Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Matthew Sappern, CEO of PeriGen (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the healthcare space, where are some of the other areas where you see the possibilities of this kind of pattern recognition and interventions based on pattern recognition?

Matthew Sappern: There are so many. Take the ICU for instance. You walk into an ICU. A typical patient has multiple telemetry devices hooked up. You’ve got nurses who are trying to manage all of that for each patient. There’s no normalization of that data. These are areas where if you were able to take tools like PeriGen and apply it to that service line, you could probably figure out how you can manage some of those ICU patients. Why that’s important is because the nurse to patient ratio is a bit less in a step-down unit.

It’s certainly more affordable for hospitals to manage that. It’s a more economic approach to managing healthcare that is ultimately made possible by the fact that these machines are helping nurses manage care in a reasonable fashion. Another trend that you’re seeing all over the place is healthcare at home. If you read up on the CEO of Kaiser, he mentioned that the future of healthcare is in the home. Picture a home that is chock full of telemetry devices whether it’s elder care or NICU babies coming home early.

Imagine a world where instead of going and talking to your physicians, there is a device that monitors key factors all the time. You look at companies like Livongo. They’re doing some remarkable things in terms of closed-loop diabetic management which is about not only having monitoring tools and telemetry devices but also trying to help the patient care for themselves at the same time instead of sending tons of data off to a physician. It’s sifting through data.

These are areas where I think there’s a tremendous amount of upside for entrepreneurs and for folks who are developing new technologies. There is no doubt that healthcare is moving further and further away from the physical plans of the hospital. Whatever can be done to create a series of tools and wearables and software to interpret data, there is a tremendous upside in that.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a player on your radar that’s addressing the ICU use case? It’s a very compelling use case.

Matthew Sappern: Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone that’s doing a great job at that. Qualcomm has built some infrastructure to allow that. We’ve got a commercial agreement with Qualcomm Life where they sell some of our technologies as well. As I look at companies that have the plumbing in place in an in-patient facility and to take information directly from the medical device and run some analytics against it, I would say Qualcomm Life’s acquisition of Capsule is the leader in having that ability.

They’re just starting to develop some of the analytical sides of this. There’s the data generation side and then there’s the data interpretation side. They have the ability to take information from medical devices. Now it’s a question of if they can cost-efficiently bring to market tools to help analyze that data in real-time. I am hopeful they will. If they don’t, somebody else will. I would say that they have a leg up by the fact that they have data passing all of their wires.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Matthew Sappern, CEO of PeriGen
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