From Traditional Care to AI-Driven Health Innovation

Discover how AI is not just a buzzword but a transformative force in healthcare with our insightful guest, Ronald Graefe from Kaia Health, a pioneering figure in the Meditech field.

As we navigate the intersection of artificial intelligence and medicine, Ronald shares enlightening anecdotes from his 25-year journey, revealing how AI-guided digital therapies are reshaping patient care.

Learn about the practical hurdles faced by medical practitioners and the innovative strategies that can help overcome these barriers, ensuring that AI's benefits are not just theoretical but accessible to all.

From AI-powered physiotherapy you can do from the comfort of your home to ground breaking diagnostic tools, this episode explores the future of healthcare. Ronald paints a vivid picture of a world where AI closes the care gap, offering personalized and cost-effective treatment options that are revolutionizing patient engagement and self-care.

Listen to success stories that showcase how Kaia Health is leading the charge in making healthcare more accessible and equitable.

Whether you're a healthcare professional or simply curious about the potential of AI, this conversation promises to expand your understanding of modern medicine's digital transformation.

Host: Kieran Gilmurray Kieran Gilmurray | LinkedIn
Guest: Ronald Graefe: Ronald Graefe | LinkedIn

Transcript

Kieran Gilmurray: 0:00

Welcome to AI Unscripted, where I meet leaders from a wide variety of industries who use AI to make an impact on our world. Ai and healthcare is a growing area of impact but not often debated, but today we will change that. Ronald, it's great to meet you. For those who don't know you, might you say who you are and give us a quick introduction to what's happening in the world of Meditech?

Ronald Graefe: 0:27

Happy to be here. Thank you for the invitation, Kieran. I started my AI journey 25 years ago. I started my journey into the medical field and currently I Kai at . We offer digital therapies to patients and the role of my team and I is to help patients, but also provider, understand the use of AI in our product and to help to overcome them, their barriers they may have.

Kieran Gilmurray: 0:55

You mentioned the word barriers there. What are the key barriers to implementing AI in healthcare and, importantly, how do we overcome them?

Ronald Graefe: 1:04

In day-to-day conversations with physicians, but also with patients, you realize that the AI is a more important topic than it used to be years ago. On the other side, you see that the physicians are used to their conventional work, they're used to their clinical routines. They they're just starting their ai journey in the day-to-day practice. A lot of times I hear from physicians that they do not think about, for instance, prescribing an innovative crp using ai, because it is not so much in their mind, because they still think about physical drugs, because that's what patients typically would ask for. But they also have non-drug alternatives on the hand which they often don't think in the first place. We offer AI-guided physiotherapy support at home. Ai-guided physiotherapy support at home. All the data processing takes place locally on their smartphones and we have trained our models with studio data. So we had models performing different exercises, which helped us to train our models. But also we used 200 000 of synthetic images in order to train our model and with that we are ready to the market and there are no doubts about data privacy.

Kieran Gilmurray: 2:37

So, to get AI to actually work, we've a couple of hurdles. We've got the doctors, who are what I would say is creature to habit, whose habits need changed, and we've also got some regulation that limits doctors from actually, you know, being able to roll out AI technology and what you're describing. There is a technology that allows you to offer alternative treatments to patients using their mobile and smartphones. Is that what I'm hearing? And that there is showing patients, or potential patients, different exercises to allow them to technically heal themselves?

Ronald Graefe: 3:20

Exactly so. What we do is we close the care gap. So there's not only a shortage of physicians, but also, you see, that's quite challenging to get a physiotherapy appointment. And what we do is we offer digital therapies digital therapeutic which runs on a patient smartphone. You place yourself into the right scheme and then you get visit visual but also all your guidance about how you perform the exercises. And when you try it for the first time, you're really amazed how good it works. It works at different light settings, different home settings, so that's really a wonderful experience and the people who started loving the app they do not want to stop.

Kieran Gilmurray: 4:07

How else is AI transforming patient care and what do you see that's coming in the future, that's going to improve patient care even further?

Ronald Graefe: 4:17

The first use cases which are happening are more like in the diagnostic and the CRP. But sooner or later we will see also the impact on prevention. If we know that certain behavior will lead to a certain disease early on, we can actually counteract.

Kieran Gilmurray: 4:38

So what role can AI play in improving healthcare accessibility and reducing disparities? Improving healthcare accessibility and reducing disparities because most of us no longer have ready access to all of the medical professionals we need, because the number of people seeking medical help is outweighing, you know, the number of medical professionals in the market. So can ai improve accessibility?

Ronald Graefe: 5:03

so the example of the ai powered motion coach in the smartphone app is just one example. So there's no real need to see a physiotherapist on a day-to-day basis and that allows users to train on their own pace as they go. And what we do at Kaia is we want to enable free access to our users, but also we showcase that we save the health system a lot of money.

Kieran Gilmurray: 5:38

So, Ron, what are the success stories of AI adoption in healthcare? Are there more lessons? Can we learn from them?

Ronald Graefe: 5:45

When we look into the wider space in the ambulatory or inpatient care sector, we do see a lot of improvements, so specifically in the image-guided support, also in cancer therapy, that the use of AI helps to identify the relevant patients or the relevant CRP alternatives better and with that, like symptom checkers, can really offload the physicians, help them to stratify the patients first, and then they only need to review the proposal and propose the CRP.

Kieran Gilmurray: 6:33

I kind of like that because all of a sudden it's not just giving everything over to the machine but it's actually augmenting a wonderful professional with, you know, potentially a diagnosis, a recommendation that they then determine the next action. Ronald, thank you so much indeed. I really appreciate you coming on to the podcast today to tell us that little bit more about AI and healthcare Fascinating area with more discoveries to come.