Medication is usually essential for good outcomes, how can we help patients adhere to theirs?
In this episode of Bite the Orange, we have the pleasure of talking to a neurosurgeon turned health-tech entrepreneur, Dr. Katrina Firlik! She talks about her journey from neurosurgery to co-founding HealthPrize Technologies and how they are leading the industry regarding app engagement and medication adherence. HealthPrize utilizes intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to keep its patients taking their medications. Many patients stop their medications out of poor education and misinformation about their treatments, two issues that Katrina and her team address. She also mentions their short-term goals and where HealthPrize can go in the future!
Tune in and listen to the Mary Poppins of medication adherence!
FULL EPISODE
BTO_Katrina Firlik: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
BTO_Katrina Firlik: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Welcome to Bite the Orange. Through our conversations, we create a roadmap for the future of health with the most impactful leaders in the space. This is your host, Dr. Manny Fombu. Let's make the future of healthcare a reality together.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Good morning, good afternoonood evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another episode of Bite the Orange, where today we have a very special guest with quite an incredible background and quite a personal story. Today we have Dr. Katrina Firlik. She's a neurosurgeon turned digital health entrepreneur and she's the co-founder and chief medical officer of HealthPrize, a company that I know personally pretty well, actually spent some time down in the offices, right down in Connecticut and met some of their leaders and I think a fantastic company with a great psychology behind it. And so today, we are honored to have Dr. Katrina Firlik. Welcome to the show.
Katrina Firlik:
Thank you, Dr. Fombu. It's great to be here.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you. So tell us something about yourself, for those that don't know you.
Katrina Firlik:
As you mentioned, I started off my career as a neurosurgeon. I was a practicing neurosurgeon in Connecticut, in Greenwich, Connecticut, and on the clinical faculty at Yale. And I started to get interested in medical innovation, entrepreneurship, and came across some concepts that led to HealthPrize Technologies. I ended up being co-founder and then chief medical officer of the company. At first I thought I might be able to do a little part-time neurosurgery, part-time co-founder. And then I realized it's a bit difficult to be a part-time neurosurgeon who wants a part-time brain surgeon. So I did have to jump ship, which was not an easy decision, but it did lead to HealthPrize.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Not a very bad idea to jump ship, because I'm sure all the knowledge you learned as a neurosurgeon that comes into behavior as well. So a lot of times, how would you describe the training of a neuro, of a neurosurgeon to that of the behavioral psychologist, for example? So a lot of times as a surgeon myself, when I look at the concept of neurosurgeon, I'm thinking they just go into brain and just pick out things in there. But I'm sure you also have to understand how the brain works, right? And how humans, humans behave in general.
Katrina Firlik:
Yeah, you do. It's interesting. There are so many different brain specialists and the brain surgeon is very physical in nature. Obviously, we're the only ones that are really tinkering with the brain physically. And yes, as you mentioned, Manny, we are thinking about how the brain works, and that's essential to knowing how to operate, where to operate, when to operate. But what we're really focused on, what's inside the skull, the contents, not just the brain, but the blood vessels, the spinal fluid, the physiology of it all. So we do have a really particular focus on the physicality of the brain. But it's a really amazing field because you're focused on the physical, physical and the functional.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Right, which brings us down to the nitty gritty of the matter and what we are doing today. All right, so I first got interested in. HealthPrize several years ago when I worked at Novartis ... Johnson, but the idea was, at the time within the life science companies in general, or if you look at on the payer side, we had a gazillion apps right within the company. So you can literally pick one brand or one product and you find out that each one has like ten apps. And if you look at engagement rates, they were actually pretty low, right? So and I remember sometimes on some apps we would spend millions of dollars to build these apps and then find out that you had five people engaged, and no, six months ago, the people that's still working on this. But we had no behavior expertise behind this, which is more ... o app hire UX UI designers and let's deploy the app and then everyone would jump on it, right? And we tried on several pieces and this the whole psychology behind this and the psychology of gamification, for example, I think that played a role in your title, your name of your company HealthPrize, although I'm just guessing, maybe not.
Katrina Firlik:
No, absolutely. Absolutely. Health. Health is the ultimate prize, but we actually use prizes, extrinsic motivators, and I can talk more about that. But as you mentioned, HealthPrize is, it's both in pharma and in the payer space, and we're all about behavior change. We have a specific focus on medication adherence. That's our real core strength, and we're real experts in medication adherence. But we've, unlike the pharma apps that you describe, we have very high engagement rates and we're very proud of that. And that's what really makes us special, is the engagement.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So with that being, with that being said, throughout my engagement, like I said about five years ago with HealthPrize, with they HealthPrize leadership team. I've since read a book called Connected and I learned a lot about interaction between humans, right, and how the whole network affects. I believe there's a whole science behind this that's much deeper. But for the average user or listener right now that has never actually experienced or knows anything about patient engagement, has no idea about what happens here. What exactly was the problem you went out to solve? What was that gap? What was that? We need to solve this problem. What's the problem? What's your problem statement?
Katrina Firlik:
Yes, that's really the core question here. And the core issue is that medication in many cases is essential to good outcomes, right? It's essential to preventing the downstream complications of chronic disease. And as a neurosurgeon, I was frequently at the end of the line after someone had suffered the complication of a chronic disease, say, not taking the high blood pressure pills and then ending up with bleeding in the brain 20 years later, for example. I saw that all the time and I knew that non-adherence was a contributor to the poor outcomes. So HealthPrize is all about trying to prevent those downstream complications. And so the core problem to answer the question is medication non-adherence, which is a fascinating problem. If you ask most people, why don't people take their meds? There's a knee jerk response out there. They cost too much or people just forget. And those are definitely valid concerns. But the problem is actually far more complex and far more interesting than those simple knee jerk responses. And so we really get to the heart of the matter beyond those kind of simple understandings.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So, Katrina, I think I'll bring this up, which is something that personal. And I think I shared this story in the past with some folks. My grandmother, interestingly, she grew up in Cameroon, in Central Africa, and she was uneducated, right? And she had high blood pressure, she had a stroke several years ago. She passed away 15 years ago, but she had a stroke. And I was in medical school at the time, and I remember coming to see her and we gave her all his medicines, right? So she has high blood pressure, she's taking ACE inhibitors, beta blockers, everything else you take in, and she'll come home, and, but her condition kept progressing, ande never understood why. And when she passed away, I came to our home and I moved to a couch. And guess what? I saw all her medications under the couch. She never had to actually took them.
Katrina Firlik:
Oh, my God.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Yes. She never took them. And so I realized how this point that even like adherence, even educating her about what was happening .... was something that didn't work. And so there's something that, that's particularly important to me, like in general, from adherence perspective, what the outcomes are, that's one. And then two, down in my career as well, developing drugs and letting drugs in the market, you find out that sometimes you have like specific doses of medications that patients need to take at the right time. And if you're doing research in general, you also want to take the drugs and to get them engaged in this process. If we don't, they have bad outcomes. And with that being said and that in mind, what are some of the things that HealthPrize does that is unique to HealthPrize that gets patients engaged?
Katrina Firlik:
First, thank you for sharing that story about your grandmother. That's really, that's, I'm sorry to hear it and it's a very dramatic story. I'll remember that one. But what HealthPrize does is we were really the first company to combine gamification with education and then deep insights from behavioral science. Okay, so again, we're not just giving someone a discount or giving them a reminder, those work to some degree, but they don't work very well. So what we've realized is you have to we have to use multiple levers because it's a very complex problem. And I like to think of it as trying to be the Mary Poppins of medication adherence. We're trying to add a spoonful of sugar to this process because who likes to take medications? I actually, using your Bite the Orange analogy, I'll call it like biting the grapefruit, like taking, getting a patient to take a medication, not only do you have to get over the fact that you were diagnosed with a condition and have to take a medication, those are both negative. Then you have to take the medication, and it's not sweet, right? It's bitter. So if we can make that a little bit of a sweeter process by educating the patient, giving them rewards for filling and for taking the medication, and even more importantly, for taking quizzes about their condition, what we're doing is using extrinsic motivation, the points, the prizes, the leaderboards, the streaks, the gamification that gets people engaged and makes it fun within the long term, even more important, intrinsic motivation. When you take our educational quizzes over time, for points, so it's fun. People then truly internalize why they need to take the medication. So we use this combination that we think is really the secret sauce of long term engagement and behavior change.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which is quite interesting, if you look at like the whole space of gamification is something that, personally, I'm interested in and not just like video game conferences actually to understand how they go about ... gamification, that kind of idea. And this book also called Hooked, How to Build Habit-forming Products, which is quite interesting, right? Talk about ... The idea behind gamification and dopamine and how that actually works. There's a science behind this, right? It's not just, oh, let's just guess and make it work, right? If you have a like button on your on Facebook or whatever, you know what this looks like, right? You get alerts on your phone, right? These are all part of the gamification. So tell us more about that. That's ....
Katrina Firlik:
Yeah, totally. And by the way, this works across demographics. This is even wealthy people like to see their airline points build up and then get a class upgrade. This is across human, the human population in multiple ways. But the way it works is we've fine tuned this over the years is that we know that the idea of a short term reward can be important to getting people in the beginning, getting them to sign up, right? So if you get an email saying, hey, you're on this particular medication for your high blood pressure, would you like to earn points to learn about your condition and to show that you're taking your medication? And at first somebody might say, I've no interest but points? Sure. Oh, maybe I can get an Amazon gift card, all right, why not? That might be the little secret sauce that gets them to say yes, right? Is that superficial? Absolutely. Completely superficial, right? But we know that it works with many people. So if we can get them to sign up, that's the first hurdle. And then they'll get enticed by extra points for taking a quiz. You get five questions about your high blood pressure, right? Maybe you learn something new and then you see where you are in the leaderboard with the daily check ins. Some people are very competitive with that. I even had a lady early on who, it's funny, I went from neurosurgeon to customer service rep. I really wanted to be the person interacting with the patients on our system. In the beginning, I really wanted to understand what they liked and didn't like, so I was literally getting emails from patients saying, I'm going into surgery, I've been checking in every day. I'm worried I'm going to miss a couple days. I'm going to drop on the leaderboard. And I was thinking, gosh, this is crazy, I don't want to cause anxiety. But at the same time, I realize this is actually pretty sticky and she was excited about the program. I'm like, okay, something about this is working, and she, she cares about this. So we use the points, the leaderboard, we vary the number of points. So any given day, if you say, yes, I took my meds, you might get five points, you might get 100 points. If you miss those 100 points because you didn't check in, we show you what you missed, right? So there's that fear of regret. So we're using all of these kind of tried and true concepts from behavioral economics that are now becoming quite popular. But we've put them all together in one program. And again, that's, you know, I've been focusing more on the gamification points and prizes sort of thing. But really the education is, I would say, as the doctor in the company, even more important. But what's interesting is the education takes a while to sink in. So you can't just hand someone a pamphlet and say, here, read this boring pamphlet with boring graphics about why you need your blood pressure pill, right? Who's going to, who's going to internalize and really take that in. But if you give it to them a little bit by little bit, different angles, repeating in different ways, our goal and we know this works is to really have them internalize it and create the intrinsic motivation that leads to long term behavior change.
Emmanuel Fombu:
... I think it's the concept of positively health misinformation, which is another concept in, developed by another neuroscientist out of Harvard actually, and I spent time with him discussing his idea about how do you reinforce this idea in someone's mind. So I think and this applies around how important education, the educational side is. In my grandmother's case, she had all these medications, she had no idea what each medication does, but she knew that when she took one of them, she goes out, she has to pee all the time, and she didn't want to deal with that, right? And so she decided to take none of them, which I think something like this to educate her on this, right, to say, hey, this is what this pill does, right? This is why you take it and this is the benefits of it, I think it could have gone a long way to actually improve outcomes here. But with that being said, you also mentioned that you do this questionnaires and this, this surveys, which means you actually collect real evidence data to see how patients, you actually collect this, see how patients actually do on medication real time. Is that something you do right now?
Katrina Firlik:
Yeah, we actually, we're a little bit early on the curve in terms of really harnessing the tremendous amount of data that we're creating, that we're harvesting here. And so we have a lot more to do on that front. But we collect tons of engagement data. We collect data on what answers people are getting right versus wrong, which is very valuable. And we have tremendous potential right now, we've been focused really relentlessly on maximizing engagement rates, maximizing adherence and then more recently proving to payers that we're decreasing cost. But we have, as you mentioned, a ton of data that we have been mining and we're a little bit early in terms of what I can share on that. But we've been gathering this data for years and we believe it's truly valuable to both payer and ....
Emmanuel Fombu:
And I must say I'm quite impressed by some of the data that you have. You clearly showed that you have outcomes that actually last across the board, and everyone can go on your website and actually see some of these great outcomes. Looking at increasing adherence by increasing adherence to 44%, average adherence at 12 months, not over 90%, average reduction in total cost of care, about 24%. That's actually real outcomes. What are some of these outcomes? Tell us about this. This is quite fascinating. How long do you think it will actually accomplish all these?
Katrina Firlik:
Long to take to accomplish in terms of showing that or in terms of?
Emmanuel Fombu:
Oh, yes, it's quite impressive. These incredible numbers, with significant P values, by the way. Let's ignore the P values here.
Katrina Firlik:
And one thing, just for people who aren't that versed on the medication adherence problem, it's very difficult to move the needle on adherence tremendously. So I'll give you an example. So for people that think it's all about cost, right, they'll say people don't take it because it's expensive. And again, as I mentioned, that is an issue, right? But if you look across globally, global adherence numbers are, and there are many countries where patients have almost no out of pocket cost or far less than United States. So it's not just about cost. And we know that because there was a very interesting New England Journal of Medicine study that very carefully took patients after they had a heart attack in a hospital, and then half of them got all their copays covered for all their cardiothoracic, all their cardiac meds. The other half had to pay all their usual meds, copays, and they were able to increase adherence by only about six percentage points, right? A tiny amount. So free medication makes a dent in the problem, but a tiny dent. And so what we were able to show is 44% increase, which is 22 percentage points, just as a be true on the comparison there. It's multiple times what giving away meds for free does. And again, it's because it's human psychology. It's not just because it costs something out of pocket. It's because people don't want to be a patient or they have side effects and may not know that the side effects are transient or you can deal with them or they feel like they've lost control, that they're a failure that they have diabetes. And so they just don't want to think of themselves as a patient. Even women on adjuvant treatment for breast cancer stopped taking it after a few years. There's a large percentage of women who quit treatment and you're thinking, gosh, but this is a cancer diagnosis. It's because the psychology is very complex. And again, I'm going off on a tangent here, but.
Emmanuel Fombu:
No, you're not.
Katrina Firlik:
Yeah, that's why. ... Yeah, that's why our program is far more successful than just giving a medication away for free. It's because we're trying to tackle it from multiple angles, and the human psychology angle is really critical.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Which just because you mentioned cancer, actually, I have a friend that recently had was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and they went through chemo. And after that, they had to put them on pills after that, just to make sure that the cancer did not return. And they refused to take it because of the psychology piece of it, right? So they're like, I don't want to deal with it because, you already went through chemo for six months or seven months, right? Now, you have to get on some other medication piece to go. And there's no support to educate you or support you along the way and no platform to do that, so clearly, it's overwhelming. So you don't want to get engaged with that. And that's I think that's a big, major problem.
Katrina Firlik:
Yes. And that's, again, where the spoonful of sugar mentality actually helps a little bit. You're just trying to sweeten a little bit, right? Really having a condition, taking medication there, there's no fun in that, okay? So you really have to sweeten the, what are the benefits? What are the long term benefits? Are there some short term benefits that we can sweeten it by giving you some some points and prizes, high fives and sense of community because you're actually in a platform with other people on the same medication for the same reason. There's also a community element to being in our program. All those things are just trying to sweeten it a little bit, add a little bit of the fun factor, even though at first that was a big challenge for us was, the idea of adding fun to a healthcare program was a bit, a pill hard to swallow for some people and payer ind the pharma space.
Emmanuel Fombu:
No, which is quite interesting and I think in this space is quite important that this goes beyond the idea of just giving someone a drug and say, hey, go ahead and get it. Most, most prescriptions are not even refilled, ... Just take it and they never fill it up, they just take it, right, that's one side of it. And so we're not at a point of convincing a clinician to actually prescribe the medication. This is the point where the clinician believes that patient needs the medication. And now we're just trying to engage the patient to make sure they take the medicine so we get the lasting outcomes on this. And so with that being said, I know you have two main solutions that you offer 1 to pharma and 1 to payers. So can you tell us more about those individual offerings and how someone listening, for example, to work on the payer side or thepharma side, how they could engage with HealthPrize?
Katrina Firlik:
Sure. All of our programs, whether they're for payer or pharma, have similar essential elements. Education is core. The idea of the, the reward aspect is core. The gamification aspect is core. So all of our programs have those essential elements. The payer space, we have more of a medicine cabinet approach where patients can input and track multiple medications. So it's a more kind of holistic treatment of the patient. Whereas for pharma, it really is focused on one medication and the education goes deep on that particular medication. Whereas in the payer space, if a patient inputs a hypertension medication, we're really kind of globally educating about hypertension, but it's not so tightly focused on one particular drug. So that's really the main difference is how we treat the medication and how many medications we're handling at once.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Yeah! So with that being said, as we wrap up here, so what is the role of a chief medical officer look like at HealthPrize on a day to day basis? So what, so how do you go about designing studies and working on this thing to make sure, which I think you have done a fantastic job because I've never seen such outcomes, actually statistically significant outcomes, which means you design a study in the right way to make sure that the p values for those that, our scientists are interested in research, this is actually poorer research. This is not just another peer review, this is not another consumer questionnaire that people fill out questions and say, oh yeah, this is great based on response rates. It's actually a scientifically designed which I think you did a fantastic job and doing, of course. So tell us about that particular role.
Katrina Firlik:
Yeah, it's actually changed over time. I was one of the original co-founders of the company and so in the beginning I was pretty much jack of all trades and doing a little bit of everything and literally starting from scratch, designing the product, trying to figure out how to engage patients optimally on every pitch meeting and pharma in New Jersey driving around, going to different brands and educating them about the adherence problem. I'm also involved on the PR side, so educating either the public or payers about the adherence problem. You know, I really, when I started the company coming from the neurosurgery side, I was not an expert in medication adherence per se, so I became an expert by reading every article I could find, every academic paper I could get my hand on. And I, so became an expert in that. And so I really have my hand in everything from PR to design to overseeing the medical content, and obviously. So it is a multifaceted role, it's a fun role. But I'm really, at this point now that the company has grown, really focused on the medical angle, whereas I would say 5 or 6 years ago, and especially in the beginning, pretty much had my hand in a little bit of everything.
Emmanuel Fombu:
But that's quite fascinating. I like that journey, I like where you're going. So what are some of the challenges you face along the way? And I'm sure that there are many. Yeah.
Katrina Firlik:
Yeah.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Many hell out.
Katrina Firlik:
Yeah, many challenges. My co-founder, Tom, and I used to joke that if we knew it was going to be so hard trying to sell a program in healthcare, we never would have started this company. It just the sales cycle, as everybody in healthcare knows, is very long. There's a kind of a death by pilot also issue there where.
Emmanuel Fombu:
I call it pilotitis
Katrina Firlik:
Oh, pilotitis, that's even better, that sounds more medical. Yeah, that sounds more official, Yeah. Pilotitis is for those who aren't familiar. Yeah, sure. We'll buy a pilot, we'll run it for six months, and we're like, hey, it was a big success. Let's roll it out. Oh, that person just left the company. Okay, so your, the champion at the company just left and we're starting from square one convincing someone else of the problem. So it's the pilot issue. In our particular case, convincing the healthcare world that we could add incentives and add gamification to a healthcare program was definitely a big challenge. Now that concept is more common. The idea of paying people to go to the gym, that sort of thing is a little more common. But when we were first starting out, we got slaughtered in some companies for the idea of trying to peddle fun and games and make healthcare actually engaging. So that, that was a challenge we had to overcome. And then creating a program that has a lot of content. We have a weekly educational quiz, for example. That's a lot of content to go through MLR, which is medical, legal, regulatory, for example. It's just a lot of work, but we think it's valuable work for the patient. So those are just a number, just a small number of the challenges we've faced.
Emmanuel Fombu:
And I'll add one to it because like I said, I've been on that side work with HealthPrize being on the pharma side, right? You guys, I remember walking up to a legal team and oh, there's a company here called HealthPrize. They're like, prize? No, no way. There's a token prize. We can't be showing what prize. But I'm quite impressed that even five, six years later, reaching back out, that you stuck to that name, which today is not a problem anymore. It's not a problem like today. I remember back then thinking about this prize was a scary thing, but not being able to, you didn't have to move. ... Was a core, was the core of what you do, right? So it makes sense to what you're doing. And if someone got beyond the word prize, got to realize what the outcomes are and what you're actually doing to get this accomplished.
Katrina Firlik:
Exactly.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Yes. I'm kind of proud of you guys for actually sticking this out. I'm quite impressed, actually.
Katrina Firlik:
Well, thank you Manny. People, I think the prize element, people start to warm up to when they see our engagement numbers, they're like, oh, now I see how the prize thing works. And it actually engages people far more than our boring app does, so it does help.
Emmanuel Fombu:
So how does someone sign up to the app, right? Is something that a call .... just listening to, to this podcast right now sign up or what is the vehicle in? If I want to become a, on this platform and engage with the platform, do I have to come through my clinician? How do I what is the touch point? How was the entry point?
Katrina Firlik:
At the moment it's still program by program, so wish I could say that any patient anywhere on any medication could join. We're not quite there yet, but it's being, it is rolled out and existing through different brands and also different, more recently, payer companies that are reaching out directly to their covered lives to join HealthPrize. So it's in different program modes, each program is separately labeled for that company that supports it.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Gotcha. So you're like a white label piece for the product, which makes sense, right? Yeah, exactly. It's more focused that way. You can just make, it's not Facebook for everyone to just jump in. It's tailored to a particular patient, particular educational material that needs to develop for that. So that makes sense.
Katrina Firlik:
That's right. I do foresee a future iteration where anyone anytime can join, but we're not quite there yet. That would be the ultimate.
Katrina Firlik:
So with that being said, what are some of the immediate short term goals like you hope to accomplish is the beginning of the year. We're in January 2023, so I'm sure you have your Q1 goals. So what is what is short term, long term goals?
Katrina Firlik:
Yeah. One, you touched on earlier is to better harness the tremendous amount of data that we are gathering. Again, we've been laser focused on showing that our core adherence numbers and other outcome measures are solid and showing that across conditions. But we would love to, to make better use of the wealth of data that we're gathering, so that's a goal. The other is just simple sales goal, more programs across more payers, more pharma, more conditions. It's just keep proving the central concept. So those are the big ones so far. And then we're always trying to fine tune engagement. We have stellar engagement numbers, but anything we can do to tweak it and make things even more enticing and engaging is always on our radar.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Now, so thank you very much. And as we wrap up on this, it was an honor and pleasure to have you on the show. Katrina, if anyone's listening and you are on the pharma side or payer side, I think this is a fantastic company to actually engage with. You can reach out to Katrina if you have any questions about what they've been doing. But this is a company, like I mentioned, I've known them well and work with them and I'm quite impressed with that journey. And I've seen a lot would have done the branding, the website. You could check it out. HealthPrize.com and look at some of the outcomes that they have on this. Once again, thanks a lot, Katrina, I hope to have you on the show once again soon.
Katrina Firlik:
Well, Manny, it was a real pleasure. Thanks for inviting me to Bite the Orange.
Emmanuel Fombu:
All right. Thank you very much.
Katrina Firlik:
Okay, bye bye.
Emmanuel Fombu:
Thank you for listening to Bite the Orange. If you want to change healthcare with us, please contact us at info@EmmanuelFombu.com or you can visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com or BiteTheOrange.com. If you liked this episode and want more information about us, you can also visit us at EmmanuelFombu.com.
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About KATRINA FIRLIK:
Katrina Firlik is the Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of HealthPrize Technologies, a digital health company with a novel approach to improving medication adherence and clinical outcomes.
Katrina is a Neurosurgeon with multiple publications in neurosurgery literature and the Author of Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside, published by Random House.
Things You’ll Learn:
Many physicians interested in entrepreneurship have to jump ship from their medical practices.
Neurosurgeons need to consider the whole building when interfering with the brain.
Inside the skull are the brain, many blood vessels, spinal fluid, and more physiological items.
Medication is usually essential for good outcomes.
Gamification has been critical in keeping patients within medication regimens and other condition programs.
Adherence problems are not only due to medication costs, it has a human psychology element that’s key to it.