Latest / CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered. / Improving Medication Adherence with AI Solutions w/ AllazoHealth CEO, William Grambley

Transcript

Improving Medication Adherence with AI Solutions w/ AllazoHealth CEO, William Grambley · CareTalk: Healthcare. Unfiltered.

• 0:00
  David: Artificial intelligence is destined to play a big role throughout the pharmaceutical industry in 2025.
• 0:06
  David: But what specific changes can we expect in patient support programs and pharmaceutical marketing?
• 0:11
  David: And how will that affect overall health costs and the patient experience?
• 0:23
  David: Hi, everyone.
• 0:24
  David: I'm David Williams, president of strategy consulting firm, Health Business Group and host of the Health Biz Podcast, where I interview top healthcare leaders about their lives and careers.
• 0:34
  David: My guest today is Bill Grambley, CEO of AllazoHealth, which uses AI to personalize patient engagement to drive medication initiation and adherence.
• 0:43
  David: Do you like this show?
• 0:43
  David: I hope so.
• 0:44
  David: And if so, I hope you'll subscribe and leave a review.
• 0:47
  David: Bill, welcome to the Health Biz Podcast.
• 0:49
  Bill: Hi, thank you.
• 0:51
  David: I think I pronounced Bill right, but did I pronounce your company name right?
• 0:54
  David: If not, please correct me.
• 0:55
  David: You did.
• 0:56
  David: Yes.
• 0:56
  David: Alazzo Howell.
• 0:57
  David: Okay.
• 0:58
  David: Outstanding.
• 0:58
  David: Sometimes I blow that, uh, part of it.
• 1:00
  David: So I'm glad I didn't.
• 1:01
  David: Well, let's, we're going to talk about AI and all those sorts of things that are happening now.
• 1:05
  David: But let's start off with, uh, winding the clock back and talking about your own background, your upbringing.
• 1:11
  David: What was your childhood like, uh, any influences that have, uh, stuck with you from childhood into your career?
• 1:18
  Bill: Well, I was always interested in, in math and science growing up and, and problem solving and it even manifested at a very early age when, uh, apparently when I was in, you know, like kindergarten, I would be building these, these towers with blocks taller than, than I was at the time.
• 1:35
  Bill: And, you know, that kind of just continued through my life and, uh, eventually leading, you know, just, uh, to move forward on the career into, um, going to get my engineering undergrad, I went nuclear power in the Navy, which is amazing for, for somebody who just loved it to understand problems and problem solving.
• 1:57
  Bill: And, and, uh, you know, just built on over time more and more about kind of problem solving, understanding the world.
• 2:05
  Bill: And that led into leadership in the Navy as well.
• 2:08
  Bill: Got it.
• 2:09
  David: Now, was Jimmy Carter also a nuclear engineer in the Navy?
• 2:11
  David: Do I recall that correctly?
• 2:12
  David: I believe he was.
• 2:14
  David: Yeah, yeah, I had a, uh, there's a guy who lives down the street from me who, um, was a submariner.
• 2:20
  David: He went to the Naval Academy and, um, I asked him if he ever met Admiral Rickover, but anyway, he did one time and it was a short conversation and Rickover wasn't too pleasant to him.
• 2:29
  David: But anyway, he said he was a good submariner eventually.
• 2:31
  David: So, uh, Good.
• 2:33
  David: And so did you know you wanted to be in the Navy?
• 2:35
  David: I saw you were doing, I think, Naval ROTC when you were in school.
• 2:38
  Bill: I did.
• 2:39
  Bill: You know, the ROTC program paid for a good amount of my college.
• 2:43
  Bill: And so I have no, no regrets on that.
• 2:45
  Bill: And, um, yeah.
• 2:47
  Bill: And, and, and, you know, when I remember my dad was a Marine way back in the day and, you know, he, he kind of pressed me to make sure I wanted to go in the military because he had.
• 2:58
  Bill: Yeah.
• 2:59
  Bill: Good experiences, but, uh, but also knew some of the downsides of it with travel and everything else.
• 3:05
  Bill: And, uh, and then he, he also recommended the Navy because it was kind of very technically advanced, you know, a lot of the, a lot of the technologies they use now, it seems a little bit old, but, uh, but back in the day it was viewed as pretty advanced for, for a lot of the militaries.
• 3:23
  David: All right.
• 3:23
  David: So after the Navy, I saw some name brand companies after that, starting with, uh, Bain and EMC.
• 3:29
  Bill: Yep.
• 3:30
  Bill: And, and, and so during that time, you know, again, this, this kind of theme of problem solving, uh, at Bain and company as a consultant, you know, working with large companies shifted over to EMC where I was involved in what we called kind of solutions and solution development.
• 3:46
  Bill: How do you take EMC products and position them in a way and, and, and put the right, uh, services around them.
• 3:55
  Bill: So that they can be used in a solution, not just as a box.
• 3:58
  Bill: EMC did, did storage devices at the time.
• 4:01
  Bill: Um, and that, that really led me then, uh, eventually to CVS, uh, CVS Health, where, uh, that was my first kind of true, uh, healthcare focused company.
• 4:12
  Bill: The, the thing that I, I'd still think back on very fondly is, you know, here I am relatively new to, to CVS.
• 4:19
  Bill: It was around 2008.
• 4:22
  Bill: And, and I walk in, and, you know, I'm given this, uh, this initiative to help drive related to, um, patient condition management type activities, and, you know, I didn't know a lot of people at CDS, and it was a huge organization, even at the time, and bigger now, and, and everybody I talked to was just so focused on understanding, you know, what is this thing, how can it help patients, uh, It didn't matter who I talked to in the organization, there was an openness to supporting patients and, and really trying to understand how they could further that along, uh, along the way.
• 5:04
  Bill: Um, over time, you know, I spent a little over 10 years there and over and over again, there was this focus across the organization, a very cross functional.
• 5:14
  Bill: Uh, organization to build a programs that supported patients on their medication journey.
• 5:22
  Bill: Um, and it was tremendous to see the impact of those and, and both in terms of individual patients, but then in the scale where, you know, CVS health as an organization touches so many lives.
• 5:35
  David: Uh, CVS is an interesting place.
• 5:36
  David: I remember back when it was just a drug store, you know, I think it stands for consumer value stores originally, and then, you know, adding Caremark and Aetna.
• 5:44
  David: Um, and really becoming a behemoth and, and making such an impact, especially during the pandemic.
• 5:50
  David: And what's striking about the company also, I'm not sure about the division you worked in, but, uh, you know, it's really run by pharmacists.
• 5:56
  David: So you got like the CIO is a pharmacist, a CEO, everybody, uh, there, and they, they certainly have, you know, they know a lot about medication and they know about the patient a lot.
• 6:07
  David: It's different than your typical kind of corporate role.
• 6:10
  Bill: Indeed.
• 6:11
  Bill: Indeed.
• 6:11
  Bill: Yeah.
• 6:12
  Bill: It's, uh, again, I look back very fondly on my 10 years there where Uh, this focus on how are we supporting the patients and, and, you know, throughout, we'll, we'll talk a little bit about, uh, adherence, but, but the way that you can support patients when you have such a variety of touch points is one that, you know, we'll continue as we, uh, as we talk about what AllazoHealth does.
• 6:37
  David: Sounds good.
• 6:38
  David: All right.
• 6:38
  David: So far on the Allazo side, I'm interested to hear a little bit about, you know, what attracted you to the company you were at.
• 6:43
  David: You'd moved around a few places where it's CVS quite a while.
• 6:47
  David: Um, and so why, you know, how'd you hear about Alazo and what attracted you to make the jump?
• 6:53
  Bill: So the founder, a gentleman named Cliff Jones, is somebody I actually worked with at CVS.
• 6:58
  Bill: Got it.
• 6:58
  Bill: He was at CVS the same time I was, early on, uh, and he left CVS and, and one of the things he did after that was starting Alazo Health.
• 7:08
  Bill: Um, one of the things that he and I had worked on together at CVS was a program, it was called But the gist of it was, how do we support patient adherence using the variety of access points that CVS Health as an organization had, and so they had retail assets, they had Um, assets from the, the PBM, um, both of which could influence patients.
• 7:34
  Bill: And so, so that, that was the core question we were trying to answer.
• 7:39
  Bill: And one of the things after he left was to think about when we have this broad set of assets, why are we employing them in a way that's very standard, that treats every patient like they're kind of a widget.
• 7:55
  Bill: You're defined as on this medicine.
• 7:57
  Bill: So you become part of this program and then you go through a pretty rigid set of, of rules that will drive the outreach and with advanced analytics and, and, you know, over time, better machine learning and AI technology.
• 8:11
  Bill: You don't have to do that.
• 8:12
  Bill: You don't have to actually treat patients like they're defined only by a specific medication.
• 8:20
  Bill: And so all of the outreaches that you can do, all of the ways that you can customize those outreaches, the channels, the timing, those were things that when he started the company, he was really focused on saying, let's make these things better by doing a better prediction around the patient.
• 8:37
  Bill: And so he and I had kept in contact over multiple years that, that he had started the company before I left CVS to join him.
• 8:45
  Bill: And, and I was just fascinated by, by what he was doing.
• 8:48
  Bill: And, and it was a chance to go be part of a cutting edge technology startup.
• 8:53
  Bill: Uh, but it was also in a space that I knew fairly well around adherence and this patient program.
• 8:59
  David: So it was less of a jump than going to CVS since you already, uh, knew the subject matter and, uh, and the, and the leadership there.
• 9:05
  David: Let's talk a little bit about, uh, terminology because we talk about, uh, adherence and we're also going to talk about initiation.
• 9:12
  David: There were back in the day, uh, some other terms used as well.
• 9:15
  David: And I just hope you can distinguish a little bit.
• 9:17
  David: So people used to talk about compliance and persistency, but adherence is the word that is kind of stuck.
• 9:24
  David: And can you maybe just explain, you don't have to go through the whole lexicon, but you know, why is adherence the concept?
• 9:30
  David: And you know, why is that, why is that the right way to look at it?
• 9:33
  Bill: So, I mean, in the end, they're all kind of important aspects to making sure that people start medications that their doctor prescribes and stay on them.
• 9:43
  Bill: And compliance and persistence was kind of two flavors that roll up into adherence.
• 9:48
  Bill: In the end, if you think about how does a patient get the clinical benefit of the medicine, they need to take it according to the doctor's orders, they need to take it, uh, frequently enough related to that to really get the benefit of it.
• 10:03
  Bill: And we kind of bucket that in adherence, uh, but you could split that into compliance and persistence.
• 10:10
  Bill: The other thing I would highlight is that in terms of measurement, it is often difficult to separate compliance and persistence.
• 10:17
  Bill: Yeah.
• 10:18
  Bill: Uh, and so adherence is, is a little bit of a catch all to be able to measure that in a way that kind of leads to understanding how much benefit the patient's getting from them.
• 10:28
  David: Got it.
• 10:28
  David: Yeah.
• 10:28
  David: Some of these real world things get a little more complicated.
• 10:31
  David: Like I think there's like, they still talk about like possession ratio and things like that.
• 10:34
  David: So.
• 10:35
  David: Um, all right, so one of the things that I remember a long time ago being shocked by and pretty much everybody's shocked when they hear this is like how low the levels of adherence are.
• 10:45
  David: And I'm not talking about, I know that like classic examples like for blood pressure medication, right?
• 10:49
  David: It's the silent killer.
• 10:50
  David: You don't know you have it.
• 10:51
  David: But even for things like, you know, cancer medications, um, adherence is really low.
• 10:56
  David: So what, what are.
• 10:57
  David: What are the sort of typical levels of adherence that you see now, and if I'm correct, why are they so low?
• 11:03
  Bill: Well, and you are correct, I mean, often, and you will see some variation by, uh, by different medication, but 50, 60 percent of people are adherent, you know, and, and that obviously translates to 40 to 50 percent are not.
• 11:20
  Bill: And, and I think part of the reason that, uh, one, it is so low and two, uh, that it doesn't change a lot is that fundamentally a lot of what drives people's adherence behavior is driven by human nature, who they are, what their lives are like.
• 11:39
  Bill: And a lot of times in the past, efforts to address adherence focused kind of solely on the medical side of it.
• 11:48
  Bill: And they didn't really think about all these other things that can go on.
• 11:52
  Bill: And, and so, so in the end, if you look back, you know, 20, 30 years to studies on adherence, the numbers are not appreciably different than they are if you looked at it today.
• 12:05
  David: We actually worked on due diligence of a company about 20 years ago called Adherus, if you'd heard of that company.
• 12:10
  David: And it was basically there were at the time, there were all these methods of trying to improve adherence and they all were expensive and they generally didn't work very much.
• 12:18
  David: So the only one that had An ROI was adherence, which is basically getting the pharmacist to say, Hey, you haven't refilled your prescription.
• 12:24
  David: Uh, can you come and do it?
• 12:25
  David: So I'm hope things have moved along a little bit.
• 12:28
  David: Are there issues with medication adherence that have changed over time?
• 12:32
  David: You mentioned it sort of like who you are as opposed to the kind of the rest of the situation, but what are those sort of key issues and are they in fact evolving?
• 12:41
  Bill: So I think there's a few different components here.
• 12:43
  Bill: I mean, one, there are certainly components that haven't really changed.
• 12:48
  Bill: So.
• 12:49
  Bill: Uh, when you think about what drives adherence behavior, I mean, the common ones like cost or side effects, forgetfulness, things like that, a lot of those things haven't drastically changed, although Interestingly, with many, many brands over the last 20 years going off patent, cost actually has decreased for many common chronic medication.
• 13:13
  Bill: But, obviously, the flip side of that is a lot of specialty medications have become more, uh, more prevalent, and those do often have a cost to the patient that can be quite, uh, quite high.
• 13:25
  Bill: So, broadly, those things haven't really changed when it comes to, uh, to medication behaviors.
• 13:32
  Bill: I do think, though, one of the interesting things is that patients have become much more consumers of healthcare.
• 13:41
  Bill: And, and when you think about what that means, uh, we, we've seen some studies even by McKinsey that say people are prioritizing health and wellness more now versus, you know, past years.
• 13:57
  Bill: They also express more dissatisfaction with healthcare.
• 14:01
  Bill: And actually, many people are highly likely to change their providers based on the experience, uh, compared to the past.
• 14:09
  Bill: And, and, and if you even think of, uh, more broadly, the access to research that has changed, you know, the, uh, influence of, quote, influencers has changed.
• 14:20
  Bill: All these things now are, are, uh, impacting patients and their behavior much more so than they were 5, 10 years ago.
• 14:28
  Bill: And that does have an impact.
• 14:30
  Bill: I just think about the divisions that occurred in the U.
• 14:33
  Bill: S.
• 14:33
  Bill: during COVID, you know, some people were all about, you know, masks and vaccines and all that, and other people were actually at the opposite end of that and, and how social media fed into some of those behaviors.
• 14:45
  Bill: And so, so I think we're, we, yes, many of the same things haven't changed.
• 14:51
  Bill: But there has been a pretty sizable evolution in some of the ways that patients do engage in healthcare compared to the past.
• 15:00
  David: I want to distinguish a little bit between adherence and therapy initiation.
• 15:04
  David: So I think about adherence, you know, that assumes someone started therapy and then they have side effects or the costs are too high or they forget or something else changes.
• 15:11
  David: That's one thing.
• 15:13
  David: But before that.
• 15:14
  David: Uh, where they have to actually initiate it.
• 15:16
  David: So presumably they get a prescription and they may or may not fill it.
• 15:20
  David: Now that's not due to actual experienced side effects by definition.
• 15:24
  David: It's something else.
• 15:25
  David: But help me understand that kind of initiation aspect.
• 15:29
  Bill: So a few different things are going on.
• 15:32
  Bill: Uh, one, you know, just in general related to the one I shared a minute ago, you know, a lot of brands have become generic over the last 20 years.
• 15:41
  Bill: we're And there is even a generic wave that, you know, a lot of the industry talked about.
• 15:45
  Bill: And so, many of the barriers that existed in the past were not there around cost and, and access and things like that.
• 15:54
  Bill: Uh, that being said, a lot of newer medicine, because of the expense, because of the specialty nature of it, they have a variety of process steps to go through before they can even get the medicine the first time.
• 16:08
  Bill: And, and those process steps.
• 16:10
  Bill: They can be confusing to patients, uh, they might be challenging for somebody to navigate through, uh, it might require them not to go to their local pharmacy, the one that they've been going to for a decade or more.
• 16:25
  Bill: Um, all of these things instill in patients a bit of a, well, is this the right thing?
• 16:31
  Bill: How do I do this?
• 16:33
  Bill: Well, how do I approach this, um, in a way that, that is brand new to me?
• 16:39
  Bill: Many of those barriers are new to patients, again, more recently because of the nature of the newer medicines.
• 16:47
  Bill: So all of that has been going on more recently.
• 16:50
  Bill: I mean, when you think about ongoing adherence, yes, it could be more about side effects.
• 16:55
  Bill: It could be the actual experience of taking the medicine.
• 16:59
  Bill: But just at the beginning, there are these barriers that are being in place now.
• 17:05
  Bill: That again, a long time ago, uh, they just weren't that, that prevalent, you know, there were often substitutes, there were often other medicines that might be generic.
• 17:14
  Bill: Uh, so now when you get into these specialty medications, sometimes you're dealing with there's only a single medication or all of the medications in that class are, are specialty and all costs, you know, hundreds or thousands of dollars a month.
• 17:27
  Bill: Very different world for a lot of patients than, uh, than in the past.
• 17:32
  David: Personalization.
• 17:33
  David: So I think in, in, uh, I can understand the appeal of it and at the same time, Um, maybe all I need to know is like, I'm adherence and you're not, and we just sort of tease out which is which.
• 17:45
  David: How important is personalization in practice to what you're doing and, and what is it, what does it mean?
• 17:50
  David: Uh, like what are some attributes that would distinguish one person from another that maybe on a demographic basis look similar?
• 17:59
  David: But, you know, what, what's different, uh, that would be personalized to them as it's relevant for adherence.
• 18:06
  Bill: So let me just start though, by, by saying our lives are already filled with personalized content.
• 18:12
  Bill: You know, the news that you read, the shows you watch, the ads that show up on websites or sometimes even your TV, uh, the offers you get, whether it's a sale offer or, or the emails you get from merchants.
• 18:26
  Bill: You know, all of those have some level of personalization in them.
• 18:31
  Bill: Um, you know, if you share a Netflix account, you might be confused by what's on your screen.
• 18:36
  Bill: Right.
• 18:36
  Bill: You know, just because the personalization aspect is so prevalent there.
• 18:42
  Bill: And all of that has conditioned patients to become these kind of healthcare consumers where they expect a level of personalization.
• 18:51
  Bill: And so if you communicate to, to a person, and you haven't taken into account something about that person beyond, let's say, the, the definition that they're on a specific medication, like, you're, you're literally leaving opportunity on the table.
• 19:08
  Bill: And when you think about, let's say, a broad set of communications, what personalization really means is that looking at each individual patient, What is the best message for that patient?
• 19:20
  Bill: And, and message could even be broken into smaller parts.
• 19:23
  Bill: Like, what is an image that makes sense within that specific email for that specific patient?
• 19:31
  Bill: You know, is there different language around a call to action that would be different for two different patients?
• 19:37
  Bill: And, and, you know, I'm, I'm not sure exactly how old you are.
• 19:41
  Bill: And, uh, but you know, if you and I were looked at, I guarantee you, we would have different reactions to different messages.
• 19:49
  Bill: And, and if you're ignoring all of those differences, again, you're leaving opportunity on the table.
• 19:55
  Bill: That also things around what channel you get content through, what time of day you might get content, what time around an event, like a refill, do you get content?
• 20:08
  Bill: Uh, what's the cadence of that content?
• 20:10
  Bill: Some people need more intensive outreach.
• 20:14
  Bill: Some people, if you do that, they're going to opt out faster.
• 20:18
  Bill: Uh, what order of content?
• 20:21
  Bill: So, so it's a whole slew of different, uh, components of what goes into a journey.
• 20:27
  Bill: And it's not just, uh, as simple as kind of version A or version B of an email, right?
• 20:32
  Bill: It, it's much more robust than that.
• 20:35
  David: So I just saw some, uh, predictions that you released about the role of AI in the pharmaceutical industry, which I think is, is interesting and timely.
• 20:44
  David: You know, certainly AI has been in use in one form or another, uh, over the years, but I think with the emergence of generative AI, everybody's interested in it more.
• 20:53
  David: What are you seeing, uh, for pharma in, you know, 2025, uh, in terms of AI?
• 21:01
  Bill: So, so there's really five areas that I think are, are areas to watch, um, in 2025.
• 21:08
  Bill: And you mentioned one of them, generative AI, you know, I think, uh, it is a new world.
• 21:14
  Bill: Um, and you know, for all of the people in pharma who are, uh, who have nightmares of going through an approval process for content and, uh, and all the outreach stuff, generative AI is going to be scary, right?
• 21:28
  Bill: How am I supposed to trust this thing?
• 21:31
  Bill: But you do see people are using it to come up with new ideas before they go through that process.
• 21:36
  Bill: So it's not kind of.
• 21:37
  Bill: Uh, automatically being used in inpatient engagement, but it is something that is taken the world by storm over the last couple of years.
• 21:46
  Bill: And at least in our business, you know, it highlights the the value that you can bring by using predictions by using these kind of models to come up with better, better outreaches, right?
• 22:00
  Bill: So generative is more focused on language, but you can use it on on, um, or you can use AI more broadly.
• 22:06
  Bill: So that's definitely one.
• 22:08
  Bill: I think two others that I think are particularly interesting, one is precision medicine, really getting down to the root causes of disease based on, on genetic, um, understanding.
• 22:21
  Bill: The other thing I think is really interesting is, is health equity, which as a phrase has been around for decades.
• 22:28
  Bill: But the thing that, that to me is interesting about that, and, and if I think about AI more broadly is.
• 22:35
  Bill: Now you can really, based on data that's available, understand the patient, almost in the holistic environment the patient is in.
• 22:45
  Bill: So as an example, some of the things that we look at, you know, what is the environment of the zip code that the patient lives in?
• 22:53
  Bill: You know, is it, is it high income?
• 22:55
  Bill: Is it low income?
• 22:56
  Bill: Is it dominated in a, in an auto heavy world?
• 22:59
  Bill: Or is it supported by public transportation?
• 23:02
  Bill: Um, do they have access to a lot of healthcare services or do they not?
• 23:07
  Bill: There's all sorts of things that, that you can look at by looking at, uh, just a geographic area.
• 23:13
  Bill: When you look at demographic area, uh, demographic factors, things like what cultural impacts, uh, will influence the way that that patient engages in healthcare.
• 23:25
  Bill: Um, do they have a household that, that they are taking care of, or are they a single individual or maybe a two adult household?
• 23:34
  Bill: There's a lot of different things that you could start to bring in, and when you look at that, you could actually now understand how do we support these patients in a way that is going to drive a different level of impact.
• 23:50
  Bill: Uh, we actually did a study several years ago looking at a program that we've been involved in for, for a little while.
• 23:57
  Bill: When you start to incorporate these types of factors in the right way, we decreased the gap between, uh, high income and low income individuals.
• 24:11
  Bill: Um, you know, different races that would tend to have a different level of outcome.
• 24:16
  Bill: Uh, when you look at the, the demographics, kind of white collar worker, blue collar worker, we were able to actually decrease the disparity that you see when you just look at those in, in their own, uh, environment.
• 24:29
  Bill: Because we can use these predictions to actually provide better support for the different population.
• 24:35
  Bill: And to me, the use of AI on, on these is just exciting.
• 24:39
  Bill: It, it allows us to, to really finally look broadly at, at a person.
• 24:46
  Bill: Look at their consumer behavior, look at the environment they live in, look at their medication history as well, and really use all of that to now make better predictions about their behavior.
• 24:57
  Bill: And then how to support their behavior in a way that leads to the right patient outcome.
• 25:03
  David: A question I have is about how this patient behavior is evolving.
• 25:07
  David: As you mentioned, people are used to getting personalized information.
• 25:10
  David: That's always being refined.
• 25:12
  David: There's new technologies, new social media.
• 25:15
  David: Uh, there's some, probably some feedback loop in here and I'm wondering about how dynamic the insights are.
• 25:22
  David: So in other words, if you put me in, let's say a given segment and I didn't, you know, even it's a micro segment and I, I didn't change much, how much does the environment change?
• 25:32
  David: And my behavior changed just because of other, you know, if everyone's hitting me with the same type of message, like how, how are these things changing over time?
• 25:38
  David: I'm, I may not be asking the question exactly right, but I have something in my mind about what all these forces are doing to behavior.
• 25:45
  Bill: Well, I think there's, there's, uh, it's kind of two ways to think about this.
• 25:49
  Bill: One is, you know, does it evolve over time?
• 25:51
  Bill: Yes, but it, it tends to involve with a broader environment, right?
• 25:56
  Bill: So 10 years ago, texting a patient a reminder on a refill wasn't nearly that common, you know, some, some pharmacies were doing that, but, but it wasn't common today.
• 26:07
  Bill: If you don't have texting in your program, you know, people are like, well, why not?
• 26:12
  Bill: My mom, who is in her 80s, texts me.
• 26:14
  Bill: You know, it's just so common now that, that that has evolved.
• 26:19
  Bill: Um, but those are kind of slow, right?
• 26:21
  Bill: They evolve as the broader environment evolves.
• 26:24
  Bill: Do you think you will see a few more disruptive things?
• 26:28
  Bill: So we talked a little bit about the generative AI.
• 26:31
  Bill: You know, can you imagine organizations start to use generative AI in their patient facing environment?
• 26:38
  Bill: Yeah.
• 26:39
  Bill: And then does somebody feel tricked if they, you know, figure it out?
• 26:44
  Bill: Will, will they not trust the healthcare environment as much?
• 26:48
  Bill: Or maybe there are some people who would trust it more.
• 26:51
  Bill: Um, maybe you actually change the, the way you use it so you can use generative AI to kind of feed personalized content to a live person before it goes to a patient.
• 27:01
  Bill: Yeah.
• 27:02
  Bill: You know, I, I do think there are some disruptive things that go on, you know, I would also say that, you know, COVID and, and some of the influence that social media had, that was pretty disruptive, that was something that, uh, you know, I don't think people five years ago, or now six years ago, pre COVID would have really even thought about as being, um, but in the end, you know, I think you're, you're going to see AI revolutionize the, the patient experience and, At least for me, I'm looking forward to seeing how ELASA can, can lead when it comes to these pharma marketing and patient support programs.
• 27:35
  Bill: GLP
• 27:36
  David: 1 drugs have been huge.
• 27:39
  David: They continue to increase in the US and globally for, you know, weight loss primarily, but diabetes and then a whole host of other conditions that are, that are coming out.
• 27:50
  David: And I have to think that, you know, adherence is going to be important there.
• 27:57
  David: And I wonder whether this is just One more class of drugs and it's similar to others?
• 28:02
  David: Or is there, or is there something fundamentally different about the GLP ones?
• 28:06
  David: Other than the fact of just how much money is being spent?
• 28:09
  David: Um, you know, any, what, what, what does GLP one mean overall for adherence and, and what does it mean to Lazo specifically?
• 28:16
  Bill: So one of the, the neat things, our technology that can adapt for these different kinds of medicines.
• 28:21
  Bill: But I do think what's interesting about the GLP ones.
• 28:25
  Bill: You know, most people, when they think of medicine, think of kind of a once a day or sometimes a multiple time a day medicine.
• 28:33
  Bill: Most GLP 1s, I'm not going to say all, but, you know, they're a weekly dosing.
• 28:38
  Bill: And so right there, you're just suddenly changing somebody's expectation.
• 28:43
  Bill: I also think it's interesting, just the, A kind of collective consciousness about those medicines that you didn't often see except for other really large name brand medicines that kind of exploded in popularity.
• 28:57
  Bill: Uh, you know, it treats a large sloth of the population, as you had mentioned, diabetes, weight loss.
• 29:03
  Bill: Uh, and, and, you know, more evidence is showing other, uh, disease states that can be treated.
• 29:09
  Bill: Um, I do think it's going to be interesting because, uh, one of the, one of the things about adherence that you see in some therapies is that, you know, well, I feel better, so I'm going to stop.
• 29:21
  David: Yeah.
• 29:21
  Bill: Um, or I don't feel any different, so I'm going to stop.
• 29:25
  Bill: Right.
• 29:25
  Bill: So you can see some of those.
• 29:29
  Bill: Many of the, the direct impacts are actually visible, right?
• 29:33
  Bill: They're visible to the patient, they're visible to their friends and families.
• 29:37
  Bill: You know, I think you're going to have some kind of self reinforcing of, well, I have lost weight or, you know, my clothes fit better or, you know, my, you know, spouse or my family told me I'm looking better or, or whatever.
• 29:51
  Bill: Uh, those things become part of a motivation factor that we see as well.
• 29:56
  Bill: So.
• 29:57
  Bill: So it's going to be really interesting to see how that, uh, how that, uh, evolves over time.
• 30:02
  Bill: But, uh, but in, in principle, again, as I think about our company and what we do, you know, they still need to have ongoing support.
• 30:12
  Bill: Maybe they need a weekly reminder instead of a daily reminder or.
• 30:17
  Bill: Um, or whatnot and, and the technology we have can actually still support even though there's dynamics around this, this therapy area that's different than what you may see across a lot of more traditional medicines.
• 30:30
  David: So my last question is one I ask all of my guests, uh, which is for a book recommendation.
• 30:35
  David: Have you read any good books lately or even in the past, there's anything that you would recommend to our audience or recommend that they avoid because it's a waste of time?
• 30:44
  Bill: Uh, well not avoid.
• 30:45
  Bill: So.
• 30:46
  Bill: Um, recently the, the series Silo came out on, on, I think it's on Apple TV, but, uh, but the Silo series by an author named Hugh Howie, uh, I read it several years ago, like during the COVID era and, uh, it, it's a fascinating read.
• 31:06
  Bill: Um, and if you haven't seen the show, I would definitely recommend read the, read the series beforehand.
• 31:12
  Bill: Um, but when you, you, you just dive into this world and you're like, well, what are these people doing?
• 31:19
  Bill: Why are they in this silo?
• 31:21
  Bill: And, but for somebody who kind of has always been fascinated by the engineering, the problem solving, um, and problem solving is actually a key piece of the plot development that occurs, but, but it's just a fascinating read and, and I was even telling my wife the other day as we were watching the latest in the TV series that, I wish it was a set of books I could go back and read again the first time, because it's just so fascinating to kind of experience it.
• 31:48
  David: Great.
• 31:49
  David: Well, that's it for the latest episode of the health biz podcast.
• 31:52
  David: My guest today has been Bill Grambley, CEO of AllazoHealth.
• 31:55
  David: We've been talking about the use of AI for personalizing patient engagement to drive medication initiation and adherence.
• 32:02
  David: Bill, thanks so much for joining me today.
• 32:04
  Bill: Thank you.