In this episode of the IoT For All podcast, Luma Health Chief Technical Officer and Co-Founder Aditya Bansod joins us to share how Luma Health is leveraging IoT to efficiently and safely distribute COVID-19 vaccines.

Aditya Bansod, a pioneering healthcare entrepreneur, is the co-founder and CTO of Luma Health, a total engagement platform for healthcare. Luma Health was founded on the idea that healthcare should work better for all patients - a principle that Aditya strives every day to make a reality. Prior to this role, Aditya served as the vice president of Remind, was a principal product manager for Adobe Systems as well as a lead program manager for Microsoft.

Interested in connecting with Aditya? Reach out to him on Linkedin!

About Luma Health: Luma Health was founded on the idea that healthcare should work better for all patients. Every single point along the care journey should be simple, seamless, and effective, from accessing care to achieving health goals. Luma Health empowers providers to make this a reality through its digital health solutions, designed to boost access, streamline patient-provider communications, and drive increased revenues.

Key Questions and Topics from this Episode:

(1:00) Intro to Aditya

(1:43) Intro to Luma Health

(5:50) Intro to Luma Vaccine Operations Solution

(8:53) Healthcare Technology Landscape

(13:38 ) Developing IoT for Healthcare

(15:18) Trends in Healthcare IoT

(18:18) Healthcare IoT Adoption Across Generations

(24:39) Future of Healthcare Technology

(27:05) Advice for Companies in the Healthcare Space

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 on the IoT for All Media Network. I'm your host, Ryan Chacon, one of the co-creators of IoT for All. Now, before we jump into this episode, please don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, or join our newsletter at IoTForAll.com/Newsletter to catch all the newest episodes as soon as they come out. But before we get started, does your business waste hours searching for assets like equipment or vehicles, and pay full-time employees just to manually enter location and status data? You can get real-time location and status updates for assets, indoors and outdoors, at the lowest cost possible with Leverage's end-to-end IoT solutions. To learn more, go to IoTChangesEverything.com, that's IoTChangesEverything.com. So without further ado, please enjoy this episode of the IoT for All Podcast. Welcome, Aditya, to the IoT for All show. How's your week going so far?

- [Aditya] Good. Full of vaccines right now, but very good.

- [Ryan] Fantastic, well, it's great to have you here, excited to kind of get into this conversation. I wanted to start off by just kind of having you give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience; a little background information, who you are, who they're listening to, that kind of thing.

- [Aditya] Absolutely, so it's a pleasure to be on the show. My name is Aditya, one of the founders and CTO at Luma Health. We are a patient engagement solution, and our vision and our goal is to take healthcare out of healthcare, so make it easier for patients and doctors to connect around the moments that they know they need to get access to care, and make it as seamless and as joyful as it can be when you need to get access to care, experience along the entire journey a patient goes through. So we're based in San Francisco. I live in this beautiful city, and been at it for almost a little over six years now.

- [Ryan] Fantastic. So let's talk a little bit more about the company, what you all do, kind of role you all play, how IoT kind of fits in and that kinda thing.

- [Aditya] Yeah, absolutely. So Luma Health kind of what we aim to do, and what we have built, a solution, a platform that enables healthcare providers and clinics and health systems to do is communicate with patients and then help them get access to care.

- [Ryan] Okay.

- [Aditya] So the kind of talk track we often use is I know, me Aditya, you Ryan, you need to get access to care. So how do you go about that journey in order to get access to care, find the solution you're looking for, and then kind of make sure that everything that you and your care plan that you put together with the doctor is well-tracked, well-traveled, and actually well understood on your path to healing. And so one of the very common examples we like to give in this universe is, if you're a potentially diabetic patient, one of the largest causes of healthcare consumption in the United States, being able to measure blood glucose on a every day, every hour, minute basis is super important so you can make wise and smart choices in how to manage your chronic disease. And so that's one of the really interesting ways that we've started to see IoT, specifically, really show up in a very prevalent way in healthcare. So Luma's goal is really to help the patient orchestrate that entire journey, and from the point they're like, "I think I need to go see a doctor," if this the right doctor to see, booking that appointment, and then making sure they have all the preparatory information, and then the post-care discharge information. And then, potentially, as things happen down their care plan, for them to come back in for follow up care.

- [Ryan] Okay. So as a co-founder of the company, tell me a little bit more about the story behind it, kind of where this idea came from, how the company got started, what opportunity did you see in the market to kind of bring this solution, I guess, the technology, first, to life, and then obviously the solutions you have available right now?

- [Aditya] Yeah, there's three co-founders on our founding team. Myself, kind of, my story is kind of a very, in some ways, a very boring Silicon Valley technologist. I've worked at Adobe and Microsoft, and then and then venture backed start-ups. So, about as cookie cutter of somebody in the Bay area as you can get.

- [Ryan] Sure.

- [Aditya] And then, my other co-founders, one is an MD, Dr. Ekram, and he, a lot of what we came through, and what a lot of the ideas that we built here were really around his experience as a clinician; and my other co-founder, Adnan, who's a biologist. So really from Dr. Ekram's perspective of being a practicing radiologist, one of the biggest things that he saw when we were kind of talking at the early stages of the company, is he's a radiologist, and if you need to go get imaging, an MRI, a CT, an ultrasound, whatever it is, it's a typically very expensive appointment that's also very hard to get access to, and patients wait anywhere from two to four to six weeks to get those appointments, which means the beginning of their path to care and their path to healing is often delayed that amount of time. So really starting with that little genesis of an idea of saying, hey, there's actually patients canceling appointments, and there's patients waiting weeks to months to get access to those appointments. We really started the company on this idea that we should have a smart wait list. We should have a wait list that kind of matches patients who are canceling and patients who need appointments. And that's really where the basic, the curl, the idea that became Luma Health came from, which is a product that was around kind of matching supply and demand. And again, with that core vision of, hey, how do I make it as easy as possible for me, a patient who needs to get access to care, to get access to that care? From there, what we ended up doing over the last six years is really building more and more solutions around that pathway. So now I got appointment, now I need to reschedule the appointment. Maybe I need to see who are other doctors that might do the appointment in this health system. Hey, I got access to that care. I now have follow-up instructions, or prep instructions. And before that appointment; all those different points on that patient's journey. So we started with this one really simple core of an idea that's really blossomed into an entire platform that describes how do you get patients successful in their care plans.

- [Ryan] Gotcha, that's fantastic. So, I guess, to bring this all back around to each other and we have a better idea of kind of how the company works, how the company got started. Let's talk about some Applications out in the market. I know you have something very closely attached to what's very relevant today, with the COVID-19 vaccines. So I'd love for you talk a little bit more about kind of how that solution works, what the solution is, and just kind of the overall benefit.

- [Aditya] Yeah, I mean, it's getting Americans vaccinated is one of the largest public health challenges than any of us, I'm sure, can ever remember. And it takes a village of technologists, hospital administrators, operations staff to really put together all the pieces to stand up a fully scalable vaccine operations solution. And that's one of the things that we've done is put together a turnkey set of solutions that help health systems deploy vaccine scheduling, messaging, rescheduling, and consent at scale. And so if you are a patient who's looking for a vaccine, for example, in New York City, maybe the Bronx, maybe Manhattan, Arizona, Chicago, and the Chicago land area; these are a couple of places where we have live deployments, we make it very easy for you to look to see if you're eligible, because the eligibility rules are literally changing every week. Every state has a slightly different set of eligibility rules, and so these are fast moving targets that patients are aware of because they hear it in the news, but they're not necessarily always sure if it applies to them, but that same idea of I'm a patient who wants to get access to this service, this vaccine, am I eligible? Fine, if they are, showing them an open slot, letting them book it, and then when it's time for their appointment, sending them information about the vaccine, things to expect on site. One of the really challenging ones we're seeing, as we're talking right now, Ryan, is the snow storms that are happening kind of throughout about a third of the United States.

- [Ryan] Sure.

- [Aditya] And so one of the things that's really become important in the last kind of two days and probably the next six or seven days is we're having to actually message patients to make sure they bring clothes to their vaccination appointment that they can actually roll up their sleeves. Right?

- [Ryan] Interesting.

- [Aditya] It seems so trivial, but if you're in long johns, a parka, all this sort of stuff, the amount and speed at which these mass vaccination sites can move patients through slows down quite a bit, and which means we're vaccinating primarily seniors, which means if the actual indoor vaccination facility is backed up, then senior citizens are waiting outside in single digit weather. So kind of getting patients prepped ahead of that kind of visit, so that they're like make sure you wear something that can be rolled, that you can roll up your sleeves, and then having them book their dose two appointments when that's done, that's part of this operations flow that we've built out that makes it really easy for them to step through all the pieces of, am I eligible? I got it. I know what I need to do, and when I'm done, I got my dose two appointment in 28 to 48 days later. So there's all those pieces around coordinating that, where you want to bring the speed at which you can move patients through the vaccination centers is critical to making sure we can deploy all the supplies that exist.

- [Ryan] Gotcha, that's fantastic. So, I wanted to take a step back here for a second, and just kind of lay the landscape out a little bit more for those who may be a little bit unfamiliar with how technology is playing a role in the healthcare space. And just from your experience, how has healthcare technology, and this is not necessarily like within hospitals and actually performing services, but more as it relates to companies like yours who are building solutions that are applicable to the healthcare space to kind of just help out there, how has healthcare technology kind of been developed in the past, and kind of where is it, I guess, in a sense, and now? How has IoT enabled healthcare, or, I guess, solutions that are now helping the healthcare world, and kind of what does that look like?

- [Aditya] Yeah, it's fascinating to see the evolution of health technology and I'll kind of bring the tape back a little bit earlier, Ryan, and kind of talk where you kind of saw it in the consumer internet, to kind of use that as a grounding principle, around a place here, that transition from like Windows applications to web applications, to connect a device with mobile applications, to now like IoT applications, right? And so there's this evolution that's happened or happening in consumer and general enterprise software, where we're starting to see those kinds of pieces come to bear now in healthcare technology, and health IT, as we call it. And one of the really important parts, I think, that we found here is we're just now, like healthcare is huge, right? It's so big.

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Aditya] And it's such a, some parts race forward so fast, like the vaccine is a miracle of science, right? Versus you have to VPN into a virtual desktop in order to get access to a healthcare record, right? And so, kind of, how do you marry that with kind of the other pieces of an IoT and an internet-enabled setup, like remote device monitoring and all that sort of stuff, and enabling devices. There's so many pieces that are like where the gears are still turning, and they're not necessarily matching very well. And so one of the pieces that I think that's been a really positive sign in kind of how the evolution of technology has really moved us forward here, and will continue to move us forward, is partly, in healthcare this is very unique, is the regulatory pieces.

- [Ryan] Sure.

- [Aditya] The government has put a lot of effort into what's called the data blocking rules, which say you, Ryan, and me, Aditya, as a patient, we have the right to our own medical records; we have the right to access them, we have the right to kind of put them in my Apple health care app, I have the right to put them in these other systems and capabilities. And I think there's this regulatory shift that has caused a lot of the vendors in the health IT space to really move to embrace APIs, to enable this IoT remote patient, internet-connected experience that really exists for patients. So, a really great example, and I used this when we talked about this at the beginning of our dialogue, which is in diabetes, if I have a glucose monitor, being able to see my my blood glucose on my phone is super valuable, but how do I tell the clinician about that? How do I tell my doc about it?

- [Ryan] Sure.

- [Aditya] How do I have my doc actually do something actionable? So we have some really interesting customers who do some really interesting stuff here. And it's kind of, there's this confluence of this regulatory changes around how telehealth becomes more pervasive in healthcare, and remote patient monitoring, which is kind of like a concept that covers IoT in healthcare, these really come together. So one of our customers, Dr. Medhavi Jogi of the Houston, Texas area, he does this really powerful thing where he's kind of monitoring these patients, but then when he actually does a telehealth visit with them, he'll actually get them on the video and say, now I want to look in their fridge, right? Let's actually have a discussion about what these things that we saw, and actually it's not just a, hey, doc, hey, patient, how's it going? Hey, Doc, it's like this. It's like, okay, let's actually dialogue about how these different pieces come together so that your behaviors, that's things I'm seeing remote, they're tied in the APIs that are getting back in your electronic healthcare record, how all these pieces really tie together, so that I can provide the patient with a more comprehensive path towards their care.

- [Ryan] Gotcha. Yeah, we've been seeing a lot of very unique applications of technology in the healthcare space, and it's been a very fascinating kind of, I guess, path, I guess, or we've seen over the last number of years, especially as IoT kind of relates to it. We're seeing everything from asset tracking solutions to solutions just like yours, or actually your solution, not sort of solutions like yours, but your solution. And I wanted to ask, 'cause I've had this conversation with some other people about just the general roadblocks and challenges that they've come across in the development of solutions and working in a hospital setting, building for something that does have a relatively large number of regulations involved in it, and privacy concerns, and that kind of thing. so, as you've kind of got into this space. and you started down this path of building the company and your solutions, what have been some of the biggest challenges that you've come across in that process and kind of what does that look like?

- [Aditya] Yeah, it's access to data that's-

- [Ryan] Okay.

- [Aditya] That is number one. Any technology vendor working in the healthcare space, access to data and access to data in a HIPAA compliant manner.

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Aditya] So you, we, anyone else in this ecosystem, you have to be good stewards of the patient's data, that's a responsibility, right? So it's your moral responsibility, but it's also your legal responsibility. and being able to stand up a HIPAA compliant system service applications that also then marry the other big challenge of actually getting access to the patient's data, whether it's through APIs, through common standards like FHIR or HL7, or through some really legacy technology, such as, you'll be amazed, in healthcare, the state of the art often is I'll send you a file over an SFTP, and then we're good. Like, okay, well this is not very different than where we were in 1977 or something like that. And so being able to transact that data in a HIPAA compliant manner and just getting access to that data, that is by far, by far, the number one biggest challenge in kind of how do we move the state of the art forward.

- [Ryan] Gotcha. And now that kind of tied, in a sense, to the biggest challenges that you've seen. What about as far as trends go? What are you seeing kind of happening in the market? What are some of the the biggest ways technology has kind of enabled these solutions to now be possible. I assume, obviously, with mobile phones is playing a big role, just the technology being available to monitor patients remotely, and that again, ties back into IoT. So, on the positive trend side, what are some positive trends that you're seeing? And then also, I'd be curious to hear more on the negative trend side; are there any kind of concerning trends that you're seeing, or maybe you have seen, that technology is allowing to kind of be fixed now?

- [Aditya] Yeah, in the positive trend side, I think really the big focus that I'm seeing is the patient is now moving into the role of a consumer, like you use your iPhone to do your banking, being able to access your medical records seems to be an equal expectation that patients should have.

- [Ryan] Okay.

- [Aditya] And I think putting the patient really in the driver's seat of their own healthcare experience is making health systems actually realize that they have to up their game.

- [Ryan] Sure.

- [Aditya] And, a lot of times people kind of, I think, somewhat pejoratively say booking an appointment should be as easy as booking an airline ticket.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- [Aditya] I like that because it tells the right story, but there are really only four major airlines in the United States, right?

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Aditya] Versus, here in the Bay area, have four major healthcare systems, and then maybe a couple thousand small clinics and practices. So in that light, the vision is right, the analogy is wrong, if that makes sense.

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Aditya] But I think that same thought process of, hey, the patient is in that driver's seat is that mega trend that is really a force for good, because we will all be pulled by patients who say, hey, you know what? The app for health system A is a pain in my rear, and I'd rather go book even at health system B, 'cause it's easier to get my access to my appointments, I can text my doctor, I can do all my screening forms online, and they send me, and I can directly submit my blood glucose, my BMI readings, whatever it might be. And so, yeah, I might drive an extra 15 minutes, 'cause it's just easier to deal with. You see that all the time with other kind of consumerized behaviors, and so I think it's really gonna push health systems and clinics to really move towards a more consumer-friendly or patient-friendly way of deploying their services, the delivery of their services. And that's that real concept of getting healthcare out of the way of healthcare. Patients love to see their doctor, right? Very rarely do patients have something incredibly negative to say about their physicians themselves, it's often about the delivery of the care that surrounds that physician appointment where a lot of the angst comes from. And so I think that patient expectations is a really positive trend where the demand for patients for a great experience is the same as the demand for great experience when they're booking an airline flight. So-

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Aditya] I think that's a really positive trend.

- [Ryan] So let me ask you this question. So I know with healthcare, obviously, healthcare spans all ages, and if we just think from when you're kind of, I guess, an adult, so 18, 20, 22 years old to the elderly. Technology, if you remove healthcare, is used very differently by all these different age groups and as hospitals and doctor's offices bring these kinds of technology and these services to make the patient's interaction, the patient's experience better, how have you seen kind of the adoption and, I guess, just generally the adoption based on or around different ages? Because obviously the younger tech-savvy kind of groups would love these kinds of things. I know, personally, I do, being able to send messages to my doctor without having to call, make an appointment, being able to schedule appointments online, but then my mom, for instance, she's not someone who is necessarily going to interact with that, she's going to want to be able to call and talk to somebody and handle it the way she's handled it her whole life, and then you get even older than my mom, the seventies and 80 year old patients who may not be very good with technology, so a lot of these services may not be as easily understood or adopted by them. So what is kind of the approach there? What challenges have you seen, or trends have you seen kind of as it relates to the varying ages of patients? Because I think, obviously, this is an inevitable thing that is needed and definitely makes the process better for everybody. But just from your side of things, what have you kind of seen from the age distribution side?

- [Aditya] I'll add in one other dimension there before, I'll make it more complicated before I answer it. Which is, a patient's socio-economic background.

- [Ryan] Very true, good point.

- [Aditya] The access to internet itself is not always a guarantee.

- Yes.

- Right?

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Aditya] So when we think about it a lot, I think there's our philosophy at Luma Health, and then there's also the data, which are kind of really fascinating. So philosophically, we believe healthcare is a right. Everyone should have access to healthcare. Everyone should have the ability to get access to high quality care on the terms that makes sense to them. And the ability to, what's really important is that you do not disallow certain classes of individuals whether it's due to socio-economic background, age, gender, ethnicity, due to lack of access to technology, that should not be allowed to disadvantage a certain individual from getting access to care. And that means that kind of our strong belief is solutions need to work across all modalities that a patient may engage in healthcare.

- [Ryan] Okay.

- [Aditya] So whether that's showing up in person, we have to have tools and technologies that support an in-person, whether it's a kiosk, or even a tablet, one of the questions you asked, Ryan, is how do you make for elder geriatric populations, one of the things that we've learned is geriatric populations, they have to do with 18 page pre-assessment questionnaire in the doctor's office lobby, they may not be able to have the arm strength to hold a tablet that entire time, right? That requires a bit of arm strength, it requires dexterity, and it even requires technical proficiency. And so being able to have nurses act on the patient's behalf, medical assistance act on patient's behalf, and then email also for, there's that population who relies primarily on email, and then, obviously, SMS.

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Aditya] That's kind of being able to serve as patients in all different classes have access, in all those classes, that's just key to our mission. Now, kind of the interesting part that we see is patient engagement rates across age groups, and the highest engagement rate that we see is in the 70 plus.

- Okay, wow.

- Which is maybe backwards than you might think. Yeah, exactly, right?

- [Ryan] Yeah. Well, I wonder if that has to do more with the fact that older individuals probably interact with doctors more than the younger generation. Like I know from, for instance, I don't see a doctor very often. I mean, even over the last number of years, I see them only handful of times, but I know as you get older, just naturally, you go to the doctor more.

- [Aditya] And that's definitely a factor, your consumption of healthcare increases generally with age, right?

- [Ryan] Right.

- [Aditya] And then the acuteness of your requirement to get care goes up with age too, right? Like if you decide not to go in for a sore knee or a sore back, it's not really a big deal, but if you don't go in for your diabetic exam, or your glaucoma exam, there can be pretty significant downstream effects for you. So the acuity, as they call it, the acuity goes, generally speaking, it goes up with age. So I think that's one of the reasons we see it. Also, I think one of the other reasons we see it is I've spoken to a large number of our clinics, their patients, and texting at the 70 plus mark is so common, largely around sending children's pictures, right? So they're used to texting their kids, their grandkids, all that sort of stuff. And so there is a large amount of familiarity with using text message, a lot more so than say email, right? And so there's just like a really nice, I think, benefit there where those patients do need to get access to care because of the acuity, and kind of elder patients, geriatric populations, need more access to care or need more care, and they're also used to messaging other family members, and it's a method that they use to stay in touch. So I think you get a nice little Venn diagram where it gets quite Venn-y, if you will, there.

- [Ryan] Right. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I'm