Guests: Malekeh Amini and Dr. Carl Feinstein

Presenter: Neal Howard

Guest Bio: CEO and Founder, Malekeh Amini, is the parent to a child with a multi-system neurological disorder. She experienced firsthand the frustration and defeated feeling of walking out of a doctor’s appointment after being redirected time after time to a new physician to treat a new symptom. Instead of considering whether these conditions were related or causal, they were treated individually and the coordination and care was left up to her.

Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, Carl Feinstein, M.D., founded and directed the Stanford Autism Center. He has dedicated most of his life to helping children with autism receive the best care possible and is currently a Professor Emeritus in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Stanford University and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the UC Riverside School of Medicine.

Segment Overview: In this health supplier segment, Trayt Technologies CEO, Malekeh Amini and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Carl Feinstein discuss the launch of their comorbid treatment platform that leverages big data and analytics to measure the efficacy of interventions for patients with neurodevelopmental and brain disorders.  

Trayt was designed to treat patients holistically. The Trayt application enables patients and caretakers to track behavioral and non-behavioral symptoms through its patent pending comorbid rating scale and to accurately measure effectiveness of their treatments. The data is then analyzed and presented in a simple dashboard with progress reports and personalized, actionable insights.

Transcript

Neal Howard: Welcome to this health supplier segment here on Health Professional Radio. Glad that you could join us. I’m your host, Neal Howard. In this health supplier segment, Trayt Technologies CEO Malekeh Amini and chief medical officer Dr. Carl Feinstein are here to discuss the launch of their comorbid treatment platform that leverages big data and analytics to measure the efficacy of interventions for patients with neuro developmental and brain disorders as a mouthful and I’ll let both of our guests talk about that. Welcome to the program. Thank you both for joining us today.

Malekeh Amini: Thank you.

N: So, Dr. Feinstein, talk a little bit about your background and how you got into Trayt Technologies along with Malekeh.

Dr. Carl Feinstein: Well, I am a child psychiatrist and I have been in practice for many many years. And I am retired, Emeritus professor and former chief of child psychiatry at Stanford University and other places and currently still working a little bit part-time in a preschool program at UC Riverside School of Medicine, and I am an expert on brain disorders and child behavior problems with a particular interest and passion that developed over my whole career in helping parents negotiate a very difficult set of problems and very unresponsive medical institutions. So I was pondering what to do with my approaching retirement and I was blessed to have Malekeh Amini approached me and asked me whether I would work with her on what seems like a common agenda which was basically how to improve the system of care for children with brain and behavior problems and particularly, how to help parents negotiate that system. I just was in love with the idea right away and I’ve been working with Trayt ever since.

N: Malekeh, your background, have you always been involved in child development?

M: No, Neal. Actually again, thank you so much for having us on your show. I actually am an engineer by background. So it’s the technology side that has been kind of part of my background. I got my MBA from Harvard and then really got involved in the healthcare industry in general from a consulting at … I started with the Boston Consulting Group and really started advising corporations on what was at the time called patient-centric models of disease management or all kinds of different, various sub segments of healthcare. And that’s where my healthcare experience came in In 2010 my son was diagnosed with a complex neurological disorder and since then, he started to show several new symptoms and disorders almost on a bi-monthly basis and I was just lost in the process of who to see for what symptom and why were these new conditions popping up and that’s my exposure to brain disorders started really with his condition, but also with some background that I had with all over the course of my career in healthcare. But then what his condition and my kind of converging my technology in healthcare experience led to starting Trayt.

N: So your company just launched and let’s talk about this merging of big data and and the analysis of that data, are we talking about determining the best interventions or determining how long an intervention should stay in effect? What exactly are we talking about that Trayt Technologies is involved in?

N: Well, currently. Yes, the system of medical care is very fragmented and each specialty has its own set of evidence-based rules that it follows and those evidence-based rules are based mostly on clinical trials which are very expensive very specialized ways of selecting highly motivated families and patients to participate in trying out new forms of treatment and it tends to be a very slow progress, a kind of system where we’re still operating often out of an evidence-based which may have happened 20 years ago. So basically, the problem with that system is that meanwhile millions of patients and their families, I’ve seen thousands and thousands of doctors and other care providers and those patients are providing tons of information about real real-life information, about realizations as to why aren’t they selected for anything, who are just regular people trying to make progress in their lives, and doctors who are just trying to do the best they can, talking with trust after they leave the trial-and-error system and they leave the evidence-based system and go through a trial and error system. The big idea behind having a bioinformatics approach is that we should be getting information about all those …, about all those patients and all those parents who are saying and what all those doctors are doing. We should be collecting all the information about all the patient and not just a few to collect pieces of information. And we should be seeing how different children different families respond to different treatments. Right now, nobody really knows. Treatment might help 60% of children and might not help 40% of children and we don’t know why but the answer lies in big data and finding out more about the total circumstances of the child, the total biology of the child and the total environment of the child, and not going … Then we can ask lots of questions and if we have enough cases, we can come up with what I would call personalized medicine. That is really being able to say, “Oh, your child has these three different kinds of problems and this kind of task history.” We know from looking at a thousand cases that this is the type of condition they respond the best to this type of treatment. That’s what we call personalized medicine and I think that is the big goal behind a great pile of Informatics.

N: Malekeh, it’s a daunting task. How do you get all of that information into a cohesive efficiently usable format? It seems almost impossible, but I’m sure that you’ve got some answer for me.

M: Yes, I know of course, it is a daunting task. What we have actually focused on is, we’ve spent basically two years of our time on really focusing on what are the most critical pieces of data that we do need to collect in order to achieve the type of database and analytics that we require in order to really improve care and outcome. So part of our focus went into making sure the data itself is just enough data and not too much data or not too little data. The next step was to really create a platform and an user engagement model around the application for data collection and for data retrieval. What we did is we brought in a team of experts. We brought in someone from Google who had been working on all of the consumer facing products of Google and had been focused on the user interaction and user interface there to help us build a product that simplifies data collection and more importantly synthesize the data visualization so that people can not only answer the right data very quickly and very easily but also for the other side, at the clinician side to be able to look at the data and very quickly make sense of it. So our focus really has been on creating that product that is going to facilitate that process.

N: And I’m assuming extremely easily streamlined based on each professionals needs and each individual patient both mental aspects and the physical aspects that may affect the ADHD or any other developmental issue that the child might be facing. Am I correct in assuming that?

M: That’s very correct. So our product is, as a patient, if you have cognitive ability, you can collect your own data or for patients who are not able to interact with the application, a caregiver or a parent will be collecting that data for them and every application is customizable so you can create your own items for tracking or outcomes or data collection if it’s not captured easily in our app. So we’ve captured the word of maybe 85% of symptoms and conditions that tend to overlap but every parent and every patient can customize their own application and every physician can customize their own portal.
N: Well, we’d like to go online and learn some more about Trayt Technologies. Where can we learn some more about this brand new enterprise?
N: Well, you can go to trayt.io on our website and read more about what we do. You can also go to the IOS app store and search for Trayt health and our application with that bright orange icon will show up. You can download and create a health profile and really start to track outcomes on our application. We also have our Facebook page, which is Trayt health and you can learn more about the company and about the content that’s really meaningful to what we do on our Facebook page as well.

N: And that’s T-R-A-Y-T trayt.io.

M: Exactly.

N: Well, I thank you both for coming in today, Malekeh Amini and Dr. Carl Feinstein, some great information very exciting developments and I’m hoping to hear from you in the future as things take off with your company.

M: Thank you so much for having us, Neal.

F: Thank you.

N: You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio. I’m your host, Neal Howard. Transcripts and audio of this program are available at healthprofessionalradio.com.au and also at hpr.fm You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes listen in and download it on SoundCloud and be sure and visit our affiliates page at healthprofessionalradio.com.au

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