AESOP Technology, in collaboration with AstraZeneca Taiwan, has unveiled Medigator, an innovative AI software designed to manage immune-related adverse events (irAEs) and enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapy. With cancer being the second leading cause of death and immunotherapy offering improved survival rates, Medigator is specially designed to address the potential challenges associated with irAEs that may deter some patients from choosing this treatment.

The American Cancer Society estimates that of the 2 million new cancer cases in the U.S. in 2023, about half could be eligible for immunotherapy treatment. While this treatment stimulates the patient's immune system to fight cancer, it can potentially trigger an overactive immune response, leading to irAEs.
Managing irAEs is challenging due to the unique immune responses and variability in the reaction to immunotherapy. The intensified immune response that fights cancer cells can inadvertently harm normal tissues. Effective communication is crucial to educate patients about possible side effects, readiness for assistance, and timely medical intervention. Mild irAEs can often be managed symptomatically with topical treatments, while severe cases may require discontinuing immunotherapy and administering immune-suppressing medications.

To address the complexities of managing irAEs, Medigator offers real-time assistance to physicians. This tool manages the risk of irAEs and is seamlessly integrated into the Computerized Physician Order Entry system.
"By harnessing the power of big data analytics, Medigator analyzes real-world patient experiences with irAEs, physicians' management strategies, and patient responses to treatment based on a dataset of 197,921 claim-based prescriptions. Using these analytical parameters, Medigator goes a step further by predicting the risk levels of different irAEs in individual patients. It provides personalized medication options by considering factors such as patient age, gender, race, chronic medical conditions, and genetic history, empowering physicians to enhance their risk management strategies in the care plan," explained Jim Long, CEO of AESOP Technology.

"Medigator is an immunotherapy medication navigator designed for physicians. It aims to minimize interruptions in immunotherapy, preserve valuable treatment time and resources, and alleviate the treatment burden," said Jim Long.

"The origin of the partnership between AESOP Technology and AstraZeneca Taiwan traces back to 2019 at an international biomedical accelerator co-hosted by AstraZeneca A.Catalyst Network and the National Biotechnology Research Park in Taiwan, which is dedicated to exploring new possibilities to change patients' lives. Medigator has set a promising example demonstrating patient-centric innovation by advancing shared decision-making in precision medicine," said Ben Chen, Medical Director, AstraZeneca Taiwan.

The research findings of Medigator, which were recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, received notable attention. AESOP Technology continues its unwavering commitment to delivering physicians with precise and personalized solutions for irAEs as immunotherapy advances. Its ultimate goal is to enhance immunotherapy treatment outcomes and improve patients' overall quality of life.

Reference
Yahoo Finance

AESOP Technology announced that they have been accepted into Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate, a 20-week program that helps early-stage health tech AI startups get market-ready.

Participants are selected through a competitive screening process where a panel of Mayo Clinic leaders reviews them from the clinical and operational perspective, led by John Halamka, MD., President of Mayo Clinic Platform.

"It's an excellent opportunity for a medical AI startup like us. Data is the fuel from which everything grows into power, and this program provides de-identified patient datasets and tools to help us validate our solutions," says Jeremiah Scholl, the CPO of AESOP Technology. "This practical experience will help us go even further in developing better products. The fact that we get to be mentored by Mayo Clinic's reputable experts is inspiring."

'AESOP',  which stands for 'AI-Enhanced Safety of Prescription', is working to make physician data entry easier, faster, and less error-prone using machine learning on 3.2 billion data sets. The company has developed products capable of this. One is RxPrime which detects wrong drug errors by checking if medications match patients' diagnoses, age, and gender.

Errors can happen at any stage of the medication-use process, but more than 50% of them occur during the prescribing phase. RxPrime is able to detect potential and unexplained errors in prescriptions and provide optimal recommendations, even for the look-alike-sound-alike medication errors. It offers just-in-time decision support without interfering unnecessarily with the clinical consultation process.

The other is AESOP Technology's latest clinical documentation improvement tool, DxPrime, making it easier for doctors to input correct diagnoses into electronic health record systems. This task can be challenging as there are 68,000 different diagnosis codes under the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The ICD codes were designed to support insurance and billing rather than clinical medicine.

"Medical professionals are more overwhelmed with their workload after the pandemic. How AI can support them gains more importance," says Jim Long, the CEO of AESOP Technology. "AI is transforming the healthcare industry in a variety of ways, like any other industry. Healthcare has unique challenges, and this program will help us be more grounded."
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As a participant of the Mayo Clinic Platform_Accelerate, AESOP Technology is glad to expose themselves to real-world applications, which helps cultivate future growth in this rapidly progressing field.  As part of the program, Mayo Clinic will take an equity position in the startup.

Reference: yahoo finance

Medical AI start-up Aesop Technology announced a new partnership that made their new product, DxPrime, available in the Olive Library. DxPrime provides physicians and clinical documentation improvement (CDI) teams with information about missing and wrongly coded diagnoses and procedures to correct the patient's chart in just a few clicks. It makes completing discharge summaries, prioritizing work for CDI teams, and medical coding much easier, faster, and less error-prone.
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If the patient record is incorrect, you cannot code correctly.

Completeness, precision, and validity of medical documentation are critical for all healthcare stakeholders. Without correct patient records, patients could receive improper discharge instructions and a sub-optimal continuum of care. Providers also can struggle to estimate the length of stay and code insurance claims correctly, resulting in denials and loss of revenue.

Approximately 10% of inpatient claims are denied, of which more than 85% (or about $35 billion) result in unnecessary losses. Many of these denials occur because of errors in the patient record that occur upstream from the claims process. Diagnosis input errors are difficult for physicians to avoid because the knowledge of coding systems is different from what they need to learn to provide great patient care. Modern medicine's complexity has caused 14,400 diseases to be included in ICD-10, further classified into 68,000 ICD-10-CM and 87,000 ICD-10-PCS codes.

"Physicians, CDI team, and coders have to spend a lot of time poring through medical records to find the key clinical diagnoses among the vast amount of information available," said Jim Long, CEO of AESOP. "After that, they have to follow a series of inefficient steps on the computer to complete the input process, and search functionality for ICD codes often is not helpful. The whole process is complex, time-consuming, and error-prone.

When the physicians input the improper diagnosis, it also has downstream implications. "When using DxPrime, we have helped physicians often notice they did not correctly code complications such as urinary tract infections and respiratory failure. By assisting them in inputting the proper diagnoses, our partners have seen an increase in revenue of 5-10% per inpatient."

State-of-the-art machine learning assisted physician data entry.

DxPrime provides high-quality suggestions to support physician data entry based on a machine learning model (published in the Healthcare journal) that has been run on top of data from 3.2 Billion patient visits, including vast amounts of structured information. It allows DxPrime to use items from the patient record like lab test results and medications ordered when predicting a diagnosis.
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This comprehensive model utilizes artificial intelligence to efficiently compensate for traditional CDSS and NLP weaknesses to find correct or missed diagnoses.

​Ten startups from the Taiwan Tech Arena (TTA) will participate in the program's first Global Innovation Pitch Showcase, produced in partnership with Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley's highly competitive global startup accelerator. Silicon Valley VCs, angel investors and industry professionals will attend the virtual event. Interested investors may register to join the pitch Showcase here.

TTA, funded by Taiwan's Ministry of Science and Technology, is focused on building a vibrant tech ecosystem of Asian startups. Each year, they select a cohort of up to 30 startups to participate in the TTA Silicon Valley accelerator, with eight of the startups participating with SkyDeck as part of its Global Innovation Partners program. This event marks the first time TTA is producing a pitch showcase with SkyDeck.

"We are proud to connect the outstanding Taiwanese tech talent with the impressive entrepreneurial community of Berkeley SkyDeck," said the TTA Silicon Valley office. "Since 2016, we have brought more than 150 innovators from Taiwan to the U.S. to build strong international relationships and connections and attract investment. And it's noteworthy that most of the startups' businesses stem from academia. To date more than half of these Taiwanese startups have raised money. With the new Showcase, we're thrilled we can share their talents, ideas and innovations on a global stage."

SkyDeck's Global Innovation Partner Program serves as a bridge for global startup teams as they participate in the SkyDeck entrepreneurial ecosystem and bring their ideas to the U.S. market. A limited number of startups from outside the U.S. are selected to participate in the partner program alongside the SkyDeck Batch (cohort) and Pad-13 (incubator) teams.

"Working closely with TTA has been a wonderful experience for all of us," said Caroline Winnett, Executive Director, Berkeley SkyDeck "Not only are the teams from Taiwan getting an immersive learning and networking experience at SkyDeck, they will return home ready to launch and create economic opportunities in their communities. We look forward to helping jumpstart these startups here in the U.S. and then seeing how they grow."
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The Aug. 19 Showcase will feature the following startups:

• AESOP: AESOP aims to reduce medication errors and billing errors, thus enhancing patient safety and optimizing revenue with AI-powered technologies.

Reference: yahoo finance

Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley's startup accelerator, today hosts its Demo Day featuring 21 innovative global startups specializing in a wide range of industries including AI, enterprise software, robotics, health, bioscience, and consumer solutions. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the first time SkyDeck's Demo Day will take place virtually.

In fact, instead of coming together in the Bay Area, this cohort is the first that ever participated in the entire accelerator program remotely from their home locations -- around the U.S. and around the world from such countries as Armenia, Canada, Chile, India, Israel, Russia, Taiwan, and Turkey.

"This year has been one like no other with many challenges, and I could not be more proud of our startups for their grit, determination, and perseverance to succeed," said Caroline Winnett, Executive Director, Berkeley SkyDeck. "Major challenges force us all to be even more innovative and creative in the way we problem-solve. We definitely saw this in our founders."

"We recognized early on that startup founders would be concerned about their ability to fundraise while COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on the economy. To ensure our startups would have a leg up, we doubled down and have been working even more closely with them to ensure that they are getting strong access to top tier investors that care about what they are building," said Chon Tang, Founding Partner of the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund.

AESOP Technology

AESOP Technology reduces medication errors using machine learning run on more than 2 billion prescriptions. They do this by providing decision support and reporting that flags inappropriate prescriptions, where the medications prescribed do not match the diagnosis, age, and gender of the patient. They also supply a medication and diagnosis suggestion engine that is being used to support intelligent workflow tools inside Electronic Patient Record systems.

Referred from: yahoo finance