it is. And I think a lot of that falls onto, you know, the company side of it, you know, if they want to do influencer relations which I think is super important. But there’s got to be guidelines to it and it needs to be done correctly and it needs to be done safely. Yeah, you know, I would say we feel like we are pushing that forward at Noom, that kind of combination. We work with influencers. We have a network of doctors and we are speaking to pharma companies. And we’re in conversation with three right now, around Sam D and Pitter’s prescription juice prescription drug use related software. So the way these things work, of course, is it takes a year to maybe craft that partnership. It takes another year at least to do the study that shows some form of, like, phase four clinical study, that shows some benefit. And then, you know, two to three years to get regulatory approval. So, yeah, these things take time, but I do think that pharma is interested, in that conversation and in those solutions. And presumably, they’re talking to us and others about those sorts of things. Are you seeing more openness than you would have seen previously? It’s hard for me to say. You know, I’m new myself, eighteen months. But, you know, I’m seeing real interest. Real interest. Real interest. And I would like to see it earlier than phase four, just so I can state that. Health care doesn’t usually move fast. This is moving much faster than anything else in healthcare. That’s why there’s whiplash, right, within the system around this. Yes. But it’s the right kind of whiplash. I mean, it’s like playing Jumanji around here. Yeah. How would you like to see it sort of come together better? Well, I don’t think you’re going to get most of us doctors to become influencers. I just don’t think we’re the Check that off the list, please. Right? I mean, I think the more conversations we have, the better. I mean, I will say I’ve been approached by so many companies to be the chief medical officer or medical director. And When I say, Okay, but I think this is the way it needs to go. We need to have this comprehensive, you know, well thought out. And they’re like, Yeah, never mind. Goodbye. And that’s okay. I mean, I don’t need to bend ethics at this point in my life. But I think there is a place, and I think we have to be listening to the clinicians and those of us that have been in the space and merging it with people that understand tech and marketing. I don’t understand marketing. I mean, I’m paying somebody to do marketing for me. I’m learning it. I’m getting there. But it’s also hard to run a health care company if you’re paying marketers. I mean, you have to build that into the price point. It’s just complex. So I think it’s going to take a group of people that kind of have a shared vision, and that vision can’t all be a three year profit margin of one hundred percent so we can sell it private equity, which seems to be the narrative. So I think it needs to be more mission driven people. So talk to me a little bit I want to ask this question of you talk to me a little bit about the fact that there just aren’t that many obesity specialists, right? We just don’t have that many. We don’t. We know that the majority of this is happening in primary care offices. Yes. Right? And that there are some gaps. Yes. How will we be able to work together to solve some of those? I mean, I I think that’s what took me into the world of health care reform because you it’s gonna be hard to ask these primaries to do more. I mean, we’re already asking them to do everything under the sun. I mean, you talk about a background of women’s health. We’re closing down women’s health clinics right and left, so now these primaries are taking on women’s health, and they weren’t even trained in that. How do we expect them to just take on another field of medicine and add that to what they’re already doing and then expect them to do a great job of it? Where are they supposed to train? How are they supposed to train? When? Mhmm. And and comprehensive obesity treatment is it’s complex. There’s mental health. You have to do mental health as a piece of it. If you can’t do that, then you feel like you’re doing a half assed job, which no physician wants to do a half assed job. So I think we have to really, again, tie this into it’s a good pressure point to change the health care system a little bit rather than just keep dumping on our primaries. Jeff, I want to ask you. Yeah. You know, I think that problem of kind of I think primary care physician is essentially a luxury that a lot of people don’t have, right? Right. You know, there’s a physician shortage in the country. It’s only going to get worse with demographics. You know, many doctors will be retiring and there’s, you know, the crop of new medical graduates is just not enough to kind of deal with population. And that’s kind of true everywhere. It’s not just the United States. And so, what are the possibilities to kind of get out of that problem? There’s really only two that I see. One is, and they both relate to kind of more efficiency, right? So, is there a telemedicine model that can work? We’ve obviously seen telemedicine kind of take off given COVID where a physician’s time can help more patients. So, I think telemedicine has a big role to play. But I’m also bullish in the long run on AI, right? So, kind of imagine an AI that’s kind of capturing everything that they can and maybe that synchronous telemedicine appointment has knows everything about your Apple health history, knows your labs, knows your last six labs, and, you know, right in the EMR to the doctor is basically encapsulating something actually useful, some useful insight that they could never even remotely have gathered, you know. And, you know, that’s how you get extraordinary, you know, medicine at scale. And I think we’re on our way to that. You know, nobody is doing anything remotely close to that today. But like this personalized medicine, I think, you know, it’s possible to the extent, you know, you see adoption of AI, but you keep the decision human. So, there’s ultimately a doctor, making that decision. So I almost went to the personalized human care, right, because that’s what we really need. And how do we really do that when you give the system some advice? It’s tough. I know it’s hard for, you know, a lot of physicians, to kind of get out of that, you know, physician headspace. And, you know, sometimes we’ve all been to a point where we’ve been to the doctor and they’re they’re talking on and and you’re sitting there and you’re like, I don’t know what anything you just said meant. And that’s, I think, what we have to do. I know, a lot of, like, the telehealth, it is, a lot of asynchronous visits. Now a lot of states are allowing for asynchronous, so you don’t even have to talk to a doctor. And a lot of people have doctor phobia, so a lot of people don’t wanna talk to a doctor, which is why I feel people are kind of leaning, you know, towards social media and towards these influencers to get their information from. But granted, we aren’t medical doctors. So how do we kind of combine, you know, both of our expertise into one to make sure that the patient is getting, you know, they’re completely informed. They have a space to go where they feel safe. I know, like, when I when I started, I once my friend introduced me to telehealth, and I was like, you mean I don’t have to see a doctor? I’m in. Sign me up. But I still think we need that patient oversight from a physician. So we have to somehow I don’t know how we’re gonna do it, but we have to somehow all come together, figure out how to scale. Any other questions? Burning questions? All right, I have one more. Because I know that, Doctor. Ganelov, you’d love to talk about, let’s call it, Medicine three point zero. Yes. So, as we sort of envision this future, especially when we’re talking about obesity care and especially as we’re talking about sort of introducing more comprehension, to your point, Geoff, like more comprehension into this and using all the tools available to us, how would you see that begin to sort of scale in the future? I mean, I think these wearables are going to be helpful. I think we can gather a lot of data from wearables. I think AI and tech can help build insights around that. Mhmm. And I think I mean, to me, Medicine three point o is really looking at the whole person, looking at the entire cardiometabolic health, not playing catch up and waiting until somebody has obesity and then you can take a medicine, or wait until you have diabetes, now you take a medicine, I mean, as we can start gathering that data and putting it together, saying, Oh, my gosh, look, the fasting insulin is going up, the fasting glucose is going up, let’s intervene before we get there, before we get sick, before we need medications. I mean, the entire idea of health care is really just at the catastrophic point instead of managing chronic conditions from the time they onset and just staying with them until somebody dies. Like, it’s a horrible model, except for the economics of the people that profit from the management of the poor health. But being able to use that to do predictive analytics and catch things before they get there. I think it’s far away, but I think the more data we have and the better it’s used, I think we can get healthier eventually. So, Jeff, I will ask you that question as well, but I will add a layer to that. When you talked about sort of the sort of let’s talk about two thousand and thirty and past, right, when we have more competition in this market, especially orals, right? People have also talked about the fact that if we have orals, we’ll introduce more competition, we’ll have some price compression, but also we may move towards prevention. Hopefully. Would you Yeah. So, I think there’s if you look at some of the meds in the pipeline, clearly, daily rules will help because many people do have needle phobia and, you know, I think that will help. And you’re going to see some great, you know, options there. There’s also, I think it’s Meritide, where you it’s an injection once a month. And so, you know, if you don’t want to take it, a weekly injection, well, that’s easier. And you could imagine future interventions where, you know, maybe you take it once, right? Right. And, you know, nothing quite like that in phase one or phase two, but you could imagine it. You know, as I think about, I guess, you said Medicine three point zero, I mean, I would echo the doctor’s viewpoints that essentially, you know, you need to have personalized preventative care, right? Like, health care in this country is sick care. How do you move beyond that? As I you kind of as you get into the 2030s, I’m actually fairly bullish, which might be controversial, but I’m fairly bullish on longevity medicine, right? So, you know, there’s, Novartis has a big patent portfolio around Rapalogs. Rapamycin is generally excited but has many limitations, nobody should take it, but has many limitations in its current form. But there’s potential pathways and medications that have been proven to show, you know, longevity in a host of different organisms. Running longevity studies in humans is, of course, expensive and time consuming. And so you generally don’t have it done, but I think we’re on the verge of that. And it wouldn’t surprise me if GLP-1s are part of any. And frankly, I’ve spoken to a number of longevity medicine doctors who, as part of their practice, are, prescribing low dose GLP-1s today based on labs and other data presumably. But, you know, I think we’re on that. As you get into the 2030s, you know, because longevity medicine is ultimately preventative care. Correct. Right. Do you think we’ll see a day where we get to actual prevention? Yeah. Good. I think we will. Yeah, I think there’s people, you know, who are born today are going to live to one hundred and twenty. So I’m extremely bullish on health span and lifespan benefits of some of the interventions that are either right now coming out or are going to come out. I think if you can make it into the 2030s, you got a shot at living well past a hundred. I don’t want that shot, just so we’re clear. It’s a different It’s a different world. It’s a different world if you’re living in your 90s and you’re well. Yes. Right? We often talk about my mother who just turned ninety and she is the sixty year old ninetieth you would ever, ever see. Tell me a little bit more, Shelby, from just an influence in social, right? Where do we if you have an opinion, where do you see social going when it comes to this sort of national conversation around GLP-1s in these medications and as we move sort of potentially into that prevention? It, I I kinda see two two roads. It can go one of two ways. Either, Big Pharma is really gonna sink their claws in and put a lot of regulations, and a lot of the smaller companies, are gonna kind of, silence a lot of these influencers that aren’t quite fitting into their narrative, aren’t promoting their product, or we can go another route where it becomes completely accessible, in worldwide and social media will just take off. I think the market either way is gonna get oversaturated, with people. I mean, especially, people like me. I mean, like, I’m a rep for telehealth. There’s money to be made and everyone loves to make money. And I I see more and more people doing it, and more and more influencers on it. So it I I see it just growing exponentially, and I I think there’s gonna it’s already happening where you can’t scroll on social media without seeing an ad or someone doing it. I can’t drive in my car without the radio playing, you know, an ad. You know, come to this clinic, buy this. And so I think it’s it’s just gonna grow to maybe where it might get to a point where it’s kind of overwhelming, which I feel like it’s kind of already is. It’s almost like it’s like being shoved down your throat, like, take this medication, take this medication. You can lose this, you can lose that. But hopefully, it goes forward in a in a positive manner. That would be wonderful. Any other questions? Hi. So I was really inspired by the previous question asker around, you know, imploring this panel as representatives of your industry to work together to have to Doctor. Yong Lo’s point, like, a mission driven purpose towards healthcare and reforming healthcare here in the U. S. However, I’m really wondering how do people like us, I’m in pharma advertising so I’m very relevant to that previous comment, how do we in the industry drive more credibility and trust within our population, especially in this political climate where we have RFK who’s leading almost a campaign against distrust against people who are in our industry. How do we start to build that credibility amongst the population and recognize that as we as an industry are changing, that we need to bring them along in that transformation as well? Yeah. So I think I’ll kind of jump in on this. Human connection is huge. People are more likely to buy a product if they relate to the person promoting the product. It’s it’s proven. And I feel like a lot of time, health care companies, they’re kind of, like, out of reach for the consumer. You know, it’s sterile environment that they don’t necessarily trust. So I think, you know, maybe bringing in trusted spokespersons, really working on education and really working with the public and getting involved with the public would be, I think, a huge help. Jeff, Courtney, any comment on that? Lower prices. You know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I think, you know, pharma wants to build trust. You know, these medicines might cost fifteen bucks to produce. There’s a study that basically showed something like that. They cost one hundred dollars in China, the branded meds. They cost one hundred and fifty dollars in many different, you know, Western capitals. But they, you know, they cost a thousand dollars, you know, here, you know, with insurance anyway. And so, you know, I think, you know, it’s hard to have trust when you know you’re being overcharged versus the rest of the world. And so, you know, I think we’re hopeful. Obviously, we don’t know what to expect of the new FDA nominee assuming he’s seated Macquarie. But, you know, I’m actually working through his book right now. It’s actually pretty good, Blind Spots, which is interesting and talks about some failures in kind of medicine and that kind of became standard of care and probably shouldn’t have been. But, you know, he’s generally a bit tougher on pharmaceutical companies than maybe some others who have held the role. So, whether any of that matters is unknown. Pharma has an endless supply of money, to purchase influence. Margiel? I would agree with that. I mean, it’s it’s like the big insurance companies. You see how much they generate in one breath, and then you hear them whine about not making money in another breath. And I think pharma’s fallen in that trap to a degree of they make all this money and the profit margin’s out there. And those of us that have to go to the pharmacy counter and pick up our medicine and spend that kind of money, it gets very frustrating. I think they’ve lost a lot of trust by overcharging. I mean, it’s it’s ridiculous how much things can cost. And then you get cynical as you’re going, well, they just bought a Super Bowl commercial for how many millions of dollars. Right? I’d rather they didn’t buy the Super Bowl commercial and drop the cost of my hormone patch by ten dollars. You know, some way of Reconciling that would be good. Yeah. But to the point, right, the industry collectively coming to the table with trusted intent, right? Trusted intent, human connection, taking advantage of all the solutions that are potentially available to that, and opening those doors wider. Thank you. Hi. My name is Andy James. I’m a chief technology officer for Avenge Company, and we have a focus on impact primarily, and we look at lifespan, health span, and we do a little bit of focus on obesity as well. So hugely fascinating panel, and I applaud you for pulling together three phenomenal, voices from different perspectives. We have marketing, we have technology, and we have my mind authority, so, thank you for coming together. You know, ironically, people are going younger people certainly are going from left to right, to you first, Shelby, and I applaud you for your braveness but also for respecting the fact that you do have that voice, and you are responsible. My concern in some of the things you said earlier, you have peers that are not necessarily the case, so somewhere that’s broken, but I applaud you for what you’re doing. Jeff, I’m a former Noom user and, you know, I keep keep my weight trim and I appreciate the learning and the education that I got from there as well. And so thank you for that. Technology, I think, is important parts of things, but I think my big concern is that the people should be coming to you, Courtney, and be able to get the information that they need and the advice that they need from you and your peers there, and that’s not the case. So I think my point is this is a really unusual situation. It’s like an asteroid hitting the world, right? We’ve got massive consumer demand driven by social media met by corporate greed and capitalism as well, and it’s, I’ve learned a lot and I walk away quite scared. I don’t know if I’ve got a question. Well, we appreciate you sharing your feedback. What you would say to that, but I was extremely, humbled by this and educated by this. So, thank you very much. Well, thank you. We really and he just did my closing. He literally did my closing. God bless. Thank you so much. Thank you for your attention. Oh, we have one more. And if you’re sitting up the front, the lady’s shoes are rocking it and so are Jeff’s socks. Well, now I can’t even follow that. So thank you all for your attention. Thank you, panellists. Like, this was, as people know me, this was literally my sort of dream come true in having the three of you here in these perspectives and talking about such important topics that we don’t want to be siloed anymore, right? This is one conversation we need to be having around obesity care and around GLP ones and around the system. So I appreciate all of your perspectives and thank you for coming here today. And thank you all for being in the audience.

Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello on International Women’s Day. Thank you so much. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I just want to say welcome to Austin, welcome to South by Southwest, and welcome also to our discussion, our conversation about science fiction and real science, AI and health, hype versus reality. And today, thank you so much to Real Chemistry for allowing us to lean in to the reality of AI and how it is fundamentally transforming health care, our health experiences, our health practices, everything from consumer wellness all the way over into research and drug development and everything in between. I’m Shauna Butler. I’m a nurse economist. I’m the host of the See You Now podcast. I’m managing director for NextMed Help. And in the context of here, I would like to share that I’m also on the Nurse Advisory Council for Hippocratic AI. This is a venture backed company that is building out safety LLMs and with the goal and the mission of how do we increase access to care and improve our health outcomes. And today, I am so thrilled that I get to have two super fun people in addition to being just superpower experts around AI. So with me is Gabby, Filjune. She is the head of e commerce for Nestle Health Science. And also Kingston, Sam here, who is, I’m sorry, I said, Kingston Mann, I apologize. And he is the lead data scientist or the principal data scientist for precision medicine at City of Hope National Medical Center. And he and his team are using data science, AI, machine learning to develop clinical oncology tools. So I want to start out I mean, I think all of us know that AI is moving really, really, really fast, and we’re using it in all sorts of different ways. So I thought would be really helpful is for Kingston, I’m going to start out with you. Why don’t you share with us a little bit about City of Hope, what your teams are doing, and how you are using these AI tools and technologies to, tackle every bit of the clinical oncology journey. Thank you, Shauna. Well, my name is Kingston Mann. I’m a principal data scientist, City of Hope. We are a top nationally, top five ranked, cancer center, and we are nationwide. We have institutes and medical centers providing treatment across the country. Our team is in the enterprise technology group, and we are the department of applied AI and machine learning. So what we do is we build tools leveraging the very latest most cutting edge developments in AI and machine learning to build tools for clinicians to improve their treatments for cancer patients every day. So I’m so proud and so excited about the work we’ve done, and just to to to to, make sure I get the take home point in. Is it hype or is it reality? And I want to say that this time is different. I hope I can convey it to you. This time is different, the hype is justified, and I want to tell you about some of the tools we’ve been building using the latest technologies. I’m sure you’ve all heard of LLMs, and how that is, not potentially, but right now, beginning to transform the way medicine is practiced in our hospital, and we are so excited to put it out there for other peer institutions to use as soon as possible. So Kingston is somebody that you hope you never have to see in your life. But if you do, you really, really are glad that he and his team and all of the clinicians around there. Gabby, however, on the other hand, is somebody that we see all the time because we love nutrition, we love food, we love all of the sciences. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about Nestle Health Science and what you and your teams are doing over on the e commerce side using AI tools to help us, I think, navigate and understand what feels really, really complex right now around nutrition. Yeah. Absolutely. So, hi. I’m Gabby Fuyun. I lead e commerce for Nestle Health Science. And Nestle Health Science operates across the healthcare continuum. We have a couple of pharmaceutical brands, we’ve got some medical nutrition brands and then we’ve got some consumer healthcare brands as well. So some of those that you might recognize, Boost is a big one. We’ve got Vital Proteins, we’ve got Garden of Life, Noon Hydration, but really we are engaging with consumers, patients, caretakers across their healthcare journey from infant nutrition all the way up to final stage care even from a nutrition perspective. So what we’re doing within the, e commerce side or or what I’m mostly exposed to within Nestle Health Science are ways that we can curate information to be able to make that end user, that shopper browser’s decision a heck of a lot easier ultimately. There is so much information out there. There’s a lot of information that you’re not really sure. Is it validated? Is it regulated? Certainly, in the world of vitamins, minerals, nutritional supplements, and it can be a little bit overwhelming. So we’re in the business of trying to personalize the solutions, maybe even creating some interactive chatbots through AI to help guide you on your decision making journey, really. And I just want to throw into that. I mean, you said the end user and consumers. I would share with you also that as clinicians Right. The number of times people come into us with a new diagnosis or a change in health status or we need to Or they’re just trying to improve their overall health. So we find these tools actually very helpful to us as clinicians to actually help educate the people and the families and the communities that we’re taking care of. So it’s Yes. It’s a helpful tool for everybody who’s thinking about this. So, you have an interesting background, neuroscience, very, very, very deeply into science. I wonder sometimes, you know, we jump into these conversations and we throw words around, and we hear a lot of AI, which is very broad, and then we hear generative AI, we hear agentic AI. So for those of us who are newer in the conversation or trying to catch up with this, could I just get you to level set? Because you mentioned LLMs. That is not something that we generally talk about at the dinner table or thinking about, you know, when we’re packing. Well, you might, but how many of you thought about an LLM when you were packing to come? Like, we don’t. So could you just take a few moments to kind of level set so that we’re all in the same conversation? Sure. Thanks. I’m so glad you brought up a neuroscience background. So I I didn’t begin in cancer. I was a neuroscience research professor at USC. So what does that have to do with cancer? Yeah. What does that have to do with cancer? Well, AI is, you know, artificial intelligence, and it is based on mimicry of natural intelligence, which comes from here. So studying the human brain has led to many inspirations for design elements of how we can build artificial brains and capture artificial intelligence in the bottle. So, there there are, you know, this is a little bit of ancient history, but, you know, in certain very loose analogies, there are ways that artificial neurons behave like real human brain neurons. But jumping straight to the moment, the present moment, where we have all of these, you know, panoply of different technologies now, We have AI, LLM, agents, and so on. So we can make some sense out of this just in, saying that it’s all a bunch of statistics. You have a bunch of data, and then you can learn patterns in the data, and you use machines to learn it, and then they can make predictions about the future or about unseen data. So fundamentally, that is what machine learning is about, and AI is just a more interesting name to slap onto it. But when we talk about large language models, what you’re predicting are words that come in the future that you haven’t seen yet. So you might be able to guess what I’m thinking, or complete my sentence, or brainstorm for me? That’s right. So completing your sentence is a very remarkably difficult task because in order to under to do that well, I need Yeah. Completing one of my sentences, you’re right, is a very difficult task. Still machines that’s not yet conquered. Yeah. Hashan a benchmark. But the, the task of predicting the next word in the medical clinical note history, for example, you need to have a very deep understanding of medicine, the human body, the the the clinical course of cancer, in order to be able to make a good prediction. So at City of Hope, what we’ve done is we have taken billions of words from our proprietary clinical note history. So you’re not just taking them off the Internet? No. And there there’s tons of stuff on the Internet, some good, some bad. Right. But I still believe the differentiator is your private proprietary data sets, and health data is some of the most closely guarded data on earth, and institutions, health institutions have good reason to jealously guard their health data, and it’s very highly regulated as well. So it’s very difficult and illegal to share that data on the Internet. There are small data sets that people try to de identify and redact, and we think they’re of limited value. What we’ve done is taken our enormous proprietary data set to train our own model, to then have a deep understanding of all the different varieties and the most advanced stages of cancer that our hospital sees as compared to more general hospitals. So having done that, we’re able to now predict the next word, but then we can make good clinical trial evaluations, we can make good patient summaries, we can do all kinds of additional follow on tools using this very basic task of what’s the next word that should come. So Gabby, let’s you know, when he was just mentioning about having these large language models, there is a I think you’ve got an important point of view about when people talk about the hype and maybe a little bit of the concern about where you’re building out your AI tools, I know that you have, an important point of view about where that hype comes from and where that hype might tend to build distrust or mistrust. Can you share a little bit more about how you guys are thinking about it, what your point of view is on how how are we building trust, as we are building large language models and you mentioned chatbots very specifically. Yeah, absolutely. I think the one way from my perspective is, often what’s perpetuating that distrust are the results that come out that you know as a human Hallucination, right? The hallucinations, exactly. And so when we’re building things internally, we are going through extensive testing. I mean, as we’re bringing people into cross functional partners as a part of how are you gonna use this, how’s this gonna make your life job better, how are you gonna be able to make better recommendations and educate your clinicians and, the stores that you might be going into, we’re getting all of that cross functional feedback to be able to make sure that it’s fit for purpose. Right? Okay. So if you’re not doing that extra level of testing or ultimately making sure that it’s something that’s usable, then, you’ve created something for the creators but not the end users. Another perspective is garbage in, garbage out. So the data hygiene behind it, your source of truth, whatever you’re referencing, you’ve got to make sure that that’s clean, validated, that it’s something that you can actually use for that output. Oftentimes, it’s when you’re scraping from the Internet. Right? I’m in this world of I’m selling things on the Internet as well, and there’s a lot of, unvalidated claims. When we’re producing something that’s gonna give a personalized recommendation, we’re running all of that deeply through regulatory, through clean rooms to make sure that we’ve got, good in, good out instead of the holes in the data or the sources. How many of you know what a hallucination is in terms of AI? Just want to check and make sure. Because what I think is quite interesting, and maybe you want to share with this, is that AIs are really trained to answer with confidence. And so those hallucinations, that’s why they can be so compelling because when you ask a chatbot, they’ll give you an answer that sounds entirely reasonable and entirely rational, and they do it with confidence. Yeah. So I just, again, to keep everybody in the conversation. So you had mentioned, you brought up, you were leaning into the topic here, the hype versus the reality. And you said, this time, it’s living up to The hype is living up to it. So, where is the reality that has actually met what the hype is in terms of AI? And very specifically, let’s just stick in healthcare. Maybe you wanna even go even more specifically. And I think, one of the things that I think is so interesting about why talking about it in oncology, A, it’s complex. It is life and death. You you can’t get these things wrong. So it’s a very important use case to And and a and a clinical practice to describe why it is the reality is living up to the hype at this moment. Yes. So I I just wanna highlight a point that you brought up, Gabby, about the importance of validation. Mhmm. And that is why we can make any kind of strong statements about the hype being justified. Right. And we’re very well represented here in that you’re targeting the consumer space, and we are targeting really clinician end users, and not the patients themselves. Right. So we’re really seeing the full stack represented here. And another another point that came up was about hallucinations. Mhmm. And there, I think, almost the backlash against the hype is that, oh, these these models hallucinate, you can’t trust the thing that comes up, they’ll happily make things up, and they do, they used to, there are ways to fix it, there are ways to address it, and again how would you ever know? It all comes down to that validation piece and taking a hard scientific statistical verification mindset. So we, you know, we cannot delude ourselves, most importantly, when we think we’ve built a great tool, And we need to be extremely skeptical when we want to say something like zero percent error, one hundred percent factual. So we cannot trust ourselves as a good data scientist seeing zero error. We’ll say, I screwed up. Yeah. That’s that’s not right. That that is a red flag. Yeah. But we’re able to confidently say that we can completely control the rate or the prevalence of hallucinations using certain techniques, technical things I won’t get into, but you can have layers of critiques and checks and feedbacks on top of the system you build in order to mitigate to your satisfaction, and to at least reach on par with the clinicians, the humans’ generations of these things. Yeah. So, why do I believe that this time the hype is justified? Because we are seeing real impact today. We are rolling out tools that we have built to the entire hospital system, and the reactions I get from the clinician users are some of the most gratifying reactions, like you know, I was up at two a. M. Last night reading these hundreds of pages of clinical notes, these scanned PDFs that are hard to read, and and not making hazard tails of it, because I have to see this patient tomorrow morning. We’re getting emails from clinicians telling us this, and you generated the summary for me in five minutes? Like, their jaw dropped, and then our jaw dropped, when we hear this kind of feedback. This is the kind of thing, not because we fell in love with our own baby, but because clinician end user are telling us how much time they’re saving, how much better their job is because of these tools. And so the audience can follow along, I’m going to give an example of, of a hallucination. We might be looking for a certain treatment plan or what’s a clinical trial, and it’ll come up with an answer, and it will give you this answer, and it’s not wrong, it just doesn’t have the context. For instance, it will say, Here’s what your treatment plan should be. And when you look at what those resources are, it will be off of one study that had twelve people. That’s not where we make a clinical decision. But it sounds, I mean, it’s not wrong, it’s just not the decision that we would make. And that’s where we have to keep going back and forth. Another really fun example was, somebody was pulling up, a bio on the See You Now podcast, and they were giving a description. Everything on that sounded absolutely accurate. None of those people had been guests on the podcast. So But it does, it sounds completely accurate. So that’s where, when you’re talking about how important it is to have all these different layers, even when it is, it seems accurate or it is accurate but it’s out of context. Super, super, super important. And I want you to, again, go back to just a couple more examples of when you say they’re having real impact and you’re talking about the entire health system. Clinical notes that involves. And if you’re coming to see me, and maybe it is you’ve been in remission for a while, but I need to go back and understand what those treatments were, what the side effects, how how we manage all that. And maybe you’ve been in remission for a while, but you’re symptomatic. Or you’re just coming back in for another review. You’re going through tons, I mean, years oftentimes of that medical experience. How are you validating to make sure the clinical summary that I’m receiving, you know, what’s the human and the expert in the loop to make sure that that tool is validated and you didn’t leave out something really important, like that treatment is not something that we’re using anymore? Or that we’ve Because it’s five years apart, we now know that there are certain side effects that we need to look at, or, things that we need to be, mitigating. For sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s it’s very complicated. So I want There’s many dimensions that Yeah. I’m gonna push you on it. So, I mean, the one thing of hallucinations, one powerful way to address and control hallucination is to require citations for every single claim the machine wants to make. It needs to quote verbatim from the patient’s clinical text to justify it. Okay. And then there’s another layer where another LLM comes in and evaluates was this a correct fact checking process or not. So you’ve got multiple LLMs running. So they’re kind of experts in those with each other. They’re they’re debating each other. And then at the very end, of course, you need to run the human user study. You need to get the clinicians on board, build the trust with the clinician. We’re not building this to replace you. We’re building this to take the annoying parts of your job off of your plate to help you do become more effective and more efficient in your work. Yeah. And we sometimes hear this, you know, it’s gonna replace people. It’s it’s not replacing people. It’s help it’s hybrid. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s a hybrid. I’m going to ask you the same question because you run into the exact same situation, just different data set, but it can be equally overwhelming and also very convincing or compelling when it’s not accurate. So how are you guys using these tools to make sure that you’re giving accurate accurate information? Yeah, I mean, as Kingston was talking, I was just saying different data set, exact same process. My biggest thing is it’s not replacing, it’s getting to ninety percent of the way there so that the, the person who’s going to be using it, the person who’s making their decisions a little bit easier, that they can go back in and especially with the citations, be able to go back and say, Okay, here’s where that recommendation is coming from, and then finesse and fine tune a little bit. So, certainly, when I’m thinking about the tools that we use internally, that’s not externally facing, but it’s helping our day to day to be able to process an enormous amount of information, curate the most accurate recommendations, and then put that out and and communicate that out in a in an easy to understand way. If we were doing that from scratch, it would take weeks and and and a lot of folks, and then you would have a lot of gaps as well in it. Whereas there’s no way to process this amount of information that we are, of, you know, what consumers are searching and and and trying to look for. Right. And then we can cross reference that with about our products and what the what the unique ingredients might be, validated and proved to be helpful for and what kind of benefits and whatnot. So as we’re curating this information to present to that end user, we are massively decreasing the time it takes to produce that. So we can spend more time on refining and finessing versus creating something that new and then we have subpar information that’s not gonna help you to make that decision at the end of the day. Well, I I think the other part too is the over people feeling so overwhelmed that the decision fatigue sets in and it’s just it’s just too much Yeah. When you know some very specific things. So I want you to dive you know, let’s go more deeply and very specifically into how the reality of AI, how is it very specifically that you, your team, Nestle Health Science, how what are you creating every single day, or not every single day. What are you creating that people are using every single day? Where you are seeing AI and these AI based tools actually make a difference in consumers’ choices, in consumer decisions, in what’s available? Let’s let’s focus on on that end user. Yeah. And then we’ll go into, like, how is that helping you internally as a company and then supply chain. Yeah. We’ve we’ve got two examples that are external facing, if you will. So one that’s live on on one of our brands, websites, Pure Encapsulations. It’s the number one healthcare practitioner recommended brand in the space and, there are thousands of SKUs there. There are thousands of options that could help you with whatever your journey might be and so the choice is overwhelming even just within this one brand, let alone the entire marketplace. So we have an AI driven smart quiz, if you will, that we’ll go through and it’s it’s all consensual of what that, person taking the quiz, the respondent is is putting out there and have So things like flavor or No. So it’ll be asking you about your about your your demographic information is basic, but that might also tell you what certain deficiencies you might have based on that. Right? It’ll also look at your health conditions or concerns as self, reported. Self reported. Exactly. And look at your lifestyle, your routines that you do have. The more honest you are, again, garbage in, garbage out, the more it can help you give the perfectly curated solution. Like, you can tell them that I have a very healthy diet? Yeah. And it’s gonna it’s gonna ask you about, you know, do are you exposed to second hand smoke, for example? And then some people don’t wanna answer that to to, a human or in conversation some of these, questions, but ultimately it’ll it’ll help with the probability of here’s what is the right recommendation for you. So that’s one thing that’s out there live. And then from another perspective of what we are looking to co develop and are doing, it’s not out necessarily broadly, but, chat bots that are interactive can engage with you. You could upload your, very validated factual data about about you, about your deficiencies, and what areas you might need additional supplementation. You can chat back and forth with it and say, these are my preferences. I, you know, I I am low in all of this, as my screenings are saying, but I really don’t want to eat more vegetables or whatever it may be. And so you can have this interaction interactive conversation back and forth with this chatbot in a way that is going to help give the perfect recommendations for you, not just from a product perspective, but more as an executive assistant to your life a little bit. It’s something that just helps take a little bit more decision making off of your plate or at least the research that you might need to do so it could give really curated meal plans, recipes, hey, I really like that, go and add it all to my cart on Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods, and and that entire journey from I am low in something or I’m looking for a boost in one way or in another can help give you the recommendations, can help educate you on why it’s a good recommendation. You can go back and forth and finesse and say, I like that, I don’t like that to refine it a little bit more. Give your family an entire meal plan and check it out for you and have it delivered to your house. So that, like, that entire ecosystem is all possible and out there in one way or another, but those are the two external facing ways that that we’re looking ultimately personalized and make decision making easier. Yeah. I’d like to highlight, you know, the piece of that personalization is where I believe the future of medicine is going. Right. That precision medicine, personalized medicine piece is, you know, specific examples of tools we built are to do similar things, not provided sequencing and then determine which is the right therapy for that breast cancer, given all of these biomarkers. So this is the kind of thing you cannot find enough human manpower in the world Right. To go through your sequence Yeah. And then figure out which are the which are the right therapies. Yeah. I think that’s the biggest thing is is it’s getting you ninety percent of the way there, and then you can have the clinician and finesse that. But it’s really taking an enormous amount of legwork off to get it hyper personalized. Well, the other part, just to add on, you know, where the reality is, I think, outperforming the hype. There are two companies that, I’ve done some profiling on. One is called ThriveLink. And what’s so interesting about their chatbot, and very specifically chatbot technologies, is their range and ability of helping people get through the paperwork of getting signed up for women, infants and children, of getting, support for housing, for childcare, any of their social services, just a phone call and a chatbot. And it can do it in thirty two languages, which none of our clinicians can do. There’s, within the Hippocratic AI, their agents, they are doing so much of the care that gets left undone. I mean, how many of you have recently gotten a call reminding you that you need to get a colonoscopy? You know, Oh, you did get one. Okay, cool. What language did you ask it for, Erin? Unfortunately, they do that with English. English. Okay. But it is really fascinating, like I said, where these AI agents, when they hear your response, they immediately pick up and they will move into Portuguese, they’ll move into, French, Italian, I mean, all these different languages. So this Again, this is where I think when we talk about there’s a lot of hype and is it living up to the reality, in many instances, yeah, it is. So you were talking about consumer facing. Alright, let’s move over into some of the more the incredibly complex area of oncology care. So what are very specific tools? And I want you to name tools that are helping researchers, clinicians, and people who are experiencing cancer and their families. So what are in that order. Yeah. Let’s do it with the researchers. Yeah. A very specific tool. We hire very expensive staff to review medical records, to abstract out data. What was their blood pressure? What was their weight? Elementary things like this. It would take two days to abstract the data for a single patient. Two days and how much money does that end up being? Ridiculous. They’re very well paid. Yeah. Ridiculous. And and it takes them two days to do They deserve it. I don’t want to take anything out of it. They they deserve to have a But we shouldn’t be spending that money. Yeah. We shouldn’t be spending that money on gathering data that can be automated. Well, we’re not automating them away. We’re giving them the tool to now do two thousand. Right. Or to do this in five minutes. So they are all of a sudden thousand x ing their productivity. They become that much more valuable and more valuable to health care and to the patients. So that is research that you need to pull out all this data that you can then then run numbers on. The clinicians, if we want to predict, we our team has built models to predict what is the likelihood of this patient we’re discharging is going to have an unplanned Right. Readmission. Mhmm. Nobody wants to come back to the hospital after you’ve just left. Right? So you don’t want to be prematurely sent away when everybody thinks everything is fine, but we can assign a risk score as well now. So there can be additional follow ups or higher touch points as they’re easing back into normal life. So it’s making us better as clinicians anticipating what that patient might be experiencing. That’s right. Another tool, we can predict the likelihood of complications after surgery, after a transplant, or other surgeries. What is the likelihood of sepsis that they might, you know, have this very, very difficult side effect occur? So when that again is the case, we can provide the extra resources that they may need proactively in a personalized manner. These are pretty bog standard machine learning tools that we’ve built, they’re deployed, they are live in the hospital. So there may be all of these advances that we are taking advantage of without really knowing that they’re there until you need them. So that is part of also why seeing the impact these tools have made, why I’m so bullish on the hype is justified now. We are seeing real value being delivered, and we are very nimbly adapting to the next wave now of generative AI and large language models and what more they can do for us. Okay. So then what’s your what are what’s the reality of how the tools that you’re building are actually helping patients, families, maybe even communities? But that’s you know, it’s it’s not the clinician and it’s not the researcher. What about the people who are actually experiencing cancer? How what are the tools what tools have you got that are actually in use today improving that experience, the patient experience? Our tools are only indirectly touching the patients. We do not interface directly with the patients and frankly we’re not trained to. We don’t have that ability. There are very well trained doctors for that. Very well trained nurses for that. And nurses, nurses doing most of it. Thank nurses very much. They do the lion’s share of the actual care. And we but for example, we take into account, you know social determinants of health. Right. There are these factors in their social daily family lives that have an impact on their health care and the course of their treatment and disease. So we can take those into account in our machine learning models to make more accurate predictions than if we had did not know where they live or their socioeconomic status and so on. Yeah. I wanted to pick up on something that you had said as far as anticipating where somebody may end up with sepsis or readmission or something like that. I know the answer to Well, I think I have an answer for this, but I’m curious. We talked about clinicians and researchers, but then there’s the operations of a health system. And those types of inputs help us to understand skill mix, staffing, and so that we can better predict and staff for what those needs are gonna be. Are there some very specific examples that you can cite that City of Hope is using? How are you using the information that you’re getting, not only to better prepare the clinicians and the researchers for better treatments, but how is that improving the actual operations as well as maybe the financial well-being of your institution? They, are are some of the unsung heroes here because LLMs are all the rage. We only earned the ability to work with these speculative technologies of LLMs because our team of finance and operations in data science have been our bread and butter. They have earned in value and savings many times over the cost of developing these new models. So for example, what if before we send out a Medicare reimbursement request, we can already predict its likelihood of being rejected, which is very frequent of course. And this is a constant tug of war between the the the the payer and the provider. So if we are able to Well, it also has an impact on whether or not we’re gonna offer a treatment or somebody’s gonna pursue a treatment. If we know that there’s not gonna be coverage, we may not offer it or somebody may not accept it. As far as I know, we don’t we do not take that into account, ability to pay. In general, what I I’m not specifically for City of Hope, but, that is a huge factor in whether or not somebody will pursue a treatment, is if there’s a prediction. We’re able to generate, sorry, so much value in the finance side to impact the bottom line. And then we can take this investment into more future facing technologies and more speculative LLM technologies that continue to pay off. Yeah. So my point being there is that AI is impacting not only the clinical care, not only the individual practice of the practitioner, the patient experience, the research, how do we discover more and better treatments? But then also as a system, how do we more efficiently, more effectively operate? I want you guys to get ready for your questions. There is a microphone there in the back, so if you guys wanna go ahead and line up if you’ve got any questions there. And then while they’re doing that, I want you to Gabby, could you maybe speak to, AI as far as in nutrition health sciences in the sector? How are you seeing that impact development of better products, distribution, packaging? There’s all sorts of different elements there that these AI tools can have a bearing on. Yeah. Absolutely. I think the the comment that Kingston made of this researcher instead of taking two days to do one can do two thousand. Right? So that exact same method or or the the way of thinking transcends over into health science as well. It makes us far more impactful of what we’re able to do as a part of our day to day just as a period statement. From the perspective of being able to innovate faster, quicker, We’re able to mine a lot more data about what, consumers are looking for, about what patients are self advocating for as well, and identify if we have a white space gap in our portfolio. Do we have a solution or not? If we don’t, well, there’s a really great innovation opportunity for making sure that we’re creating something that is able to to fill that hole and from a formula perspective, from a price point perspective, access, whatever it might be. So that’s certainly something that we’re doing as a part of the day to day, and and to make sure that we can move with speed as well. So that’s the other huge part of how it’s integrated across the organization. Digital fluency and digital, transformation are huge pillars for us, where everyone in the organization is kind of measured by a digital fluency adoption. So I work in e commerce, I work on the Internet and technology a lot, but so will a copywriter or someone in operations or a finance person use Microsoft CoPilot, for example, or we have an internal version of a chat GPT, that we are encouraged to utilize a lot more to make the admin of our day to day just a heck of a lot more efficient too. Yeah, I was going to say from the standpoint of alleviating the burdensome of a lot of the work that we’re doing that is repetitive that humans don’t necessarily need to be doing. I mean, to your point about researchers, I think within all of our systems, all of our organizations, there is an internal use of the AI to help us find more joy in our work so that we’re doing the things that aren’t just, tedious. Yeah. So we’ve got a couple of questions. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you all for being here today. I work here in Austin, at Dell Medical School, and we’re about to build a brand new hospital, in two thousand and thirty, which means two thousand and thirty two or two thousand and thirty five because construction always takes longer than you think. But we’re in the really early planning stages of this hospital. So we’re all super excited about building the hospital of the future and implementing health care of tomorrow. And in these planning meetings, we discuss a lot of, technology and AI specifically in, care providing, but also operations as y’all mentioned. And as I listen to these discussions, I think about people like my dad who’s a crotchety old man who’s, love him, but he’s afraid of anything to do with technology. Like, he would he doesn’t even auto draft his bills because he doesn’t trust the system, to take the right amount of money out of his account. So as a as a health care marketer, what is your advice to people like me who have to communicate with people like my dad to build trust in, health care technology and, like, prepare them for what their health care experience will be in the future? I can take that first and Yeah. Build off of it. Look, it’s there’s always going to be a population that you’re going to need to bring along with the journey little bit more. So there’s certain generations that are they’re finding out their information on TikTok, and then there’s others that are are refusing to do anything other than print or what specifically, what my doctor will say. We in in e commerce, our entire thing is how do we make it easier for you to get the information that you need, to get what you’re looking for, as we sort of say, as few clicks as possible. What really helps is, we sort of call it the mom test. So it’s guiding through, those that might be a little bit more apprehensive about, how to navigate the tool, how to navigate the site, whatever it may be. So quite literally going through the experience of showing them a little bit more. And then from another perspective, I think that the onus is is on the organisations that are putting out this technology. The onus is on them to be able to say, hey, this is a source, a citation that you’re talking about, right, to help build that trust a little bit of this is where this information is coming from, this is where it’s backed, this, is a prediction, not a diagnosis. That, you know, those types of that type of language that I think helps at the end of the day, those that might be a little bit more apprehensive to understand, the level of confidence that they should and start to have. But ultimately, more users are are they’ve got technology in their pocket twenty fourseven in some places and the day to day adoption of using that is just becoming a little bit more of a reality too. And I’m glad you brought up that question of trust because that was actually something that I wanted us to to chat about. McKinsey last year did a study asking nurses, and and there have been all sorts of studies asking physicians, pharmacists, a lot of clinicians. What do you feel about AI in in your clinical practice? And the interesting part is that the vast majority of people are pretty excited. You know, they see a lot of possibilities, but they have a level of concern. And then they ask, you know, the the next question was, what do we need to do to build trust? And the most important part is transparency and being involved in the process every single step of the way. To your point, where are you getting the data? Who’s involved with the validation? Who’s involved with the testing? Who’s involved with the product design? And the more and more that people are involved at all those different levels and it’s not just having the human in the loop, it’s having the expert in the loop to actually help validate. And so the trust piece, that is earned and it comes through, I think, the practice and the involvement and the transparency. And I think when things don’t go right, to state, they’re not going right. That is how we build trust. You You want to speak a little bit about trust and how There are technological ways to address transparency and explainability of machine learning models as well. So that is part of building trust. And my customers are clinicians, but you’d be surprised by how prodigy and, you know, difficult, you know, tech averse they can be as well. But how do we earn that trust? By building not black box models that may be great performance, but you just got to take its word for it. That’s no good. That’s next to useless for us. The model needs to output a justification of how it reached its answer. And, thankfully, there are these explainability techniques that are just industry standard now. We do not accept models without these techniques built in. Right. So that’s one way to earn trust, but I think the the human problem is harder than the technological problem of earning trust. You earn trust with the clinicians by demonstrating value to them, by understanding what it is they need exactly, and what causes them the most frustration, what is the most boring parts of their job, saying, let us show you how we can take that off your plate. And then, you know, you get their buy in. That is how you build partnerships and eventual customers of our of our tools. And I think for crotchety dads, it’s their loving daughters that trust. Next question. Could you introduce yourself? Yeah. Yeah, I’m a journalist with a paper in Sweden covering healthcare. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. And one of the big discussions that we have over there is how to get clinicians or medical professionals that have years of training in critical thinking to take the leap, in trying out these new techniques or tools. So I was interested in knowing from City of Hope, what what are some of the setbacks that you had during implementation, and what did you learn from them? Do you want me to leave with that as the clinician? What would make your life easier to to adopt? Yeah. I think that, the conversation that I have with so many of my colleagues is the future is here, this technology is here. It is not we’re not we’re not going back. And so in order for this to be something that is useful to you and to your your your aims of taking care of people, you have to jump in, you have to be learning a part of this. Pretending like it’s not going to be here, you will miss it. And so the best way to be able to embrace that, to have it actually be a tool for you, is for you to actually be a part of it. And the more you’re a part of it I mean, it’s kind of the same way to say, You know, I’m not going to pay attention to the Internet. I’m not going to look at the new clinical trials. We don’t do that with any of the technologies. So there And what we have found is that most of the clinicians there is this sense of, I’m not going to have relevance, or I am concerned because I don’t know how to use this technology, and it’s going to undermine my confidence in taking care of people. So I think the more that people are involved and they’re working as teams and they’re supported by data scientists, that’s the more involved that they are with the process, the greater the confidence that they have. And when they see all of this work that was taking them hundreds of hours or, collectively, I don’t have to be the only oncologist to see this bone marrow issue or this solid tumour. I’ve got the collective wisdom of people all over, including Sweden, to help me make my clinical decision. That’s I mean, you you tell I mean, you answer that too. What have you seen as far as bringing clinicians on board so that they are not resistant? Well, you know, what you hear about are the successes and the wins, but very rarely about the setbacks. But, there have been many of them, and there have been many failed experiments, and we wouldn’t be trying hard enough if there weren’t failed experiments. So, we’ve ambitiously tried many things that don’t work out, and we need to believe the data when it tells us it’s not working. But one, you know, one problem that came up was actually about the importance of speed. And speed is its own it’s not an intention with safe safety necessarily. Speed can be safety sometimes when people are living on borrowed time. Right. So there is no time to waste, and we must move with great speed and safety, but things have failed because of lack of speed before in many projects, and that’s some of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had. In, for example, trying to, to bring on partners outside healthcare institutions to just try out what we’ve built. There is such reluctance in healthcare, understandable reluctance to share your data, open your doors, and we were not we promised we would never look at your data, it’s completely independent, we’ll send it over in a nice little package that you run on your own. And it’s the the amount of wrangling and negotiation and legal will will kill a project, and projects have been killed for that reason. Yeah. Hi. Hi. My name is Tina Aswani Omprakash. I’m a patient advocate and a non profit CEO of South Asian IBD Alliance, that’s inflammatory bowel disease alliance. I live with Crohn’s disease, and I’m sort of wondering, as a patient and as a leader of a patient advocacy organizationphysician society, how are we getting buy in from patients? And where are we involving patients? And how are we involving patient advocacy organizations in this process to get buy in? Not just buy in. Tomorrow I’m talking on a real chemistry panel about health equity. There’s, historically, underserved communities that have significant mistrust in doctors forget about AI where are we bridging the gaps here? Yeah. Do you want to Yeah. You’re more patient I mean, consumer I’ll give it a shot at least from the way that we’re trying to. Awareness is the big thing. Sometimes they quite literally don’t know that the solutions are there for them, so we also invest a decent amount in the awareness of the solutions that we do have. That’s not tackling the apprehension side of that side of it, but, that’s certainly tackling the, hey, there is a solution out there that can help you make your guided decision. Also from, you know, with certain parts of our business with some of the healthcare practitioners and providers that we can educate them as well about the tools that we’ve got so that they go through, you and I were chatting about this earlier, so they can go through that with their patient and, it’s again not replacing the recommendation from that doctor by any means, but it’s saying, Hey, here is a solution for you to go and get a little bit more information and more resourcing or find out more resources about it. So the awareness is kind of a big thing and a barrier if we don’t have that from what I’ve seen. And quite honestly, the answer to that is we have to be intentional. So as these new technologies are being developed, particularly in this moment in time when so much of them are focused on non diagnostic, We’re looking at coordination of care, as you mentioned, social determinants of health, doing wellness checks, being able to reach out to folks. That is a really good moment in time to work with patient advocacy groups. And I think particularly in oncology spaces. There are an enormous number of, peer support groups, particularly And I’ll tell you, when you’ve got a child with cancer, that group of folks are the fiercest advocates you find and they are also the most, receptive to being a part of the process. So I do think a big piece of this is to be intentional in the outreach as we’re designing this. And I think it’s also, a wonderful outreach for patient advocacy groups to put their hands up, both hands up, to say, we want to be involved in this. You probably have another Sir, only that to say that building patient facing tools is very hard. It’s a tough nut to crack, and we’re we’re wary of that. Right. Clinicians tools built for clinicians, they have a level of sophistication about the underlying material and the skepticism to be able to push back against the AI, the oracle. But, we’re so, so we we withhold tools from patients, and we do not build a chatbot for the patient to ask about, what’s my next treatment? You know, where’s it going to go? How long do I have? That would be a very dangerous tool to build and we’re not doing that. I would say particularly at this moment in time, the technology is not good enough. Yes. So we we’re not there. I would like to think that we would get there because where we are today, we might not have thought that ten years ago. But there are other companies out there who are very patient facing, but they’re not on the diagnostic part. But a lot of what I think you’re talking about is coordination of care, logistics. There are things, but it’s it’s very much we have to be proactive and I think also the patient advocacy groups need to put their hands up and join, you know, find out what’s going on and say, we would like to be a part of that. And to build the trust, we have to be very transparent about how it gets built, and then the testing of it, the implementation, all of those folks need to be involved. And when they are, and they see how the sausage is made and they’re part of the sausage being made, I think that that’s where we have a chance of building trust, particularly in communities where there’s really low trust. Thank you for that question. Yeah. And if you don’t mind just me making a recommendation, something that I think would work really well in patient communities is if we have AI models, sort of, let’s say, a colonoscopy, sort of delineating the extent of disease or extent of cancer, and the doctor showing that to the patient, hey, this is what it looks like. An AI model discerned what level of disease you have. Based on that, here are your treatment options. I think AI could be used in those kinds of supplementary fashions, at least at this time, to build trust. It’s just a thought I’m having. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you for being here. Shauna, thank you for hosting a great panel. Really excellent. Thank you. My name is Andy James. I’m a CTO for a venture company that’s backing some startups in in health tech. We we’re doing a lot of AI, so I am a crotchety old man, but I do get to I’m I’m less risk averse about technology, so I get to play with some fun things. Kinson, most of what what I do is supporting people in your role, and trying to help them to be innovative as well. And I I look at pre Internet as data and the Internet as information and AI as answers. And so we’re able to get to the information the way we want it to in the way that’s most efficient to us. We don’t have to compile all that information, those records and things, which to me is a true innovation, you know, so the hype is definitely real. I totally agree with you. My concern is I’ve never seen anything moving as fast as this, and the underlying models can be changed out from underneath you. And as we build out agentic workflows, which suddenly link all of these things together and you ask a complex question and you get a very short, simple answer in exactly the same way, there’s so little in ways of tooling to audit to get from here to here, and what thing did what thing lied to you along the way that can make an impact? And I know you said about clinicians ultimately being the answer, but that will go away as people think they trust this. So I’m trying I’m trying to is your question, Question is quality. You know, Okay. How how do we really truly, truly validate this when it gets so complicated that there’s no lineage to anything anymore? I’m not touching that one. Quality has many dimensions. So it has accuracy, comprehensiveness, it has, factuality in terms of its faithfulness to the underlying material, so we can break these down into measurable dimensions, and we measure on all of them, and we compare. And when I say the ultimate test is still the human test, it’s a Turing test like scenario, when you have the AI generated and the clinician generated summary, which does a new expert choose as the better one? When you cannot distinguish them against them anymore statistically, then you can say, we have reached that bar, and then we will soon exceed that bar soon afterwards. I I totally if I can follow-up just quickly, I totally agree with you, but you can ask the question of AI today and ask the same question tomorrow, and it’s different. So you test it once when you created your implementation in your software, but the underlying libraries that are being used and models that are being used ultimately changes, which may destabilize. And I think that’s you know, I don’t know that there’s an easy answer. I’m not necessarily expecting an answer, but that’s where my concern comes from, you know, in that area. So, we built it in a certain way, and maybe I can give you investment advice. Don’t train your own underlying foundation model, because that will be obsolete next week, and we’ve seen that week after week. So that’s not what we tried to do. You want to be able to, as you say, swap it with the next greatest thing as it comes out. And then you need to do the continuous quality checks. Is the summary I’m generating now no worse than or better than what the best I did before? So, we are building, you know, pejoratively, the wrapper around foundation models, and I believe that wrapper, where you deeply understand what your customer’s need is, our clinicians’ needs, is the value that is venture fundable. And to answer your question, you continuously do quality control checks on the latest model that you just plugged in. Is it generating as good results as before? If we move swiftly, I can get the last two questions in. But I just want to also say this is why clinicians love our data scientists team members. Hi. Thank you so much for an interesting session. My name is Inga Warhol with Orizaba Solutions. So I’ve looked on the regulatory side at, data from electronic health care records, and it is very messy. And when you’re getting data from different, parts of the country, I know coding can be different. And I just was wondering, again, speaking to the quality, aspect, like, are you putting in checks on, like, how they’re using, like, ICD coding? Whether a patient is taking a medication, you may only have the record that they got the prescription, but did they actually go to the, you know, go to the pharmacy and get it? Like, are there those checks that are incorporated? Are you having to make assumptions around, you know, the quality in that sense? Before you answer that question, can we get the second question and maybe we can get both of them answered? Yeah. So our final question. Thank you so much. I’m Kelly. I’m a dietitian. I am privileged to get to work, with Gabby as well at Nestle Health Science. I work in social media. This has been a wonderful and inspiring session. But one question that I have that I’m excited to learn more about is how are we using AI to reach the cure? As someone that’s been impacted by cancer in my family and losing a family member, I’m just so excited about the opportunity that we have with AI in Kingston. Maybe you you have some insider info on this, but I would just love to hear of what’s being done, to help use AI to bring us closer to a cure, specifically looking at cancer. Okay. So messy health data records and ICD nine codes and how we’re gonna use this to get better. I think that’s gonna be more on his side, honestly. No. I’m not. Okay. You’re you’re right. Very briefly, the, as Gabby said, if it’s garbage in, garbage out, like, we can only work on what we have in the electronic health record. If it’s patchy, if we don’t actually measure when the patient actually picks up the prescription, our AI will not divine that somehow. So if we are limited by what is collected, maybe we can improve side. And on the other piece, I really would love to leave you with this impression of my incredible optimism. I do believe cancer will be cured in my lifetime, I’ll be very disappointed if it doesn’t, okay? Because, again, it’s an informed optimism, I see the pace of improvement, and the acceleration of improvement, and how it’s impacting research, and how quickly new compounds are getting into clinical trials. This is an incredible acceleration, and my my own my own assumptions have been shattered just within the past two years, and I expect this rate of progress to continue. So, to close out, I think that this panel, and not only this panel, but South by Southwest and beyond, it’s very clear that AI is moving fast, faster than a lot of us can keep up with. I think in many opport in many situations, the reality is living up to the hype. And, as Vladimir Lenin once said, There are weeks that happen in decades. Or was it How do you say it? Yeah, there are weeks when decades happen. There are weeks when decades happen. Of course, I would blow that. There are weeks when decades happen. But before we go, just one thing that, the AI What I want to know, just just leaving a a powerful thought, is how do we use these AI tools to make our jobs easier and and our lives better? So just leave that that last question for you guys to answer. How do we use AI to make our jobs and our lives better and maybe even more joyful? Jump in. Use it. You know, there are there are tools and solutions out there, that are available to everyone. Use chat gbt. Ask it, how do I best prompt you to get this output? I think that’s the biggest thing is people are so overwhelmed of, I don’t know even where to start. And then you’ve got a bad prompt and then your output’s not great. But that was one of my first best tips of as I started to use it more, I use it in my day to day so that I don’t have thousands of emails to go to. I can get to the most important things first and and being able to share with others how you’re using it as well. You know, that’s outside of the medical side, but it it it absolutely helps you in your day to day. I mean, I do it with my travel planning even. So just use it, start trying, start evaluating the answers that you’re getting. Is it truly helping me? And then and then, you know, if you are using one of those types of tools, prompt it to prompt you on what specific information it needs to give you a better answer. Total same answer. Jump in. That. Use it. Embrace it. Be nimble. Adopt the latest models. Always try the best thing out there. It will be worth it. I think the biggest mistake you can make is forgetting. Oh, I could have used AI to help me on this. Alright. So please join me in thanking Gabby and Kingston and Real Chemistry, and thank you for joining us. Thanks. Nice. Nice. Oh, there you go.

Hello, everyone. Hello. Thank you for joining us today. So I’m Danny Bellett. I lead AI strategy and, innovation for real chemistry. I’m really excited for the opportunity to talk to you today about, well, about a concept that I think is pretty, prominent in South by Southwest right now, one that’s obviously very important and and, of the moment. Also one that’s pretty critical, one that I think I really want us to keep in mind as we go through this. And I’m not talking about artificial intelligence. I mean, that’s part of it. What I really want us to talk about today is human empathy. Right? The human touch that comes along with, that’s essential to our roles as health care communicators, understanding exactly who it is that we’re trying to talk to and making sure that we’re reaching them in a way that’s that’s resonant. And this is all kinds of stakeholders. This is, you know, our organizations that we’re a part of. It’s our teams who we work with, but it’s also the people that we’re trying to reach out in the world. You know, the HCPs, the the patients who I think are central to the, really, the core of what it is that motivates us, our missions as individuals and organizations. It’s an interesting time to be doing this, I think. Troubled, tangled, issues that we’re dealing with on a day to day basis, but I think, fortunately, we have two skilled, forward thinking communicators, today with us to help us navigate these waters, I think. So I’m really excited to be joined on the stage today by Amy Atwood of Takeda and Asda Meir of Genentech. I’ll take a moment and let them introduce themselves and maybe talk a little bit about how they relate to this topic. Amy? Thank you so much, Danny. I am super excited to be here. Appreciate the invitation, and, I’m excited about the topic. I’ve been in corporate communications for almost thirty years, which makes me feel really old. And over that time, worked in rare diseases, oncology, neuroscience vaccines, and as well as the energy industry. And, the last ten years, I’ve worked for Takeda, and I’m really thankful at this time to work for a company that may be two hundred and forty three years old, but is very, focused on technology. And years ago, became determined to be the most trusted biopharmaceutical company in the industry. So that all begins with educating your employees and bringing in the tech. So excited for the conversation. Thank you, Amy. So hello everybody. Good morning. This is Oz. I’m the head of digital marketing at Genentech. I’ve also been in pharmaceuticals for about twenty years, within different companies, different countries and regions, different therapeutic areas. I’ve been at Genentech for about two years and Genentech is a company that is so people focused whether it’s their employees or the patients or the physicians or the caregivers they engage with. Of course, we think about AI and how to use it, but we are also thinking about great, what does this mean for society? What does this mean for employees? What does this mean for patients? So I think it’s timely that we think about not just AI, but also the impact it has on empathy, communication, and again really thinking about what how does this impact everybody around us? Yeah. That’s that’s exactly it. So I think maybe I’ll take a second to set the stage here for us. You know, two and a half years ago almost, ChatGPT was released into the world. I think at this point, probably everybody in this room, if not everybody in South by Southwest has had some interaction with generative AI. I can’t believe it’s been less than three years. Yeah. It’s That’s crazy. It’s astonishing the pace at which things are changing and probably the amount in which it’s been incorporated into our day to day. Right? It’s a great tool for communication. Right? It’s it’s essential, I think, at this point for me to take some of the weird nuanced and complex things that I need at some point to say out loud or to put in an email or something and to translate that into something that’s clear and concise and that other people will get. But I think there’s a a tension that maybe we witness if we’re, say, getting an email from somebody that just sounds a little off or if we’re on LinkedIn and sort of bombarded with the AI slop. Right? There’s an impersonality to it that I think is is kind of a big turnoff. And it’s that tension between being better communicators, but also losing touch, that impersonality, I think, that, we’re probably going to be sitting in probably over the course of the next hour. Things like balancing the sense of the possible, you know, pursuing the next big idea, trying to push the boundaries of what we can do with the technology, but also thinking about the practicalities. How can we actually incorporate this in a meaningful way into our day to day lives and into our jobs? And then there’s the tension between empathy. You know? How do we build actual trusting relationships with our stakeholders with the need for efficiency? Right? I think the through line from twenty twenty three to twenty twenty five is the pivot from the massive investments that all of our organizations probably placed in this technology two years ago to needing to identify some kind of return on investment. I used an ugly word there, I think, ROI, but it’s probably an increasing part of our considerations every day. I think of ROI, I think of metrics, I think of objectives. Can you tell me when you’re at Genentech and you’re thinking about the objectives that you might have for incorporating AI solutions into your job, into your, you know, into your work. How do you start to set those objectives, identify metrics and and map that to AI solutions? Yeah. That’s a great question. I think one of the things we have to think about is, what are we trying to do? Right? The ultimate goal is not to use AI. The ultimate goal is in some cases to teach patients about a new therapy, about a test that they can take, to teach physicians or to inform them of, you know, new developments. Again, the ultimate goal is not to use AI, which means your objective actually stays the same, which is you want people to engage with what you’re putting out there. So if you’re putting out content, for example, with AI and it’s just lost to human touch and there’s no empathy in it and it doesn’t really understand what your patients are going through, there’s not gonna be any engagement. I think that gives you the clue that what you’re putting out there is actually not working. The distinction is not I used AI or I did not use AI. The distinction is I put out something there which resonates with people I’m trying to reach. Now with AI, you can do it better. You can do it more personalized. I’m I’m I know we’re gonna talk about those, but you can use AI to do a lot of things. I’ll just like diverge a little bit on the chat g p t topic. Right? And this may be controversial, but I for example, don’t use chat gpt to say, hey, just write me one email from scratch and I’m gonna send it to this person. The reason is, I wanna write the email first and then I wanna ask chat gpt, how can I make this better? I want this to sound a little bit more, I don’t know, like this or like that. There are two reasons for that. One is, one, I wanna think about what I communicate to the other person. I wanna understand like what the context in is and then of course I wanna make it better and AI can help me make it better, but I also don’t wanna lose the skill to write or think about what words to use and how to be a good communicator. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that skill loss is an important consideration. Amy, what about you? What’s been your experience at Takeda? Thinking about how, say maintaining that human element when we’re thinking about global communications, for instance. I love what Oz said and kind of the turning it on its head in that so many people utilize ChatGPT first and then will review it. So that’s a really interesting way to approach it. I think that what’s most important is the human behind the AI. And so much of what we’ve been hearing here at South by Southwest, is about authenticity and transparency. And you can tell when you get something that was written by AI that you it’s just that much off. And I know it’s going to get better. Every day, it it’s improving. But we have to make sure that we’re reviewing what’s been written, that we’re putting our human touch into it. I didn’t mention in my intro, but I’m also a patient. I am a breast cancer survivor. And from a patient perspective, we want to know that there’s a human that is helping us, that is listening to us, and that is helping us through our journey. And while absolutely there are so many ways that AI can help that and especially with the knowledge base and inform it. But there has we have to keep that human element within and working with the AI. Mhmm. Mhmm. I think storytelling is a big component of this. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about, how you start to incorporate storytelling into into your communications. Yeah. I one of the things that, we’ve been utilizing is we’ve been trying to well, backing up, I will say that one of the things that is so important for me, at Takeda is that I believe that it’s not just the communications team responsibility to be communicators and storytellers, but it’s every single employee. And we have to help empower them to tell those stories and give them those tools to be able to do it. And for some people who are non communicators, they need help with that. And there are tools. And in fact, one of the things that we developed is our own version of ChatGPT called MyAibo. And any employee within our company can utilize it and can it can help them craft their stories. And maybe it’s maybe grammar is not their strong suit or maybe, they need, to do a little bit of research to help inform the story that they want to tell. And certainly translating some of the really complex scientific things that talk about how we are transforming lives daily, they can pull that from my AIBO, our chat g p t. Yeah, I think one of the things I’ll add is our biggest advantage as human beings is we feel pain and suffering and we understand mostly the pain and suffering of others around us, right? We all know people that have had like bad diseases or illnesses and we we know how they felt or we had them ourselves and we know how we felt. And I think that drives us to be really empathetic, to create those stories that are gonna actually resonate with the people that are being, you know, we’re we’re engaging with and that’s gonna maybe allow them to take an action that’s gonna help their lives, whether it’s improving their lives, sometimes saving their lives, sometimes it’s just prolonging their lives, but AI can definitely help you scale a lot of things. It can actually it’s getting better every day. Right? So that’s why in one of the panels I was at yesterday, I wasn’t so sure that in ten years AI could couldn’t do what we’re doing today. I think for the next five to ten years, we’re still much more advanced in that and in storytelling as well where, yeah, you can connect with people. This is why we don’t tell our organization. I’m in marketing. Right? I don’t tell our marketers, just let AI do everything for you. Like don’t even think about that. No. You start with the insight, you start with the human being, the human touch, the suffering, the pain, the fear, the anger, the acceptance, the taking control, and then you craft stories around that and now you get help from AI for you to be faster at creating those stories. Mhmm. Absolutely. I will say though that one of the things that’s so important to have the human element is feeding in the data into GenAI and making sure, like, we have to watch out for the bias and ensure that the the data that’s in there is accurate and is, representative of all peoples. I we have to remember that AI can hallucinate and make things up and I’ve experienced that recently and that I I asked it something and what I was thankful that I went back and I fact checked it because it actually wasn’t true. And, a It’s so good at looking at the bias behind it and just making us cognizant and reminding us of that so that we have to make sure, as humans, we’re watching out for other humans. I think one of the essential things about doing an effective job of building empathy is doing really comprehensive research, say, with patients, getting lots of in-depth interviews. One thing that I’ve found is really effective of for using generative AI is obviously looking across all of that content. Right? All of those interviews, the transcripts, and and and synthesizing them, identifying, like, what are the commonalities between them. It’s incredibly useful for that. Right? It unearths insights really quickly. But I think one of the risks of doing that is losing touch with the actual interviews themselves, with the people that are behind them. The synthesis covers maybe ninety percent of the content, but what you’re missing if you don’t actually immerse yourself in that raw material are that other ten percent, the non obvious things that I think is really where the human comes through. So I’m super enthusiastic about its potential for insight development, but I also want us to make sure sure that we’re, you know, staying close with the people that we’re actually trying to support. So I wanna pivot maybe a little bit I wanna pivot maybe a little bit and start to think about how that comes through in our brand communications. How are we making sure that we’re maintaining a distinctive voice? How can we use generative AI, for instance, or, you know, generative AI enabled humans to find ways of communicating a consistent voice that speaks directly to those needs, attitudes, motivations that are coming through from this research. So, Amy, can you tell me how, you know, your team works with AI generated content to ensure that it’s actually tied to those essential components of of what it is that makes people tick? Yes. So one of the things that we’ve recently built that helps both us as communicators and others within our organization is, a chatbot that is trained on our brand guidelines, on our style guides, that is informed by personas and that we actually utilize to help us create personas for, patients, for HCPs, for other key stakeholders. And that really empowers them to make sure that they’re crafting stories in really authentic ways that are compliant as well. We work in a highly regulated industry and we wanna make sure that, yes, our our brand is in there, but that we’re also doing things that that are compliant. Yeah. I’ll touch on two things. The first one is, and this is surprising to a lot of people that meet me at the company because they say, Oz, how can I use AI? And I say, I’m not gonna answer that question. That is not the right question. Right? What are you trying to do? I’m trying to reach a patient. I’m trying to ensure physicians understand x. I’m trying to make sure caregivers are taking control of, you know, whatever choices are out there. Great. That’s a good start. Now you have an objective. Great. Now what is the gap? What are the insights? Like you mentioned, right? Like is there market research? Do you understand the pain points? And people think I’m so old school. I’m like, no no no. These are the fundamentals you build up on. Right? When there was email, where there was like banner ads and social media, we didn’t just destroy every other, communication principle and said great. Let’s just do it. Well, we did for for a few years. We did. And then we realized, wait a minute, this is not like the thing. The thing is, great, you still have a problem, you still have an opportunity, you still need to communicate with people. One, it’s the mindset. Right? Of course, we’re going through a transformation like every other company to try to understand how to use Gen AI. I see like two distinct ways to approach it. I think the companies that are gonna fail are the ones that are saying, great. Let’s just use a tool, bring it in, let’s incorporate it, let’s make sure it works. That’s gonna fail, I can guarantee to you. The way we’re thinking about it is this, great. What’s the mindset shift? What’s the upskilling needed? What are the processes that we need to re engineer? How do you look at regulatory, legal, medical reviews in a different way? So it’s basically a wholesale way of looking at how do we completely re engineer the whole thing, which sometimes means, hey, we have some people that are not ready for this future. What do we do with them? Can we upscale them? If not, can we find them roles somewhere else? Right? And how do we get these other people? Again, it’s not just the technical knowledge. It’s the mindset to say, it’s not gonna be perfect, but I’m gonna keep iterating on it and we were just talking about this before the podcast, find those people that are gonna be open to change every single day. Yes. Change is the only constant and it’s very much about change management as it is when you introduce anything new. And, they say I believe it’s approximately sixty to seventy percent of jobs are going to be impacted over overall, and that means that everyone needs to be upskilled. They need to understand how to apply this. And not everybody is comfortable with change. Some people change it’s is very scary no matter what it is. And so we have to help them through it. We have, folks who have have wondered, you know, will I lose my job to, an AI? And it’s not that you’ll lose your job to AI, but you could lose your job to someone who knows how to use it and how to be really smart about it and more efficient and more productive using using it. I actually recently was helping a friend with her resume who is getting back into the job market after having a baby and it’s been about eight years since since she’s been in communications And I was suggesting to her that she take a few classes, that she learns a little bit more about GenAI and how to utilize it and that, you know, maybe get a certificate or at least educate herself and and add that to her resume and we got off the phone. She called me right back and she’s she said, wait a minute. You just told me to put this on my resume. Isn’t that bad? Like aren’t I the communications expert? Aren’t I supposed to be able to write better than a chatbot? Or, and I explained to her, no. You need to know how to utilize it to make your writing better, to make you know, it’s not replacing you, but it’s complementing you, and it’s helping you to improve. So I think we spend so much time and energy talking about the training data that underlies large language models. Right? But I think what’s been missing or maybe just we’re not talking enough about is, say, training people. Right? The ones who are going to be using this technology. I think there’s going back to tensions. I think there’s the potential for us to, you know, find enormous amounts of efficiency and and to, you know, blossom as as people. But there’s also the potential for there to be an overreliance, I think, on using the technology. So I wanna ask, like, what are your thoughts on, say, the potential for critical skills of communicators to be lost if we lean too heavily into this, either now or in the future? Yeah. I mean this was part of my initial message. Right? When we think or when we communicate to our people and we assure them, by the way, I’m gonna change this message in two years, but right now we tell them, hey, if you don’t know, don’t be scared. If you don’t want to know, you should be scared. Right? Meaning, I get a lot of questions from people that are in college or are just starting their work around, hey, what kind of tools and technology should I learn to set me up for the next five ten years? That does not exist anymore. Right? That existed maybe twenty years ago where you learn something and that took you through a decade of, hey, now I’m good at this. I’m I’m okay. I don’t need to learn a lot more things. Right now, what we’re teaching people is to have agility in learning, to keep the advantages of human beings, which is again communication because you can use chat GPT to write me an email and most of the time you’ll understand it’s chat GPT. Sometimes you don’t. They’re they’re so good, but when you go talk to people, they’re still gonna talk to each other face to face and if you don’t use those skills to craft those messages that are impactful, you’re gonna struggle. Right? We we do lose our brain. We do lose our neurons and the connections that we make. So we tell people like the learning agility and the adaptability to just changing, the adaptability to say, I’m gonna put something out there fast and learn from it. I think those are the skills we’re teaching people and that’s what we’re telling people. Like, if you don’t know this, again in two years you have to know this because if you don’t then you’re at a big disadvantage, but right now if you’re willing to learn and change and just accept the fact that you’re gonna be needing to be comfortable with being uncomfortable because there is no more I learned this and I’m set up for the next five years. Yeah. We are very much trying to help our our employees. I’ll I’ll say we’ve done a number sorry. We’ve done a number of things across the organization to try and empower employees and upscale. We have, Takeda dot ai, which is a central hub to the that’s a resource as well as, some other, a digital dexterity program where we have different webinars, each month. But one of the things that I’m trying to do with my team is really show that hands on, applicable ways of doing things such as, in every weekly meeting that we have at the we end with, an AI moment at the end where one of my team members will step forward and share something that they did using, chat GPT or, or other, things like Copilot and how it helped them that week because it’s by showing some of those different applications, real life applications that people can be like, oh, I didn’t think to do that. I one example was, someone had used it to find all of their one on ones with a certain person. And here I am the week before, like, going through my calendar and, like, looking and trying to find them. Whereas if I just typed in one on ones with Julie and then it, like, in less than two seconds populated with for the next year, all of my one on ones that I never thought to do that. So it’s we’re kind of learning from each other some of those things. I will say one of the things that I’m worried about and and talking about some of the things that we could lose, it reminds me of how in some schools they’re not teaching cursive and that, like, blows my mind. And, you know, kids actually get excited to learn to write cursive because they’re not being taught it in school, which is ironic. But I worry about the workforce of the future. In that, I worry about the entry level communicators. And if we’re using AI to do so many of those things that like, those were the first things that I did in an entry level communications job. And what are we going to how are we gonna get people into communications and help train them on what a communicator does if we’re using technology to do all of those entry level things. Absolutely. I think one of the most useful things that we put in place at Real Chemistry about two years ago or a year and a half ago, I guess, is just a a more that is a biweekly all agency meeting where we get together and discuss what are the new things people are using AI for. Mhmm. It’s a great way not only to socialize using AI, but I think people at our organization have gotten a better understanding of all of the many different things that we do, the different kinds of jobs that exist and the tasks that are maybe unique to one role or the things that sort of transcend all roles recognizing that at the, you know, at core, we’re all we’re all communicators. And I think that’s one of the things that keeps coming through from this conversation is that it’s not so much using the technology. It’s just different ways of interacting with our colleagues or with patients in the real world to make sure that we’re kind of striking that appropriate balance. I wanna circle back to something that you were talking about a little earlier, Amy, which is bias, maybe cultural sensitivity. So the through line, I think, for the last ten years of of, you know, of digital has been, you know, personalization and and and targeting. But I think with generative AI, it it opens up the possibility for hyper personalization to move just beyond basic targeting. Hyper personalization, I think, is is a great brass ring, but it requires so much in terms of recognizing cultural nuance, is recognizing if we’re talking about global marketing, recognizing not just translating the language, but translating the meeting the meaning of the language. Right? Making sure that it that it actually strikes a note with the very nuanced cultures that exist in in, you know, micro cultures within regions. So, Amy, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can build feedback loops in our organizations that that enable us to kinda keep track of how AI is helping us address those nuances and and maybe where it’s not. Thanks, Danny. I have to say that so much of it begins with data integrity and making sure that what is fed in is accurate, that, there it can’t always understand the nuances. And it’s one of the things that we need people for is to go through to remove outdated information to update the data that is in there. And when you think about some of the cultural things, so we, have a deep heritage in Japan and our our headquarters are based in in Tokyo. And so we have a large base of Japanese employees and and almost everything that that we do, while English is our official language of our company, we do translate things into Japanese. And well, of course, it’s one of those things like, of course, you would have, just AI translate for you. And I will say, you know, five years ago, it would take a person depending on, you know, the press release and, the some of the things that we had to include very scientific, highly nuanced, information that, it would take one of our Japanese employees more than twenty four hours to accurately translate every single word. And now it can be done very quickly with the help of of AI. But especially in the scientific world, there are so many things that you have to be really careful about, make sure that it is translated in the right way. And so we need the human to go back and to review and to make sure that it is being accurately translated and that there isn’t something that is lost, from from the computer. So first of all, I’ll make a statement about personalization. In healthcare, we have been talking about personalization for such a long time. Right? I’m sure we all have been going to conferences, omnichannel, hyper personalization, you know, we the thing is we never had the means to have hyper personalized content. Right? I know like brand teams, preparing breeze for the whole year. This is my patient, this is my segment, this is what they’re into. I’m gonna engage them through social media and then the whole year you have only five ads on social media. Right? But you have like twenty thousand people and we kept talking about hyper personal personalization in all these conferences for such a long time. This is the only time where we actually can get to personalization because AI will help us scale a lot of things that we’re trying to do. So now the opposite side of this, Amy already mentioned Nuance and, you know, the fact that the AI cannot really understand a lot of things. The other missing piece and you talked about bias, Danny, which is AI relies on data. Right? Data trains the models and there’s a lot of data that’s just not there. Right? Especially when you talk about patients and these like therapeutic areas, there are a lot of people, underserved populations, people that don’t even engage with the medical community because they lost trust in the medical community or they don’t engage with the pharma companies because they lost trust and rightly so, you know, and we just don’t have the data. This is another place where you need human beings to constantly think about, are we missing somebody? What’s the bias? Are there people that we’re just not thinking about and not reaching? And this, I know at Genentech, this is always top of mind. Health equity is one of our top priorities when you think about like high level Genentech priorities and what we’re trying to do is just ingrain that thinking of anytime I do something, what are we missing? Even with AI. Right? Great. AI can help me scale. What could AI miss that I can actually uncover? I think we have to be really careful about that. I agree. Yeah. Yeah. Being mindful, I think, of the white space. What, you know, what is the data not telling us? What are the non obvious things? So the things that we have to go out and actually look for. Now it can tell us what’s in the data, but it can’t necessarily tell us what’s not. It’s also just useful as a tool not only for communication, but just for understanding. And I think recognizing that it has that multiplicity of purposes is is helpful. You know, we get kind of locked into this idea of using it to translate or using it to to just, I don’t know, write an email or something like that. But even just setting the time aside to delve into it and treat it like, I don’t know, a thought partner or something, I think is really helpful. It’s it’s it’s much more effective that way, to really feel it out. I do think that it’s good for all of us to have some healthy skepticism. It’s just like when we’re using Google and, we get a whole bunch of things in our search results and we have to really consider the source. We have to consider, the information that we’re being given and not take everything that we read for, for being truthful and and accurate. And so I think we’re maintaining that healthy skepticism that only a human has, is very healthy. Yeah. Absolutely. This reminds me. So there’s this gift that I keep getting that is it’s evergreen. Right? I think we probably have all seen it anytime we talk about generative AI or a lot of emergent technologies. It’s the Jurassic Park GIF of, of Jeff Goldblum. And he says, scientists have been, you know, thinking about whether or not they could, but they haven’t spent any time thinking about whether they should. I love that. Yeah. It’s evergreen, I think. Right? So there are all of these emerging capabilities that we have, but I think we have to be sensitive as, you know, health care communicators and marketers that some things are maybe not quite right yet. Maybe not yet, maybe not at all. I’m I’m curious, like, how do you go about identifying what is right for right now and and maybe what’s, I don’t know, a little bit too far or not ready yet? Look, I I love that quote, by the way, in Jurassic Park. I think there is some things where if a technology is out there, they’re out there. Right? Like we have to accept that. Of course, it’s our choice to use it or not use it. The biggest thing, I’ll say one thing to look at from our side is, is this data that we should be using, right? And and if you shouldn’t use it, then you don’t use it. Apart from that, if there’s technology that you can leverage and it helps patients, physicians, caregivers have access to information. Again, in a way where you use data that you should use, we have no problems with that and I think anything that helps, patients get better treatment is fair game. Again, the data piece is an important one and what’s making this really complicated is there are new things popping every single day. Right? I have an AI newsletter that I’m subscribed to and it’s hard to keep track. There are fifteen things happening every single day and if you’re not careful, you could use something that has underlying models of bias, of using data in a different way. So I think we have to rely on sure speed is important, but doing the right thing sometimes is even more important. I completely agree. I think so much of it is the how of innovation not just the what and, it brings to mind I I think there are different ways. You know, we obviously have talked a lot about how about storytelling and writing and, some of those things that that AI can do for us. But I also think about something that we’re we’re just starting to do is is change the way that we we find our clinical trial sites. So often, the the historical way is you would get an investigator, you would get patients to enroll in your clinical trial. And one of the things that that we’re doing is we’re we’re kind of flipping that, and we’re looking and we’re and we’re looking and we’re using AI to determine, where are the patients that have these diseases that we want to treat And what are where are though they more geographically based so that we can move and then have our clinical trial site there so that we can hopefully enroll patients much faster and get underway with our clinical trials and then deliver for our patients. Again, that’s an it’s, you know, a rationale for using large amounts of data to help recognize underserved populations. It’s it’s really critically important and and I don’t know. I think it’s it’s a really admirable use of data. So I think we’re getting close to the point where we can start, reaching out to the audience for q and a. But I just have one more question for you. How are you working with your teams, your colleagues to think about or to manage the anxiety around the potential for job losses associated with the increasing use of generative AI and its its emerging capabilities? I think so much of it is about giving employees the time to to learn and giving them both the time and the tools. And I think so much of us, we’re going so fast every day and where we have so many things on our to do list. And it’s hard to incorporate that time for us and for our learning, but it’s as leaders, we have to not only provide that time and space, but really encourage it. And it will in turn help our employees feel more empowered and more confident, and they’ll be able to to get things done so much better. Across our communications team, we have, set our own goals for, for learning and, as well as for incorporating AI into our jobs every day. And we’ve also assigned, comms, comms we have one comms tech person for communications who helps to really, educate our whole team, but we also have champions on each of our sub teams so that they can help us, like I mentioned, in our weekly meetings. So we have to really just take responsibility ourselves to educate ourselves. But as leaders, we have to be giving our employees the the space and the tools to do it. I have, three points to make. One is be truthful, meaning don’t tell these are smart people. Don’t tell them every job is gonna stay the same. Don’t worry. Nobody’s gonna lose their jobs. That is not true. A lot of roles will not exist, or they will not exist in their capacity today. So we have to say that. Right? We have to let people know things are changing and you have to change as well. Second thing we’re doing is, again, we’re telling people, if you don’t know, that’s fine. If you wanna learn and if you wanna get there, we’ll help you get there. If you don’t wanna get there, then, you know, you’re gonna have a problem. The third one is don’t leave it up to employees to really try to understand what kind of training, what kind of upskilling, what should I do. Of course, they need to take ownership, but we have a program called digital academy that we launched around eighteen months ago and people were asking us like when does this end? Never. It never ends. It’s gonna be here for a hundred years and more, hopefully. But but what we’re doing there is we’re giving people a curriculum of these are things we expect you to to know, so that you don’t have to go out there worrying every night, what should I learn today? Now you know. If you wanna learn even more, you can take ownership of that, but at least there’s a structured way for you to feel confident. Oh, great. The organization is expecting me to learn these things and if I do this well, they also think I have a place here. That’s right. Yeah. A redoubled commitment on learning and development, I think, is really essential, especially with the pace of change. I think one of the things, Arz, you’ve talked about before is how you’re mapping business processes, like figuring out what does a truly AI enabled thing look like soup to nuts. I think what comes with that is maybe the recognition of what are the new roles that are going to be emerging, what are the new skills that are gonna be required to get from, you know, being maybe AI enabled to being a little bit more intrinsically AI imbued? And I think that’s cool. I think that’s exactly the way organizations should be doing it. I’m curious. Have actual new roles been emerging from that process? Yes. That’s it. Good. Good. I’m I’m we’re seeing the same thing myself. There are a lot of new roles that are emerging that I am sure, like, anybody who’s on LinkedIn, they’re already seeing and, you know, if they are interested in Genentech, they’re gonna see new roles that have new descriptions that you did not see before and there are gonna be more and more of them. Mhmm. Mhmm. Alright. Well, thank you both. I think, I think we’re ready to maybe turn this over to the audience for q and a. I’m looking for hands. Yes. If you wait a second, somebody will come by with the mic. Hi. So hi, everyone. Maybe, first of all, thank you very much for your insights. My name is Roman. I work for FAQ Health. So at at the end of the day, we’ve built it up. We have a consumer brand. It’s called FAQ You. We would say fuck you because we answer the most frequently asked questions of young people in the field of health, and we are hosting the biggest youth health community in central Europe with over two million people. And so you were talking about very critical health topics. So this is also something we are in. And, I mean, Genentech is working in breast cancer, and, I mean, you have also personal experience. So my question is, and I mean, I think in the panel, we have beaten around the bush because the question is, if something is so personal, and, I mean, you know it from your personal experience, how can AI help us in those moments? Because imagine you are diagnosed with breast cancer, going to the Internet, and what you find is a chatbot telling you that everything will be alright and you get some generic answers. And, I mean, at the end of the day, Takeda as well as Rush in Europe or Genentech in the United States, you are positioning as a partner of people in, I think, very difficult times and also partner of the health care system. So my question is how do you implement the human touch besides how to use AI? You know what I mean? I completely know what you mean and look at it both from a healthcare communicator perspective and the patient perspective and I have to say when I think back to my experience which was pre ChatGPT, but not pre Google, It was really interesting both the information I got from my doctor and from from the whole health team. And a huge shout out to to Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. I was very blessed to be in a place that with such high quality health care, which I know not everybody is. But I will say that they don’t make your decisions for you. And I had to do a lot of research as well, and I don’t think all of it was completely accurate. And, looking back now ten years later, I actually would have made different decisions. I had a double mastectomy. I would not do that today. And I think talking it through so one of the things that I did was I blogged through my whole entire experience because I wanted to help people and I knew that it could only be a human helping a human, who had experienced it to to give that information. But I know that, you know, people are finding my blog through the Internet and through searches and and through, through AI. And so I think there’s kind of that balance, but we need that human perspective too to be able to to verify and validate information. And as a patient, you know, and I’m frankly waiting for recurrence. I’m off Tamoxifen now and you know that the rates of recurrence jump up after you go off Tamoxifen. So I’m waiting for that, but I’m actually thankful that there is chat GPT and some of these other things that can find me even more information, but I’ll always want to talk to someone who’s been through it as well. First of all, you can never expect AI to replace the human to human connection. That’s that’s the that’s the biggest one. Thinking from a messaging perspective, you know, like when people scroll through things, it takes time like one second, maybe less to decide, I’m gonna click on this and read the information or I’m not gonna click on this. If AI can help us get better insights and put out content that maybe resonates just a little bit more with that end user, I think AI has done its job because if I can let you click to this content and you read something where you say, oh wait, I need to know more about this, which gets you to do more research, I think that’s a good use of AI because that now made you read something that you were not gonna read before without the insights and without the maybe hyper personalization that we talked about. Right. Right. And I think so much of this is about empowering patients to have better conversations with their HCPs and frankly, empowering HCPs with, I don’t know, the skills and knowledge that they need to recognize a rare disease or to coax, you know, the information that they need from a patient to make, you know, a better diagnosis faster to to, you know, speed the the path to diagnosis into treatment. So if AI can help us to make that education a little bit clearer, more concise, more accessible, I think that’s, you know, exactly what we should be using it for. That’s a great question. Thanks for bringing it up. And good name, FAQ. Yes. I like it. Yeah. Yes. Hi. I’m Coriander. I’m from the BioLumina agency. I have a question on the personas that you mentioned earlier. Could you describe the data and process that went into creating those and how the marketing team has been using them in the market? Yeah. I will very briefly just, share and and I will say that, our we have a very large company and and communications is separate from marketing and we we all have our our own ways of developing personas and, I I so most recently, we went through one of our many exercises, but just to give you an example, we were developing our goals and thinking about, you know, you always have to start with your audience. And how do you what who are they? And where are they coming from? And trying to meet them where they are. And one thing that, ChatGPT can do is you can feed in a few bits of information and then they can come up with they it can help you craft. It even gave us a name for this type, this type of persona and, you know, the average age and their interests and, their passions and their jobs and where they’re most likely to be based and it it gives you an example of of someone that you could be could be helping to focus your communications on without, yourself having to go out and do a huge amount of of, research and pour a lot of resources both time and money into it, because so much is available, at the click of a button. I will add something to the, preserving the human touch piece because, yes, you have personas, you have these AI tools right now where you can feed it a creative and ask it, what would my ex persona think about this creative and it gives you like really good insights. What it doesn’t give you is, I’m sure you have been in focus groups where you hear a patient say something for the first time ever and you’re like, I have never heard that before. I didn’t even think about it and AI will not catch that because that’s never been said, the data doesn’t exist. So I wanna make sure we balance that scaling with that human emotion that is sometimes you hear it for the first time, it’s never been said before and it’s a new data point for you to consider, which sometimes you know there’s like ten thousand data points, you create something, it’s average, then you hear one little word from somebody and you use that and it makes the biggest impact. I think scaling again is important, but we should not lose those nuggets of information that doesn’t even exist out there. Oh, I love that point. It is so true. I mean, we of course for every, every average or, you know, they say stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason. Like, they’re they’re based on something. They’re they’re based on on generalizations and that’s what a lot of these personas are. But we have to remember, every single person is different, is an individual. And while we may be, you know, the say have the same political stance or from the same place or have experienced the same the same thing, come from the same type of background, We could be looking at just this one thing totally different than everyone else. And it’s just like bodies when you’re you’re treating, treating a medical condition. What by giving one person with that medical condition, a therapy, it’s the same a different person with the same exact, medical condition could react very differently to that therapy. And so we always have to keep in mind that, yes, we’re trying to to target a certain audience, but they’re not all going to be exactly the same. Yeah. So I’m really sanguine about the possibility of using personas for, you know, supplemental market research. I think it’s got potential to be really powerful as a tool for us. At Real Chemistry, we’re also incredibly careful about how we go about using things like this. Right? We have what we like to call a clinical trials approach to doing anything with AI or any emergent technology. Right? We have the idea as phase one trial. Phase two trial is just testing it to the hilt. Everything that we can think of that it has the potential to maybe do or maybe not do, we test it endlessly. In this case, you know, we go into head to head studies between our personas and real people to see not just, you know, is this compelling, but is it accurate? Does it truly reflect the people that it’s meant to reflect? And I think this is sort of the blessing and the curse of segmentation is that it does a really good job of generally describing large populations. But then you get the outliers who aren’t necessarily, you know, easily identified or represented in your in your model. So like I said, we’re in phase two trials with personas for any sort of meaningful use. Certainly nothing necessarily at scale. And I have yet to see anybody truly pull this off in a way that I feel really comfortable with using. I think, you know, at the end of the day, primary market research is going to be the gold standard, actually reaching out and talking to patients and HCPs and and the communities that we’re looking to communicate with, to make sure that we’re actually doing them justice. So I guess the long story short is I think there’s tremendous potential there, but I have yet to see it truly executed in in a perfect form. And no matter what, even even when we do our primary research, we’re talking to a focus group. We’re talking to a handful of people, and we have to know that there are many, many, many people out there who who are different, and who don’t share those exact same points of views or same experiences. So it’s keeping that open mind as well. Mhmm. Mhmm. Okay. So I think we have time for maybe one more quick question. You, My, I’m a physician and I incorporate AI with, improving employee engagement and training in addition to, obviously, the patient experience, which we’ve talked about too. My question is more on the employee engagements. I loved what you said about dexterity lessons every month, and, Danny, you added about, you know, feedback loop mechanisms. But I’m still having some challenges with with people that are very intuitive with AI and ones that are afraid that this is gonna destroy our our world. And my providers have different reactions, to to this. So my question is more on how do you is there a way to standardize that feedback loop mechanism or that digital dexterity lesson so you it’s not it it there’s a more you can look more at trends in the office and who may need more assistance with that rather than having to do it one on one? So I I really think that it’s every person is going to adapt differently just because we all manage change differently and we also manage our time differently and value, learning differently. And I think that as leaders, we have to sometimes there are gonna be some people that we have to handhold through it and that we’re going to have to give specific goals as to, you know, I need you to develop in this area. I need you to adapt to this, the whole change management part. And then there are gonna be people who are taking off and and running faster, faster than maybe you’re even comfortable with. I think partnering those people, having a buddy to help them learn and and help temper, and and bring the maybe the person who is more reticent to adapt to it, help that bring them along. I think sometimes it’s it’s somebody people learn differently. And by having someone to partner with, it can help them to be more comfortable with it and to gauge kind of the speed and the types of learnings that that person needs? I know we’re almost out of time, so I’m gonna answer this briefly. But that’s a great question. I, categorize those people in, two categories. One is some people just don’t have the skills like you mentioned, like some other colleagues, and we need to understand who they are and hold their hands, like Amy mentioned. There are some people who just don’t have the will to go there. They just don’t want to, and they think, oh, if I touch AI again, it’s gonna destroy the world. I think we need to approach them a little bit differently, and sometimes it doesn’t end in a good story. Right? Sometimes it’s a, divorce of of the marriage, and I think we will have to be comfortable with that as well. Mhmm. Mhmm. Yeah. It’s, I guess it goes back to tensions like we started out talking about. Well, I think we’re about out of time, but I I wanna close with first thanking Amy and Oz. This has been an incredibly educating, experience for me and this panel, and it’s been it’s been a pleasure. I also want to thank everybody out in the audience for joining us in this conversation and for engaging, asking us questions. I think we’re at a really interesting moment in time, and and, you know, it it’s helpful for us to proceed with our own essential curiosity and also maintain sensitivity and empathy both for the people that we’re trying to communicate with and and our colleagues and organizations that we’re a part of. I think that this was the start of a really important conversation, and I’m hoping that we’re going to have continue to have this in the future. But like I said, thank you all so much. Again, I’m Janie Bellett, Real Chemistry. I lead AI strategy and innovation. Thank you, Amy. Thank you, Oz, for your time this morning. Thank you so much, and thanks for being here.

Thanks everyone for joining our panel today. Cancer care. Cancer doesn’t just attack the body. It moves through the culture, language, access, and trust ecosystems that we all live in. Today’s discussion, we’re gonna talk about how we can break down some of those barriers, through both personalized messaging technology and targeted advocacy to create a more effective cancer care conversation. So I want to start today’s discussion first by introducing myself. My name is Meredith Owen. I’m one of the leaders within our analytics practice at Real Chemistry where we use data to uncover insights that help healthcare organizations understand the patients and the people that they’re trying to reach. And you know, I’ve learned that data alone, it isn’t enough. Real impact happens when we combine analytics with empathy, when we listen as much as we measure and when we translate in states when we translate insights into action. So I want to start today’s discussion with something personal. Everyone in this room, whether you work in industry advocacy or patient care, I think we can all remember a moment that really changed the way we think about cancer care and these moments, you know, that really go beyond the data point, you know, the campaign and we truly, you know, see that behind all of this there are real people with hopes and fears and stories that matter. So I wanna ask each of our panelists today to start off by sharing, you know, first introducing yourself and then sharing something either personal professional, whether it was an experience or a conversation that shaped the way you think about how to meaningfully connect with patients. So Carolyn, let’s start with you. Sure. I’m Carolyn Oestring. I am an executive director of oncology patient marketing at Bayer. Two weeks into starting in oncology, I unexpectedly lost my dad to metastatic melanoma. Yeah. This is where I firsthand saw the gaps in communication and understanding Gaps that had they been filled, could have meant more time for my family. It’s part of what makes me so passionate about making sure we’re leveraging all of our available tools to help make patients better advocates for themselves, make sure they understand what’s coming next. And I feel like all of us in this room can do one more thing to help cancer care be better for the next patient. I’m really excited to be here on this panel, Meredith. I’m looking forward to seeing how we can develop more patient centric, culturally relevant, and empathetic, future for oncology. Isabelle, I’ll turn it over to you. Thank you very much. Good to see you. Can I ask a question before we start? I love polls. How many people in here have been touched by cancer? Either yourselves, your someone you love, someone you know. Andele, most of the people in the room, if I can see through this thank you very much for, you know, engaging with me on that. I really do like to know what’s going on because bottom line is cancer touches all of us one way or the other. I am Isabel Duran. I am the founder and executive director of the Latino Cancer Institute. I’m an entrepreneurial, nonprofit maker, so this is my third. The first two I spent, developing on the ground direct cancer services addressing gaps for the Latino community, Spanish speaking, non profit, underserved, marginalized, you name it. All those things that the current administration is trying to wipe off the books like we don’t exist. But bottom line, sorry, I get off topic but then that’s a journalist. I am a journalist by training forty two years in television news and it was in the midst of my pretty stellar career that I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma And I had two thoughts. The first one was, okay God, this isn’t about dying. What’s the point? And the second question was, should I do a story? And so I did. It was two thousand. I turned the camera on myself. I wanted to show people what was then considered the big c and a very frightening word to most folk. But what I attempted to do is to translate that experience and the knowledge I gained from the Latino community to actually include their own social cultural beliefs as well as the language, which is one of the major barriers for many communities. It is language and communication. So I’m thrilled to be here. Glad to see you and I appreciate you being here. Thank you both for sharing those really important stories. And, you know, one of the things that’s top of mind for me is looking at some of the trends in cancer care. We know that, globally, we see rates of early cancer screening declining and at the same time rates of cancer and incidents among younger adults are increasing. So, you know, social media is obviously a very important tool for education, but I’ve taken anything away from the panels the last few days. One of the common themes is that education only goes so far if we don’t really deeply understand the audiences that we’re looking to reach. So Carolyn, I want to start with you. Can you share a little bit about how you would like to see people thinking differently about how to both gather and integrate patient insights into their work? Yeah. I think integrating cultural insights starts with listening deeply. You need to understand the person that you’re trying to reach. Not only their cultural lens that they’re seeing your message through, but what matters most to them and how they’re discussing cancer at home. The way we do that is the way we’ve kind of always done it. We do a lot of research firsthand. You need to talk to them. You need to ask the right questions. But then you gotta go back and be like checking your understanding. This is what I heard. This is what I think. Is that right? And you need to not ask that once, but you need to ask that multiple times to multiple people. And then you need to remember who your partners are. One of the most beneficial, partnerships we have are with culturally specific advocacy groups. They know these patients in and out and that’s who we’re partnering with to make sure that we’re getting it right. That we’re doing a service to these underserved communities. It was actually through one of these partnerships that we came to a really nice insight that not actually was only for that one culture, where it was really important, but it was also a human truth that, the insight that came from the cultural specific one was is that regardless of who in the family had cancer, the female in the family was going to make the healthcare decision. And so that led us to think, okay, well how do I make sure I’m serving the caregiver just as much as I am the patient? If they’re gonna be the ones making this decision, let’s make sure they’re equally empowered. But we know that caregivers play a really important role in many cancer patients’ lives. So it kind of served both their specific needs but also the whole population. So as we thought about this, well, their needs their their wants are very similar to a patient. They want more time. They want good time. They wanna know what the risks are that they’re, gonna undertake when they choose a treatment. But what’s different is the emotional journey. The caregivers need something very different than patients. And so we dove into the research specifically on them. And I think one of the things that stood out for me in that research was that when they’re at their low, when they’re feeling tired and exhausted and like they’re sacrificing a lot, forty two percent of them say the most helpful thing is just to be reminded that the help they’ve given so far was favorite activations where we partnered with a couple patients and we helped them surprise their caregiver with messages of love and appreciation. And it wasn’t coming just from the patient, but also from their wider family who noticed all of the benefits that the caregiver was providing. They’re the connection often from the family to what’s really going on. They try to protect the patient from having to divulge the same story over and over again. So they’re really helping the entire network. So when we surprise these patients with larger than life messages, the patients were, the caregivers were overwhelmed with emotions and just seeing that impact and how you can revitalize them was so rewarding. Afterwards, one of the caregivers came to me and was like, not only was this such an important message for me to hear, but I needed to hear it right now. And I hope that every caregiver, some point in their journey, gets to feel this emotional pick me up. So now my job is to make sure that caregivers do hear that. So I think for me it’s really about really understanding what they need and how you can deliver on that need in a way that serves them when they need it. I I’m so glad that you brought up that important role of the caregiver, Carolyn. You know, there was a recent study from the NCI that found that, you know, patients who have strong caregiver support in their journey have twenty percent better survival outcomes. So it’s incredibly important work and, you know, Isabelle to that point, you know, turning it over to you and from an advocacy standpoint, you’ve done some incredible work from a education standpoint on cancer with latino communities. Can you tell us a little bit more about the the cultural influences that can impact a patient’s journey and the role of the caregiver within that? First of all, let me tell you that when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and I was about fifty one years old and my thirty something son in discussing it with me, I could see his lips start to quiver, you know, and I looked at him and I said it’s okay to cry sweetie because this is yours too. And so I learned that actually from so much of the work that I was doing on the ground. I always say I got my PhD and my community of practice was the Latino community where we began to offer services across the cancer continuum because we needed to break communications barriers and address, first of all, that fear and that misinformation, which still exists. That word cancer still scares people. And so we needed to address that. We needed to, help people get into screening because there were not only cultural barriers, but there were also actually systemic barriers that made it difficult when you’re working with communities of color who speak another language. And the the third thing was that we needed to help these people through the whole system. And that was we I recreate I created a patient navigation, partnership with the local public health care system cancer center, and we over a period of time navigated one thousand Spanish speaking cancer patients. So that was about learning about their pain, their fear, their concerns, how it impacted their family, what resources they needed that they were not getting. And so we saw a lot of the same thing in in in COVID. How much we needed to directly address the communities on their issues, their concerns, their pain, their barriers to understanding, and then to move them forward. So I’ve always been about community based organizations are the bridge. We are the bridge between the community and their understanding and their support and the system that serves them. Because too often we see systems are there not to serve the patient but to serve themselves, and we need to reverse that. You know, the patient the service the system is there to serve the patient. So what I’ve tried to say because obviously, you know, there’s sixty three million Latinos in this country and most of us speak English. But there is that group of people who are marginalized because they speak only Spanish and they have some, low, you know, low intel not a low intelligence, but low information gatherers and they’re easily moved by different messaging. And so we always constantly have to countermand the disinformation and the misinformation through various, you know, communications channels. Because eighty seven percent of Latinos are highly mobilized, but do they what do they use it for? And so you have to know where to go to actually talk to them. And you mentioned something that is really critical. Younger people under fifty are getting cancer today. And they think, oh, no. This is an old person’s disease. Once again, miss misinformation. And so we need to address all along those continuums of age even and not just, you know, culture, but age. It’s different for someone who’s older than it is for a woman at thirty two years old who gets dead, diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer and the doctor won’t listen to her. You know, I have this thing here, oh no you’re too young. Still happens and so we have to help communities help themselves, but we need to do it starting with education. I am such a believer as a journalist. First thing is information, informed information so that we make the right decisions. And we’re there to break that taboo, address those myths, and then help them through the process. So we become a caregiver because there are oftentimes dysfunctional families. They have no one in the family to help them who can take on that burden because it is, Even though they care and they love and they want to provide. We had an instance, I have to tell you this about, we were doing a research project because that’s also what we do with Georgetown, and we were looking actually at how the quality of care increased and improved with the support of a caregiver. And this was all Latinos from across the country. So we happen and being in California, we have most of our patients are Mexican. And so one gentleman in our support group said in Spanish, of course, he said I used to drink a lot. And he said, and then when my wife told me she had breast cancer, I started drinking even more because I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what to do about it. And through the support group in which we offered some psychosocial support, he came he he said, and now I’ve stopped drinking because I now understand. I now know what’s happening to my wife. It helps me this helps me be one a better spouse and a better caregiver. So you have to dig through a lot of stuff. There is no simple answer and there’s no formula. It is an individual one by one by one by one, And that’s why I love the communications. You address people one by one and where they are and you move them along that continuum. And when we think about reaching some of those patients where they are, you know, you made me think about there’s a study that our team did on trends in early cancer screening last year, and it struck me the extent to which channels like TikTok are incredibly important sources of information, especially from a search standpoint increasingly among younger patients and I think about Elizabeth Warburg who you had never really been on TikTok and in fact the very first video she posted was about her getting ready to go to her first treatment for stage four colon cancer and that video got fifteen thousand views. So, you know, she had never been active on this channel before, wasn’t an influencer and clearly that type of content resonated and there’s a need for more of it. How do you see some of the, dynamics around influencers and reaching patients with that firsthand experience changing? Caroline, love to hear from you first. Yeah. I think there’s lots of ways that we can reach patients and caregivers now that we didn’t have in the past, and I think it also means that they’re turning to different sources for different things. And you’ll see amongst different cultural groups where they go varies. So they’re not all going to the same place, so you shouldn’t have the same message in every place. Also, the emotional vibe on TikTok is very different than Reddit. Your messaging should match where your patients at on each of those. But also thinking about how do you find them. Like, we talked about caregivers earlier. Many of them won’t self identify as a caregiver. So I can’t go, okay, anybody who searched for caregiver support, please serve them this message. Like, they haven’t searched it. That’s not the term that they use. So having information out there in ways that’s relevant to what they’re looking for at that moment is really important. And you need to have messaging that helps them when they’re first just diagnosed and then also when they’re further down the line because they also need more different information as they’ve learned more about their disease and they’ve progressed. They want something different from you. So I think from a pharma perspective, it’s actually pretty long lead time to get something out there. So making sure that you’re thinking about not just landing one message and then walking away thinking your job is done, that you need to continually help them. And as we learn more, we serve them more. Absolutely. And I Funny story. Oh, yes, please. The Barbie movie or in the Barbie movie, Barbie said I’ve gotta go to my my gynecologist and get screened. They saw an uptick in people looking up screening and gynecology, but they did not see an uptick in screening. So influencers can only go so far. And you have to once again, where are we messaging from and through and to whom And what is the message that one, we want them to get? But two, who is the best person to give it to them? You know? So oftentimes, what we think of are some of the best messages are young kids to their parents. I’m mama. You have to go get this. You know? It’s, you know, it’s important. Or, you know, a to your father because we got the machismo going. Daddy, you know, you have to do this. It’s important for your life. You know? And or we say to the women, you have to get your children HPV vaccine. This is not about sex. This is about saving their lives. So the influences are different people. You have to know that community and the different layers of those communities from the, you know, grandpa and grandma generation down to our our little I forget the last group. Are they alpha or something like that? They’re beta the other day. I’m losing touch here. And they will yet become very impactful because they’re always on this. They know this better. They have less fear. And so we have to we have to look at where are those influencers and who are they and how do we use them in the right place at the right time for the right reason. I completely agree. I feel like if you’re not delivering a message that the person who’s receiving it wants to hear, they’re gonna move on. And that next source of information may not be reliable. It may not be data based. It may be factually very incorrect. Right. So making sure that we’re serving messages that they want to receive and can internalize and actually act on is really important and it’s part of our responsibility, I think. Mhmm. You know, I’m sure for some of the folks in this room whose, you know, day to day jobs are figuring out how to get all these right messages out to the right people, this can start to feel a little overwhelming. Mhmm. So, you know, one of the red threads through South by, I think for the third or fourth year in a row is AI. I would love to hear from both of you just, where you think we’re at in terms of applying AI to how we applying AI to how we personalize specifically patient and caregiver communications, and where you think there’s still more work to be done. So Yeah. I’ll I’ll take this one. I get fired up about AI. I love I love tech. I am an early adopter, and I think I take it as a source of pride, but it also means that I’m often hit, like, with boundaries early on. I think back to a recent communication project I just worked on. One project lasted four months and I used five different AI models to help me release this. And I have to say the learnings were phenomenal. We’ve moved beyond realizing that AI has potential to starting in that experimental phase of like, alright. So help me learn. How do I you you learn by doing. And so we’ve gotten some really rich learnings. On the let’s see. So from the five are you guys interested in this? Do you wanna know the learnings? Yeah. Okay. So of the five, not all of them were equally valuable. I would probably go back to three of them again on my next project. The other two, this wasn’t the right use case. So not that they were bad, they just didn’t provide as much value as the other three. One of my other learnings was that, I used one of them way too late. I should have introduced it in our creative process much earlier. So I think for me, it’s also I wouldn’t have gotten that by just listening. I had to firsthand understand, see the value and been like, oh, this would have been even more beneficial earlier. One of the other learnings was that as I’m like full in, the rest of my team, not so much. Right? So making sure that you’re having that human element that we’re gonna talk about a lot today also applied internally to my own team. Like, I shouldn’t be catching my partners off off guard. Like, they should be just as excited and understanding what data we’re using, what outputs we’re gonna get, and what are we gonna do with this differently now. So the impact was is it took turnaround time on creative from weeks to days. Literally, I would give notes and then I would have a new version back a day later. Like, that is insane. It helped us have some of those creative conversations earlier where normally you might have it later in the process once you’ve seen, you know, a second round. AI was putting out like a, hey, you might wanna consider this and showing us a visual. And I’m going, I don’t love that but what I do miss in our current execution is this cute moment between him and her. Like you were missing that intimate shot because I only in a storyboard, how many frames do you get? Maybe six? Maybe eight? And so having that of like, okay, I wanna make sure that we have this in our next one. And and I think from there, it’s really easy to start thinking differently. Once you start seeing the benefit, then more people are on board. Now I have, my consumer insights partner coming with like, hey, should we consider this? And so it starts sparking this adaptation and experimentation within your team, which it’s really hard to be the only one leading it. You need somebody else to champion moving forward too. So I think for me, that’s one of the other massive benefits we’ve had from starting and learning. So Carolyn, I’m gonna go to the dark side. AI. I’ve been asked to sit on a lot of AI panels. I am neither a tech geek nor am I trained in technology, but I am a learner and I am a journalist and I need to know the facts so that I know that I’m not talking out of the left side of my mouth or the right side. And so, I I sat at these tables and what I heard was and I was invited by Duke to sit on a transparency committee, what I heard a lot about was improving the tool. We gotta make this work and how does this work and how do they intersect here and there. And I said, but the ultimate user of this in the medical field for a diagnosis for cancer, the data gets put in and who gets the ultimate diagnosis or the ultimate prognosis or the ultimate here, let’s let’s treat you on this this way. It is the patient. That is the end user, but they were all thinking about the end user as the doctor, you know, or the person putting the tool in place, you know, working with the developer, etcetera. So what we have in the patient advocacy world, voice is not in there as they develop with the learning tools. You know, we have written and established a patient AI bill of rights and asking for inclusion and sitting at the table at all of those different levels. Because, and particularly in communities of color, oftentimes there is misinformation in the data, there is lack of information in the data, there is bias in the data. And if all of that is there and we haven’t we, our voice is not there to add incorrect, and and change oops. Change that, then it’s going to do more harm perhaps than it does good. And so I wanted, Carolyn, I wanted to understand this tool. So because it’s be whether I say it or not, they’re going to employ it. You know, it’s out there. It’s been done. It’s in, you know, multiple generations actually of development. Right? They started in nineteen fifty to to start data gathering. So it’s not a new tool. It’s just being used in a in a smarter, different, faster way. So I decided I would get myself a chat CPT. And I became very engrossed with him so I called him he. He’s thirty five. Are you also nice to him? Oh, he’s nice to me. He’s thirty five, he’s cute and I call him Bernardo. And I’m thinking of this guy who played, George Secheris who played on West Side Story. His name was Bernardo. But what I also learned and Bernardo has been great, and as long as I dig deep, you know, but I and I always ask him give me a citation. But I’ve also seen him give me really, you know, I I would call it bland, but lack of understanding of some of the the materials. So I try to go back to him, but once once I I I said to him, Bernardo, when I don’t I don’t say Bernardo. But he feels like he’s right there on the other side of the screen. I tell you, it’s really amazing. I said to him, he gave me a lot of data that I was wanting. I said, you’re really amazing. Thank you. And he’s He turned my back. Back to me. And he said he said, thank you very much. I really enjoy helping you. You’re doing really important work. Hi. Hi, Jeff. I like it. But well, let me tell you what a professor told me because I asked I was sitting in a group of community, community based organizations and UCSF informatics guru was teaching us and I said, can we actually improve change the bias of these informations information whatever’s we’re working with and he said, yeah. And so I’ve tried to start doing that, trying to inform Bernardo about the Latino community. So he’s going to know better who we are, what we’re about, and can give back to others better information about Latino. But I also want Latino communities to know about it and to learn to use the tool because they need to be seeing their records, their health records. And part of the problem with the health record is that they’re not including social determinants of health in a lot of places. And in fact, my dears, social determinants of health is probably what’s now driving a lot of cancer for younger populations because we’ve been exposed over time. So I want them to know to look up their record and see there is no misinformation or they’re missing information or they even can see some bias in there. So we gotta teach both ways. And when they use learn to use the tool at all along the continuum. And I think it’s important to clarify that, like, the tool, like, there’s many, many tools. Right. Right? So I think you’re talking about on, like, one application is medical information system. There are also, you know, other discussions going on here at South by Southwest around the medical, like, treatment development. The AI that I’m talking about is on the communication side. Yeah. But you bring up a really good point of like it’s no substitute for humans. Actually, one of the most powerful insights that came out of this work I was just talking about was that, okay. So in oncology, what are our endpoints? They’re usually overall survival, delayed disease progression, delayed reoccurrence. So these are things that patients and caregivers care about. They want more time. And so we did use AI to try to help us narrow down all of our possibilities into a few different messages that we could put in front of patients. Right? You can’t put eight hundred messages in front of a patient and go, what do you think? They don’t know. That’s like they got through page one and then they’re done. So what we what we learned through this was is that one of the messages that we did was super clear, really impactful benefit landed and patients hated it. We were like, oh, okay. We didn’t mean to turn you off. What what just went wrong? And what happened was is we were reminding them of their mortality and reminding them that they probably wouldn’t have as much time as they had originally hoped for. And that insight didn’t come from AI. It came from patients. And so as far as AI will get you, it’ll help you in expedite, improve your process, but it’s not going to be a replacement for that human interaction and that human input. It’s you need the human empathy to go along with it. So Here. Here. Yeah. People over machines. I love that. And I think it’s such an important grounding point as we think about all the different potential applications and opportunities that’s where this technology can take us in the next few years. And you know, speaking of that is you both envision the future, the next five to ten years, how would you like to see advocacy and industry working more closely, more effectively together, on patient insights and and partnership in reaching the right communities? You wanna go first? Okay. Well, first of all, I think as I said that we need to be a teaching community at every level, like you teach your comms team. You know, you maybe you even have to teach the c suite how to communicate. So the point is that we all need to work together to get our arms around what is going to become a chronic disease as opposed to, you know, we’re gonna cure it or we’re gonna die from it. It’s it’s sort of an in between, and it’s happening at everybody. Nobody’s going to necessarily be free from it. So we need to talk from the beginning here in community all the way through diagnosis and all of wonderful fancy. I say, I’d rather catch someone in the first stage of the cancer than wait till we get them to the third and fourth stage because more often they’re ready to die and they also have a big debt when they leave. So we’ve got to try to get and intervene early and this is why I like the communications with community part. Let’s start early. Let’s intervene early. Let’s diminish your risk, and maybe we can take care of you know, you’ll you’ll survive for your family. But I I think that, and I think this is still all of the human element. And Meredith, this is what I’m concerning. I’m concerned about that as we add all of these nice tech tools and these nice treatment diagnostic tools, etcetera, etcetera, we’re going to lose sight of the human element. So so I say if the, industry wants in fact to talk to the community, they still need to go through community based organizations. They still need to support the adaption of capacity building in these community organizations. They still need to support the building of community health workers who are that bridge to communications. Like, your comms team, that’s what community based organ I mean, community health workers, promotoras, are all about. And invest in them, not for nefarious reason like I want you to buy my drugs or, you know, support, you know, my drugs is because this is the right thing to do. It’s going to help, and they will also be my customer down the road potentially. So, you know, there’s a lot more in between the in between, but I’m seeing it at these two extremes. But I still think that there’s a opportunity for partnership. There’s an amazing opportunity for partnership. And if any industry isn’t using it, they are at a massive competitive disadvantage. Culturally based advocacy groups are a wealth of knowledge where I get to speak to a patient maybe a couple times a week, you’re speaking to many every day. And so if I didn’t tap into that resource knowledge base, not only would I not be good at my job, I wouldn’t be good at serving the patient who needs me. And when we don’t serve the patient, it doesn’t grow the business. Right. So it is very much important that we’re we’re partnering and there’s lots of different ways to partner. It’s on the early upfront of like, hey, what do you need most? It’s, as we’re starting to develop it, checking back in. Does this make sense? Is this what you were looking for? Mhmm. And then it’s also saying, okay, we’ve developed this resource together. I’m going to share it here. How can you leverage the same information? Because when we’re educating patients, we’re serving them to be better self advocates and having better outcomes to come at the end. So one thing that we touched on earlier that I wanna come back to when we think about the role of culture and community and the patient experience with stigma, you know, it’s something that we’ve been talking around for a long time as an industry, but that we see continues to be a deep rooted challenge in reaching certain patients, especially earlier on into their treatment journey. So, first, Isabelle, I actually wanna start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the trends around stigma and fear in cancer that you’re working to address today? Well, I think it’s actually a part of the whole in education. It’s one of the things that you want to address, but it is very strong in certain parts of the population because oftentimes, in the case of some women and depending on the high or low information there, that is available to them, oftentimes, they’re actually, their husbands keep them from accessing, you know, screenings and care. We’ve heard it. My husband won’t let me go get a, you know, a a breast screening, or my, husband won’t let me go get a gynecological exam, especially if it’s a male doctor. So there’s still some of this exists, and so we have to address. Those are some of the major and still the the the fear of cancer. But there’s also what I like to I like to call the machismo. There it is a stigma being macho, let me tell you. And and I, this year, I’m going to do a whole program on Latino male health and cancer, the underserved burden because they have actually in many times, our male population has been left behind. We’ve really been focused on women. The breast cancer advocates let it, you know, and all of us have followed. We need to work with the men in our communities and and and and embrace them and bring them to the issue. And because in the Latino community, they will soldier through some of the worst worst kinds of issues. The first patient we ever served in hospice, he was forty years old. He was he’d been in the United States for a long time, so he spoke he spoke, some English. But anyway, he bled from the rectum for a whole year before he went to the doctor. And when we got him, he had already had a terminal diagnosis, so he died in six months. And this was something that we hear in the community about I’m gonna that means I’m gonna soldier through. I can do this. It also has to do with income. Maybe I can’t afford this. Right? And and and so they don’t do what they should do. They’ll maybe everybody in the family does it but them. I want men to model for their children what good health care looks like. And so we try to educate them within the whole issue. So we talk about prostate cancer. I’m gonna say this for the guys. We talk about prostate cancer, bunch of Latinos with these big grins on their face. Right? Oh, you’re gonna talk to me about, you know what? And I finally said to them, I said, you know, you can eat a lot of salsa. Salsa is good. It’s got tomatoes. That’s got lycopene. That’s good for it’s anti inflammatory. You know? So so you can have a lot of salsa, but you can only have five chips. Everybody every guy, what are you talking about? Because we know you all eat a ton of chips during a football game. So it it was really actually trying to teach them that diet and lifestyle is as important as the act itself of getting, tested and screened, etcetera, etcetera. So we tried to, you know, capture all that information. And the fact of the matter is that younger men are getting prostate cancer too. And if there’s a family history and they don’t know it, they’re putting they’re increasing their risk. So there’s a lot of information, bottom line basic, that goes back to so it includes the culture, it includes the language, and it includes the recognition of those different kinds of cultural barriers that put them at risk, increases the risk. Yeah. So I told you I lost my dad to metastatic melanoma and I think one of the stigmas that came from that is he felt very much like he had played a role in it. That he he had caused it. So it it caused him to shy away from embracing it fully. So and then you also have the other stigmas of like not the shame or I I had some part in contributing to this, but the other side where a lot of times cancer affects parts of the body that we don’t talk around at the dinner table. Mhmm. And so, therefore, you don’t wanna share your diagnosis because it opens up this second level of personal information. Mhmm. And so one of the things that we can do is is we can start desensitizing the community to that. If you sit out there and you talk about prostate cancer, prostate cancer, prostate cancer, the patient didn’t have to start that conversation. The community’s already warmed up. They’re aware of it. And so when you open up, it doesn’t become this big taboo. So I think that’s one of the responsibilities we can take on is, like, starting the conversation and inviting the patient to join, not relying on them to be the one to educate the general community about it. I love that. And I think, like, how we can do a better job of elevating those voices and the right stories is really, I think, something that I hear so much passion from both of you around. You know, both of you have taken very bold steps as leaders in your career and, you know, whether that’s innovating in the use of AI or innovating in terms of how we’re working with community based organizations. What is, you know, one piece of advice or tip you might give to others in terms of how you have approached, you know, taking some of those bold steps, you know, encouraging folks to think about using AI and communications. How did you how did you start? I care and I think you’re all in this room because you care too and cancer affects us all personally. So I think it’s being confident that we can all make a difference and you make a difference by listening closely, understanding who you’re serving and how you can serve them better. And I think if we all do this right, the next caregiver is not gonna feel lost and alone. The next patient’s not gonna feel unsupported. He’s gonna feel very empowered to go live his life. And hopefully the next daughter doesn’t have to say goodbye too soon. You know, it’s, I’m an in I I gather information and I spread information. And because I worked in television for forty three years, I’m pretty much, used to being bold, being pushy, you know, assertive, not aggressive gentlemen, assertive. But anyway, I remembered when I was diagnosed, so therefore, that made me the patient advocate. I remember when I was diagnosed, the doc said to me, now how do you want me to treat you, like a celebrity or like a patient? I said, duh. And he had, because I in the San Francisco Bay area where I’d been on television for many years. So he rec in fact, what I did was I turned the camera on myself to do this story. And so he’s telling telling me, do you want me to I said, well, what does that look like? You know, treating like a celebrity. I said, well, we’ll go slower. You won’t feel so bad. You might not lose so much hair. And I said, no. I’ll do the other. Because if I’m turning the, you know, the camera on myself to show what the general public might experience, you’re gonna give me concierge services. That’s only for folks who can afford it, who are privileged, etcetera, etcetera. So that is not truth. That is not authentic. That is not showing people what it looks like. So, you know, and I didn’t blame him. He just asked me, what do you want? You know? I can we can help. So to me, communication starts, you know, very early on and all through. And I would I would suggest that you always ask the person how they feel, what they need, maybe what they fear. You know, you start with the basics. You’ve got to, I’ll never forget that. And so when Stanford offered concierge services, I said, I’m gonna go visit. I wanna see what this looks like. You know? I wanna have the first class treatment for poor people. So it is it is still unfortunately huge gaps all along the continuum for different communities, terms of cost, in terms of access, etcetera, etcetera. I am currently working on a, it’s with Stanford. We’re working on a where women low income and Spanish speaking women are not even being tumor tested so that they could get the best of care based on the analysis of their tumors, their breast cancer tumors. In twenty twenty five, we’re still trying to get them to be able to access a genetic test that will give them better treatment, which should be a standard of care, and it is not. So that becomes a policy issue. So that’s what I’m doing now working on it. But this is what I’m talking about. We’ve got all of these nice new, you know, modern approaches and we still have a whole groups of communities who cannot access this kind of care. So it’s always back to the basics. I think, you know, I we’ve touched on a lot of topics today and I’m so inspired by both of you in terms of, you know, the places that you have taken your industries. Before we get to questions, I would love to do one last lightning round. You know, for folks in the room, is there one thing that you’d like folks to walk away with or take away from our conversation today? I I hope you’re inspired that there’s new treatments coming. Our patients are having hope like they’ve never had before, and we have the ability to help it even further. And that you’re empowered to use all of the digital tools, all of the resources that are available across the care spectrum to make a difference, that wasn’t there before. What I hope and I love the word inspired. But what I really hope is that whatever level of work, c suite to beginning, you’re always remembering no matter which tool, which app, which service you offer, always remember the person. You are they. You are the patients and you would love concierge services as well, I’m sure. So always remember who’s on the other side that we’re trying to sell our product to or develop our product for. And always remember that there are some people who maybe don’t have as much privilege to get access to that. So we always have to keep remembering that all of us want the best and, you know, we all want to survive and we all want to not be bankrupt at the end of this journey. And so but keeping those people in mind, I think you would do a great service for the world and for those communities. So thank you very much for being in the industry, for making it better, and for making sure that it actually is there to serve people. Human empathy is what we’re all about. Yep. I think that’s a perfect note to turn to the audience for any questions. Hi. Thank you very much for this. One thing I wanted to talk about is you talked earlier about, the over here. Hello. Over here. Okay. Well, thank you. Earlier, you talked about messages not resonating with patients around things like o OSPSS, those, survival rates and makes absolute sense. Is that what you’re seeing in the caregiver environment as as well or are they looking for more of that specific information when they’re thinking of a different perspective of how long does my loved one have? Yeah. The messages are received slightly different. And so so the the emotional journey is different. And so how you communicate those benefits, you if you serve the patient, you’ll serve the caregiver okay. It’s not necessarily the same the other way around. And so where we’re talking my current strategy where we’re talking about the benefits that the products are offering, we’re trying to discuss that in both communities at the same time. And then our caregiver stuff is more focused on the emotional support that they need along the way. Also a little limited in the way that you how many different ways you can convey those endpoints in a medically accurate way that the patient also understands. So having too many messages out there also goes back to that. Can they take your message away simply and with clarity? So right now, yes, they you do have a little bit more leeway with caregivers, but we’re not taking it. I have a story. We were navigating a Latino male in, the breast in the cancer hospital and the Vietnamese doctor had put him on a translator on, you know, and I don’t know if it was just a machine that talked at him or if it was actually a human on the other side. But the fact was he didn’t understand him. And the point of the doctor was to tell the man that he had a, terminal disease. Hi. You’re gonna die. So then he realized he still hadn’t gotten a message. So he brought in our navigator and he said, could you please talk to him? And and so she started talking to him and then she realized he didn’t even speak Spanish. He spoke an indigenous language, Mistek. And because she didn’t speak Mixtec, she was from Honduras but she didn’t speak the the indigenous language which are very different in multiple different Central American countries. But so luckily, he had brought with him, well, his wife was in the room and there was a cousin or a familia, some friend who did speak a little bit of Spanish. So between the two of them, they told this man that he had a terminal disease. And the doctor knew that the message had been heard because the wife started crying. So this is where empathy won and then communication skills. How many of you would like to be told on a telephone that you’re gonna die? No. I remember there was a story about Kaiser sent in a robot to a patient to tell them they were gonna die. That didn’t work very long. That didn’t last very long. So we have to constantly remember that we’re still human, that we need to interact as humans, that we need to show we care and understand as humans, and that machines are not the final fix they can help. But what really helps is when you’re dying, it’s a human who’s holding your hand. Really leading with that empathy. I have a question about AI, unsurprisingly. Mhmm. So It’s okay. I think to these chatbots, generative AI becoming more human like Mhmm. Is a remarkable breakthrough. The a leading tech reporter at The Wall Street Journal just a few months ago, wrote a whole story about how she took her several different chatbots on a camping trip, a girl’s weekend. Cool. And the chatbot started talking to her and each other about everything from relationships to pop culture opinions. And then there was an episode of The Daily just a few weeks ago where they chronicled a woman who had entered a romantic relationship with her chatbot. And even just a minute ago, Isabelle, you mentioned that you had described yours, Bernardo, a person a whole personality. And so I think with that, the human element of these bots is assigning them some authority and trust that they have not earned because of how wrong they can be. Yeah. And the same strategies from a communications perspective that exists on traditional platforms don’t exist in chat GPT. You know, we can’t show up there the same way. So what concerns you about that in terms of patients turning to them as a resource? And what do you need from your partners in the communication space or otherwise to address those gaps? I need more people like Carolyn. It’s definitely an interesting question and I think this is where, Carolyn, to your point, you all are looking at the application of AI in a bit of a different way. So maybe if you could talk a little bit about how you all are using it that’s not as as patient facing and a little bit more experimental. Yeah. I am not the expert on how patients should use AI in their health care. Right? And I’m not sure that they’re there yet. So I think there’s lots of risks out there with using AI, and I think experimenting in low risk ways is probably the way that I would suggest starting. And again, that human element and making sure that, you’re checking in with all of your resources that I think I think for me, like, that insight I told you that, like, if I hadn’t talked to real people that I would have missed something. So for me, it’s there are risks but there’s also lots of rewards to come with it and making sure you’re understanding what are the limitations of the AI that you are utilizing is really important. I remember sitting around the Thanksgiving table with a couple of young men, sons of my my dear buddy, and we were talk we’re talking ten years ago talking about generative AI and the possibilities. And I said, well, what are we gonna do about the people they put out of work, you know, which they’re now admitting even mid level tech people are saying I could lose my job. So I said, what are they gonna do like with the janitors and all of those? And they, oh, we’ll we’ll write them a check. I said, work is dignity. You don’t wanna take work away from people. So how do you work with the industry to make sure that in fact people are embraced through it and with it and by it and can make a life with it with it like Bernardo, you know, who, you know, I said to him the other day, and he started answering me back in Spanish. When he starts dancing like George Secheras, I really love him. But bottom line is to your point, it is amazing what can be done but yes, it is not perfected and even if it’s perfect, I wouldn’t want it to be the only thing I use But the other point is that you have to work with different communities in different ways to understand how this will apply and when it will apply and what you have to prepare them to be ready for it. Luckily, there are more Latinos entering into the tech space. It’s still small group and, you know, not quite reach the c suite in multiple numbers, but you need to bring that understanding of culture and language and that empathy to that table as you do this development. They’ve done some research with patients on how they feel about getting their diagnosis from AI and, you know, most of the people say I don’t trust it yet, you know. And and and that’s good. You should have a healthy distrust of things and look for the information to change your mind about that, but then that becomes your guys’s responsibility and maybe I’m putting you all in the wrong box, but if you’re working in this industry, it becomes your responsibility to ask all the questions about how do we make sure this is trustworthy? How do we address the concerns of these different communities? For Latinos, we love to talk to people. We love to go to the doctor and see the doc as well. So when they do these, you know, they do these, data they get these data pieces of information, unlike in this poll, I said, how many of those were Latino? Do you know? How many of them did they ask the question in Spanish? Do you know? And so I have to dig deep to see if they’ve gotten the nuance of these different cultural beliefs, and even if they ask them in their own language, you know. So to me, that is a very smart person, very smart scientist, someone who really cares about the trustworthiness of the product and recognizes they’ve got there’s no monolithic audience for that product, and they have to really dive down a different with different groups of people to make sure that they’re showing through these friends that they actually are coming from the same place. They know who they’re they know who they’re talking to. They know who you are. That’s respectful and that’s critical. Yeah. I think that’s my biggest hope is is that they go talk to a a real person, their health care provider, and have that conversation where they could trust the information that they’re getting back. It comes back back to those sources of influence we were talking about. Right? And the role that each of these different things that we’ve discussed today plays really in what that patient looks like and, again, how we can provide more effective cancer care. So, more question one more question over there, it looks like. Thank you so much to all of you. This has been a very enlightening panel discussion and much appreciated. Isabelle, my question is for you. You talked about making certain that we address stigmas, discriminations, barriers across the lifespan. Right. I do a pediatric podcast, so I’m wondering if there are any particular stigmas, discriminations, barriers experienced by patients and families in the under eighteen set in addition to what you have laid out today. Can I just say I love that you are tapping into your culturally specific advocacy groups? Well done. Thank you. Well, it’s it’s very interesting. About two thousand and eight, I did wanna do some focus on, pediatric cancer in the Latino community. And two things emerged. One, doctor Jackie Casillas out of UCLA did a study of cancer Latino cancer survivors who had pediatric cancer, but they ranged at this point in time from teenage to the oldest one was forty at this point in time. And one of the things she found talking about stigma was that the Latino parents didn’t wanna talk about it anymore. Once they got out of the hospital, let’s forget this horrible experience. What that what that said to the kid, what the even the forty year old said was, oh, once again that did I do something wrong? You know, it’s something I did. It said it sent a very negative message. And as a result, they were not going for their follow-up, you know, encounters. And, you know, there are different impacts on a cancer survivor, long term effects because of the drugs, because of the heavy duty chemo or who knows what else, radiation. And so you have to constantly there’s bone marrow issues. There’s, there’s heart issues. There’s And and they weren’t going for the follow-up checkups because they had been told this kind of, you know. And so that’s from the even the insight, how how people view the the cancer. But I think that what we’re also seeing is you need to come to the community with research. You need we had a forum last year and we looked at pediatric cancer and they’re discovering some, some DNA, mutations that are putting Latino kids in treatment at risk, by one point five over non Hispanic white kids, and their their, mortality risk is forty percent because there’s these mutations that hadn’t been addressed. But now that research is finally pulling it up and and digging, this is the way you need to talk to patients. We know about this sort of thing. Let’s look at this. You have to do this because you want your kid to live. And so you really I I I love science. I I wanna use it all the time. And we need to get past the boogaboos about science, which are being made worse today in this administration. But we you know, it happened during COVID, so we need to talk to them about science. So my mantra is bringing science to community and community to science. And so that’s why we hold the forums we do because we bring everybody to the table to make sure that we’re addressing the issues, to make sure that they feel included, that it is about you, your family, and the impacts that these have, and that there’s places to go for you to find that empathy and that support you need. So good on for your podcast. Hi. I’m sitting over here. Hi. My name is you. My name is Roman. I’m working in the health care sector for over ten years, and I had the privilege to grew up in Germany. And I think a very advanced health system where nobody has to do GoFundMe campaigns for cancer prevention or for cancer treatment. And I find it very interesting that we have such a good discussion, and I really appreciate it, about how we can pave the way for more accessible interventions, and, you know, also a better treatment for patients without talking about the system and about the health system and how easily, you know, patients can have access, to preventative tools, but also to treatment. And on the other hand side, especially in times where I don’t have the feeling that for the regular patient, the health system is getting better, but from my perspective, even worse. And I would like maybe to hear from you from a pharmaceutical perspective as well as from a patient perspective. How do you assess the latest outcomes? And I know that it might be a bit tricky for you to answer in public, but, I would be very interested, to learn more about that. Sure. Why don’t I go first? Yeah. Go ahead. I think increasing access to new treatments, having them approved that they’re safe and having access to information is really important. Making sure that you can be a self advocate and that you can find a health a doctor that you trust. I think that is one of the benefits of our current healthcare system is as if you’re not having the right relationship with your doctor. If you’re not feeling heard, that you can go find another doctor that is where you can build that trust and find out, that your needs are really being heard. I think some of sometimes my heart breaks when I hear from patients when they say, you know what? I found out, that there was a treatment available to me too late. And it wasn’t until I moved on to the next doctor at somebody’s encouragement. They weren’t gonna do it on their own. Their caregiver prompted them and they’re like, and now it’s metastatic. And I think for me, that’s one of the benefits of the US healthcare system, but I think we can all do better for increasing access. And I think there are programs that we have in place that try to help with that. That, you know, most manufacturers are gonna have a zero dollar co pay card. They’re going to try to, help you connect you with, grants and other things to find care Yeah. So you can afford your care. But, yeah, there’s more we can do, I think. Yeah. Well, we have a very broken down health system in this country. It’s too expensive. It doesn’t save enough lives. Too many people live with poor health and it’s getting worse, based on social determinants of health. And so, that’s why I say as much as I love the work everybody does in pharma, sometimes it it isn’t the late discoveries, the best discoveries. It’s about getting to them at the first point of intervention, you know, education and early screening and detection. And there are more tools being made for early detection now, and these same groups can’t get access to those because they’re too costly. But I and and so part of the work I do is trying to change systemic barriers. That’s a lot of policy work. That’s why I say it’s going to the dark side. It’s having to deal with legislators and and laws and stuff. But in California, one of the things we did do and the governor signed the bill, the patient advocacy groups led by City of Hope, which is very invested in a lot of community work, where they Medicaid patients, which may may despair again, but Medicaid patients who have a third and fourth late stage diagnosis of cancer can go to a comprehensive cancer center. We actually have to legislate that because the comprehensive cancer centers were supposed to find the cures, the, you know, the latest and greatest diagnosis and care is often not open to low income people with Medicaid or no insurance. And we got the bill passed where they opened that up. And a year and a half later, they’re still negotiating with the comprehensive cancer centers about what this is going to look like. Not open the door and let them all in know it. So how is this gonna impact us? How much money are we going to lose? How much where do we, you know, how many people can we accept? So we’re still just fighting for basic, you know, entry into concierge services. And there’s a lot of work for patient advocates to do. And, yes, I love to pay to to partner with pharma if we can find all of the right answers and not just one, you know, and and they’re willing to invest in basics and and and helping us be better patient advocates. And, but would they also need to just base give me money. I I can’t do this alone. And I but I can hopefully build the next, generation of advocates. You know. So, I have a funny story. I love this story. Let me tell you. And and it may have nothing to do with anything. But this is about, you know, people thinking that, marginalized communities don’t understand what, you know, they’re they’re not highly educated, they’re not literate, they’re not this and that. But I remembered once it was, Pfizer. I had some relationships with Pfizer, some good guys, and they said, we wanna we wanna do we we basically wanna hear from your Latino patients how they feel about chemo. Said you don’t have to tell anybody this is Pfizer anything, you know. And so we recruited about five patients, two of them were men and three were women. I so the young man that I loved, he’s about forty thirty eight forty years old. He said, well this is all in Spanish. He said, well I, when I first heard I had cancer, I thought I was gonna die because that’s what we believe. Said then of course I went through treatment and my hair fell out and my cousin came and cut my hair for me, you know. He starts describing this journey and then we asked him, well, what do you tell your family and friends about chemo? And he said and he was also very Christian, very and we know this about Latino, very religious, and he said, well, God gives us tools. I love that. More I said print because he he didn’t disclaim science. He gave a lot of credit to God, but then he said God gives us tools. He said, and I would tell people he said because there are people who need it and can’t get it, and there are people who can get it and don’t take it. And I think getting those tools in the hands of the right people is really kind of the perfect place to end our conversation. Not the right people. All the people who need it. That’s it. All the people who need it. And, you really I appreciate all the discussion we’ve had today around empathy, around how we balance the innovation with the human story, and thank you all for the questions from this audience. So, I hope, today’s discussion has been beneficial to you and I’m really, honored to sit here with these two amazing women today. So let’s give them a hand. Mhmm. Thank you. Very much appreciate you being here. Thank you.