In this episode of the IoT For All Podcast, Ryan Chacon is joined by KORE’s Executive Vice President, Bryan Lubel, to talk about the connected health market. Bryan begins by talking about his background and how he joined the team at KORE. He then discusses the current connected health market landscape and how IoT fits into the space. Bryan then talks about the challenges in the industry and the ways IoT is solving these challenges. To wrap up the podcast, Bryan gives advice to people and companies looking to adopt IoT in the healthcare space.

About Bryan

Bryan is the Executive Vice President of Connected Health at KORE. KORE Connected Health connects customers with the design, management, and growth of their IoT connected health solutions. Before joining the KORE team, he served as president of Integron for 12 years. Bryan previously served as President & CEO for a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corp. He has 30+ years of general management, sales, marketing, and system design experience. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems from the State University of New York. He has studied at Ohio State University and Laval University in Québec City, Canada.

Interested in connecting with Bryan? Reach out on Linkedin!

About KORE

Founded in 2022, KORE is a pioneer, leader, and trusted advisor delivering mission-critical IoT solutions and services. We empower organizations of all sizes to improve operational and business results by simplifying the complexity of IoT. Our deep IoT knowledge and experience, global reach, purpose-built solutions, and deployment agility accelerate and materially impact our customers' business outcomes. 

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(1:23) Introduction to Bryan and KORE

(3:44) Connected health market landscape

(10:22) How IoT fits into the health care space

(13:42) Challenges in the industry and IoT use cases

(17:37) Advice for adopters

Transcript:

- [Narrator] You are listening to the IoT for All Media Network.

- [Ryan] Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the IoT for All Podcast, the number one publication and resource for the Internet of things. I'm your host, Ryan Chacon. On today's episode we have Bryan Lubel, the executive vice president of Connected Health at KORE. For those of you who are not familiar with KORE, they are a pioneer leader and trusted advisor delivering mission critical IoT solutions and services. On today's episode, we talk a lot about the connected health market for IoT, the current landscape, how IoT fits in when it comes to healthcare organizations, health businesses, hospitals, and so forth. What does IoT enable, challenges in the connected health space, what are people really struggling with, and how to really approach adoption. One other thing I wanted to mention is if you are watching this on YouTube please give this video a thumbs up and subscribe if you've not done so already. If you're listening to this on a podcast directory somewhere else, please subscribe so you get the latest episodes as soon as they are out. But other than that I think we'll get a lot of value out of this episode. But before we get into it, if you out there are looking to enter the fast growing and profitable IoT market but don't know where to start, check out our sponsor Leverege. Leverege's IoT solutions development platform provides everything you need to create turnkey IoT products that you can white label and resell under your own brand. To learn more, go to iotchangeseverything.com. That's iotchangeseverything.com. And without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT for All Podcast. Welcome Brian to the IoT for All Podcast. Thanks for being here this week.

- [Bryan] Well, thanks for having me, Ryan. I include KORE and the connected health topic in your podcast.

- [Ryan] Yeah, it's great to have you. Let's go ahead and have you give a quick introduction about yourself and KORE to, to our audience.

- [Bryan] Sure. Why don't is the largest independent IoT enablement company in the world providing cellular connectivity in both private and customers across a wide variety of mobile network operators around the world. And it has been rapidly expanding its capabilities to support customers who want ology and IT to enable their products and services by providing by providing pre-bundled solutions that help them quickly adopt and scale economically. My background really quick is I was president of a company called Integron for 14 years. Integron is based in Rochester, New York and was a IoT managed services company with a really heavy and sciences space. And KORE acquired my company back and so for the first year I spent a lot of focus on energy integrating, and then starting in 2021, we built a very healthcare and life sciences practice we call Connected Health at KORE. And that's the organization that I run for KORE.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. And that was, so Integron was, Landon was over there with you, correct?

- [Bryan] Absolutely. My CMO at Integron and he came he came to the, with the acquisition.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. Yeah, I've known Landon for a number of years. I think we met him back in 2000, like, 16 with like John Horn and all those guys.

- [Bryan] Oh yeah.

- [Ryan] So yeah, we've stayed in touch and done some good stuff together.

- [Bryan] He's, he is wired in, in one of the, he's probably one of the, the most versatile in the IoT space today. He's very knowledgeable and very well connected in the market.

- [Ryan] Yeah, he's great. Alright, so we kinda got the introduction outta the way which is good. I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about, so obviously we're focusing here on Connected Health Market for a good bit. Can you just tell us, from your perspective, what the Connected Health Market looks like currently? Like what does the landscape currently look like and then we'll kind of dive in from there.

- [Bryan] Sure. So, so let's take a step. There's, there's thousands of industry sub sectors and use, and obviously we can't address all of those today but if we look at some big trends and what's have look at the connected health space in two major segments we look at the healthcare space, let's start with the healthcare space. You know, obviously the pandemic connected and growing and then the pandemic just made that acceleration go, you know, and if you look at, you know, some of the enablers that Connect Health brings that it gives the opportunity engagement it gives the opportunity for the care delivery teams to engage with patients and model necessarily having to have those patients come physically in to the clinic or to the doctor and potentially, you know, in the middle of the pandemic, that was a huge risk, a huge exposure for not only the healthcare, you may have patients with diabetes or patients with congestive heart failure that as soon as they started getting exposed to COVID, could really lead to the and accelerate the risk of, you know, really bad, really bad outcomes for them.

- [Ryan] That's right.

- [Bryan] So the pandemic, we were already on a, a really, you know, focus track to to look at some things that we're focusing on are chronic disease management, right? So if you look at chronic disease manage number, in the United States alone, we spend over $300 billion. If you look at the population, the aging populate 60% of the aging population has one chronic disease state and another 40% has a second comorbidity state. So you have people that have, for example, diabetes or diabetes and, you know, another chronic disease. And coming affordable, economical and scalable ways to monitor patients and improve outcomes, helping, giving them tools to manage those diseases more effective, interact with their care team without necessarily have to go to the hospital without having to go into the emergency room. That's a huge enabler to do two really big things. You know, the two big space are improving patient outcomes and improving their lives and their lifestyle, that's the most important, in a way that's affordable and doesn't bankrupt, you know, the patient, the insurance companies, and, you know, and the overall, you know, the overall economic model. And so that's been a real do that. The second element or the second segment of the connected hunt is life sciences. And so the rapid adoption of technology and IoT, and particularly phase three of clinical trials, has been growing very, very fast. So it happened in 2017 there were 275,000 registered in the world and less than 3% of them were IoT enabled or enabled with some form of capture. In 2021, there was over 600,000 double that. And we're starting to see 10%, 12% of those clinical trials become now we're expecting 30% to 40% of clinical trials to be enabled in the coming two to three year. Happening there is a couple of things. First of all, let's, let's use a real life example. During COVID, contract research organizations and pharma sponsors use the traditional to validate and confirm the efficacy and the safety of that. Just be seeing vaccines come onto the market about now, it would've taken two and a half to three, millions of additional people would've died as a result of that. As a result of EDC, electronic data cap being able to capture data real time and validate it with the protocol of the trial taking place, it really accelerated the outcome of that trial. And while it came still under what we would characterize as emergency use status, market safely we had good data on them. And that saved just an enormous number happen that way. The other piece that's happening, and, and COVID, this is another example of quickly is we went from this concept of something that was a twinkling 18 in 2019, which is a virtual trial where instead of having study participants to get engaged with clinical managers at the hospital or the clinic, being able to in directly in their home by sending them a kit, that was really just beginning to, and the pandemic accelerated that and now it's officially known as DCT, or decentralized training, engage study participants, send them the kits to participate in the trial at home and then with bio marker and digital sensors like weight scales, pulse, glucometers, which all that data has been very difficult in the past to get that data in real time of a clinical trial. And now we take what you and I would recognize all patient monitoring kit, we repurpose that kit for a clinical trial, looks the same, the data's used oftentimes differently in terms of evaluating the efficacy of a drug or a third trial. So those are the two big, you know, big elements to the landscape that we're and investment in terms of trying to help customers enable that and scale that to large volumes.

- [Ryan] Fantastic, yeah. One question I wanted to ask, kind as a follow up to that is if we try to take a step back a little bit, can you tell me about how IoT has really, how that kind of fits into what is being done in the space now in, in the healthcare space now? I mean obviously there's this endless number of use cases and potentials for the technology, everything from things you've already been talking about to asset tracking to, you know, just, just different stuff. But how does IoT just at, from a technology group standpoint really fit in and what does it enabling kind of at a, at a higher level?

- [Bryan] Sure. So I'll take a step back. So if you look at any enterprise company whether it's in healthcare that wants to go through and do some form of IoT enablement of their solution or add new services as a result of, in most cases, those, let's use healthcare specifically as an example. Healthcare OEMs contract research organizations that run drug trials, even you know, consumer focused sensor manufacturers. Typically they're IoT. So when you look at, when you look at IoT, our focus at KORE is the telemetry, this data telemetry. So we're not a remote patient monitoring company. We know about the critical elements of that are, but we're not an a company that are the monitoring or on, you know, respiration monitoring. Well these, these companies. So if, if you look at, just take a typical company, diabetes, their, their wheelhouse, their expertise is on patient's life while dealing, living with a chronic disease called diabetes. And what are the tools that that patient can use to improve their lifestyle, to improve protection of that disease and to live a more, you know, normal, productive life whilst chronic disease. That's what they focus on. Now what what they don't typically focus on is, okay I wanna get patient back into some form of data sets. So care delivery team or a provider look at that data, see when things are starting to go outside the norms and that disease, everything from just coaching and counseling and wellness to potentially intervening for it becomes a critical, a critical incident where they potentially have to be hospitalized. They know how to do that, they know how to look at the data, they know how to manage that, but what their expertise is is not data into their system from remote patients. So understanding networks around the world, you know, understanding where things have to be certified differently, data, what type of hardware devices can be used, what we call error interfaces, right? 2G versus 5G. So those are all the pieces of IoT that we're working to try to help can easily and quickly adopt.

- [Ryan] Gotcha. Okay. Fantastic. And you, you mentioned the data side. So I imagine for a lot of hospitals and other healthcare organizations, getting the data has always been something that's been a struggle for them. But I wanted you to also, if you wouldn't mind, expanding on not just the data piece, but of, and how that's a big challenge, but at the same time what are some other challenges that you're seeing in the connected healthcare space? And then, I guess, more so the challenges that IoT has a potential to solve or has been solving, but like what are the biggest ones that you're seeing, and if for companies out there that are listening to this episode that are in that space that they should be considering and thinking about as they're thinking, you know, considering adopting an IoT solution?

- [Bryan] Right, right. Well, in general, healthcare challenges and considerations you always have to be concerned about a security and privacy of that data. You're navigating a regulatory landscape that is fairly homogeneous in the United and, you know, Europe has, has has for years had something called the medical device, a common set of directives that most of the EU company countries adopted. After years of negotiation, they, they adopted what's called the MDR, Medical Device Regulation. Country in the EU uses that as their baseline. So things of, so Europe has become, and it was, but there still are some unique scenarios in, for example, Germany and France, that any, any service provider and or any customer has to be in terms of how to manage that. So privacy and security are, are big in more way, unless you can convince a med tech company, a medical device company, understand that landscape and know how to, how to mitigate those risks and manage those risks for them. Technologies, right? And getting those technologies into country. So you have, typically, you'll have med tech companies that service patients all over the world. Those solutions have to be for each country. You can't deploy the same hardware and the same tool set in Brazil and Wisconsin. And when you get into Europe, there's considerations. Turkey, using cellular networks in Turkey, you actually have to acquire all of your in country and it has to be registered with the government. So there's, there's a landscape that makes work and you know, companies are looking to people like KORE to help them navigate area of expertise. This isn't an area that they really understand well. And even if they have the capacity to execute, they may not have the resources and the presence and the, the legal entities to go to market there. So that's how we help customers do that. And from a big picture standpoint, that's enabling if you take a step back and just say what's, what's, what's the end game is- Cost effective and an efficient way to give space from the patient or a study participant so that somebody can act on that data patient's outcome. And that, you know, to me that's why it's very rewarding to me. I mean, this is, is critical because that's what will enable large scale adoption. So if you don't have the it's not gonna get adopted in, in large scale and high volumes, but the real end game is our aging. You know, we look at our parents, we look at people who have to deal with aging and chronic disease to be, to live a better life. And that's what's, that's what's happening right now which is really, really rewarding.

- [Ryan] Absolutely, I can definitely imagine. I wanted to kind of, before we wrap up here, I wanted to ask, so we've talked through the challenges, we've talked to the kind of current state, we've kind of given people really good understanding of how this all looks, and works, and how this technology is being used. But if, if, if I'm listening to this and I am in that healthcare space and I'm looking to better understand how to kind of bring this IoT technology into my business, my practice, what is the kind of advice that you have for organizations looking to adopt around the connected healthcare side of things and different solutions as it relates to IoT?

- [Bryan] So I think the number one piece of, focus on the service or the business or the outcome to achieve and what the results of that outcome you'd like to see achieve rather than the technology initial down and they start developing the technology and they get so deep into the techno devices that they need to use. What types of sensors do they need to use? Take a step back and look at what are the business objectives and then look for somebody like a KORE and other, there's plenty in the space that have a deep set of expertise on how to help you adopt and enable and how to do it in a way that, you know, doesn't require you to build out a whole new sub organization, you know, IoT experts. That's, that's what we're here to do. And you know, it's kind of like when, when you're a, you don't become, well, some people do, but in general you don't become an auto mechanic, do everything in your car specialist that knows how to do that and they do it day in and day out. And so that's, we all drive a car, we all know how to do the basics and know how to change the oil and know how to, you know, replace our windshield wipe. You know, when you have a, a water pump failure on your car, 99 out of a hundred people take the engine apart and fix the water pump. That's where, where you have to have a, you know, you know, and particularly in the healthcare space you don't wanna have to go out and in-source that whole partner to do that.

- [Ryan] Right, right, right, right. It totally makes sense. And for audience out there listening who would maybe want to follow up on this conversation, ask follow up questions, discuss more about kind of what you have going on in the space. Maybe even discuss how you all can help them with what they're building or looking to maybe deploy from connected healthcare solutions. What's the best way that they can do that and engage with you?

- [Bryan] So just have them reach out, they can reach out to my email address is [email protected]. B-L-U-B-W-I-R-E-L-E-S-S.com. And maybe you can even post that on the podcast. So people can see that.

- [Ryan] Absolutely, will do. Well, Brian, thank you so much for your, oh, sorry, go ahead.

- [Bryan] No, I was just gonna say if the reach a health team, follow up with them directly and then we can see how we can help them.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. Well Brian, thanks so much for coming on the show and talking a little bit more about this space. Super fascinating one to kind of pay attention to in the midst of everything that we've kind of been through the last few, few years as a, as society. It's really cool to kind of see how IoT has stepped up and really played a, a, a big contributor to to helping us move forward through the pandemic, through a lot of the different problems we've had in the healthcare space. So thanks so much for your time, really appreciate it.

- [Bryan] Appreciate it. Thanks Ryan.

- [Ryan] All right everyone, thanks again for watching that episode of the IoT for All Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode please click the thumbs up button, subscribe to our channel, and be sure to hit the bell notifications so you get the latest episodes as soon as they become available. Other than that, thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time.