The Future of Healthcare with Adam Isley and his Artemis Immersive Technologies

Episode Overview

Episode Topic: In this episode of Skeleton Crew – The Rad Tech Show, we sit down with Adam Isley, the founder of Artemis Immersive, to discuss the innovative concept of patient empowerment and education with 3D imaging. Adam introduces us to his company’s groundbreaking approach to healthcare, where 3D experiences and virtual reality are used to educate and empower patients. By creating detailed, anatomically accurate 3D models from CT scans and MRI images, Artemis Immersive aims to make complex medical information more accessible and understandable for patients. This new technology is designed to help patients better understand their health conditions and treatment options, ultimately leading to better health outcomes.

Lessons You’ll Learn: Listeners will gain valuable insights into how patient empowerment with 3D imaging can transform the healthcare experience. Adam Isley explains how this technology allows patients to visualize their own medical data in a way that is both engaging and educational. Listeners will learn about the development and implementation of 3D imaging tools, the benefits of using these tools for patient education, and the potential impact on patient outcomes. Additionally, Adam shares his journey from working in clinical research to founding Artemis Immersive, providing inspiration for those interested in healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship.

About Our Guests: Adam Isley is the founder of Artemis Immersive, a company dedicated to revolutionizing healthcare through the use of 3D imaging and virtual reality. With a background in product design and clinical research, Adam has a deep understanding of the challenges faced by both healthcare providers and patients. His passion for improving the patient experience led him to develop tools that enhance patient empowerment and education, making complex medical information more accessible and understandable. Adam’s innovative approach has positioned Artemis Immersive as a leader in the field of patient education and engagement.

Topics Covered: Throughout the episode, we cover a wide range of topics related to healthcare innovation and patient education. They discuss the origins and mission of Artemis Immersive, the technical aspects of creating 3D medical models, and the real-world applications of this technology. The conversation also delves into the challenges and successes of developing a startup in the healthcare sector, and the importance of patient empowerment. Listeners will also hear about the future plans for Artemis Immersive and how they aim to expand their impact on the healthcare industry.

Our Guest: Adam Isley– Empowering Patients Through 3D Imaging.

Episode Transcript

Jennifer Callahan: Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Skeleton-Crew. I’m your host, Jen Callahan, and tonight I have a great guest with me. His name is Adam Isley. Adam, thanks for being with me.

Adam Isley: Thanks for having me on the show, I’m very excited.

Jennifer Callahan: I’m excited to have our conversation. Adam is doing a start-up company. He began it about a year ago or close to a year. He’s the founder of a new company called Artemis Immersive. I’m not going to mishmash through exactly what they’re doing. I’m going to leave it up to Adam because it’s interesting to a new take on patient and provider health care. So go ahead, Adam, start us off.

Adam Isley: Perfect, I love it. So Artemis Immersive, we focus on creating 3D experiences for patients to better understand their health care, and better understand the things that they can do with their health to put themselves in a better position. It’s focused on the idea of patient empowerment. If a patient is empowered and educated and their health journey is guided do they have better outcomes? Just sort of naturally because they’ve been put in a position of empowerment. So we’ve got a number of different concepts for it. We’ve got an early product that’s not released yet. That’s like a VR telehealth concept. Then we have one now that we’re in the middle of releasing called Vox Scan Medical, which takes CT scans and MRI images and compiles them into one 3D anatomically accurate. It’s just patient data, digital human. With that, you can highlight different anatomical features such as if you only want to see the bone structure in it and you don’t want anything else getting in the way of that you can highlight just that. Conversely, if you wanted to just focus on a volumetric space like the lungs and by seeing inside the lungs, you can remove all of the more dense anatomical regions around it. We’re pretty excited about the potential. It’s designed as a patient education or counseling tool. So it’s a way for a care provider to have an easier time explaining to a medical layperson what is being highlighted in the DICOM imagery and what’s going on with their particular health condition.

Jennifer Callahan: I know that you’re in the pilot phase of it. Have you brought this out into any healthcare systems yet?

Adam Isley: We are in the process now of talking through the implementation of it. There’s one large healthcare system that we’ve been planning out several locations, multiple cancer centers. So it’s been our big first start. We’re trying to make sure that we take the time to do it As we begin to roll it out, sort of seek that product-market fit right, early user feedback, and early stakeholder feedback, be able to incorporate it into the product, and make changes to the experience to make it more useful, etc. We’ve got a handful that we’re planning to roll out for. I’m pretty excited about it, but still looking for clinics to partner with and roll it out.

Jennifer Callahan: It’s great that, say, if they’re looking at a cyst or a possible tumor, you can just highlight those two kidneys or maybe even just the one kidney, am I

Adam Isley: You are It also shows variation in specific organs. So we pulled up data sets from an NIH cancer study for liver cancer and started to work with that. As you highlight that image and you start to work with the data and slice into it, even the organs itself, the areas of it are of a physiological anomaly or it’s a growth of some sort that’s a different density than the other material in the organ in it. It highlights naturally. So it serves as a way to visualize things that are “out of place” is the right word but things that don’t match normal physiology.

Jennifer Callahan: As you were saying, it’s patient empowerment. So think of yourself going in and like Adam was sharing a story with me, and if he wants to, you can say it again. But you go in and you get news of something that like, you went to go get a CAT scan of because something is possibly suspected and you get bad news that you do have a tumor. We have to take a biopsy. We have to do this. But at that point, you just shut down. You hear tumors, you probably, think cancer, maybe you’re by yourself and you’re watching the doctor talk to you, but you’re not processing anything that they’re saying to you. So, Adam Software, I don’t want to go into how you were explaining to me, how useful it is for the patient, what they can do after the appointment, and what the software offers.

Adam Isley: In that example, it’s not just like you don’t know all of the details of the report because you’re in somewhat of a state of shock. Then you go home and you get to retell that story, which is a blank memory to whatever family members you have or whoever else is in the care process with you, which becomes difficult if you don’t remember what was said. So we built in a record feature that allows when a care physician is presenting the results of a diagnosis made by a radiologist, and they’re walking the patient through it, they can hit a record button and it records the screen. So the patient will have a video of the care provider showing them the places of concern. It also records their voice. So that one video becomes a medical report for the patient, they can scan a QR code and it brings it up on their phone or there are several ways that you could provide it to them. They can just use their user ID and log right into the system and see it. These files are like gigs, sometimes more in file size, which is the reason for the whole CD-ROM being one of the more common methods of transporting it. So having an option that’s in the cloud, that’s lightweight in terms of no one having to carry around a gig in a half size files on them. They can just access it either from a video or from the cloud.

Jennifer Callahan: Say, a CAT scan or MRI tech, i performs a scan and then they do whatever processing that they need, they send it through, and it goes to PACS. Where does your software come in the mix of that?

Adam Isley: The easiest way would be for us to write an API of some sort directly from our software to the imaging device. When the scan is performed, and they’re selecting the location from where they want to save the record, we essentially have our back end as exposed as one of those locations. That’s the easiest way when someone goes in and gets the scan, it automatically populates in the patient record on our system. That way it doesn’t add like another thing for a care provider to do. They do not have to go to the computer or a separate device and then upload a bunch of records. It’s all just simple. The other path on that is it does have an import feature, and it just opens like a Windows Explorer, and you just select the DICOM folder and hit import. It takes a minute and a half depending on the file size. It’s pretty quick.

Jennifer Callahan: Would that be importing from a CD-ROM?

Adam Isley: If a patient has their own record in hand or they’re bringing it into whatever clinic, maybe they’re bringing in their previous scans or whatever it may be, they can upload it directly from that. If the imaging device is a location on our provider’s network, they can upload it from there as well, or from other shared drives that the network may have. So it’s pretty flexible in terms of implementation. It just depends on does a provider wants to do this for every patient or if they want to do it for specific types of scans. So we try to be flexible with it.

Jennifer Callahan: You’re doing the start-up thing. But what were you doing prior to this and what led you to go into this journey?

Adam Isley: Immediately prior to this, I was head of product design for a large clinical research organization. At any given time, there were between 25 and 30 different software applications that usually were acquired from a startup or another company, and brought bringing in their portfolio. So it was my job to try to align the behaviors of the software and the user experience as much as possible to this never-ending library of applications, which is you do the acquisition-led thing over a period of time as your tech stack becomes like the history of the internet. It’s one of my colleagues was fond of saying, just because you’ve got pieces of software from all along the journey. So it was a very challenging role, but a very good one in terms of learning how to simplify a process and get users from point A to point B and what they’re trying to do. Right after that role, I developed a bit of passion for patient experience, etc. I wanted to focus on that towards the end of my time. That last role was focused on creating patient experiences, and I saw the application of 3D animations and interactive models as a way that you can save providers’ time because as you know, providers are going to spend their 20 minutes with a patient or whatever variation of that is, a cardiologist’s example if person’s going in for like a stent procedure, they’re going to spend 5 to 10 minutes explaining when to the stent is probably, for every one of those appointments that they have all day long.

Adam Isley: It is supposed to talk about, well, this is why we’re worried about this specifically for you, here’s your physiology, and that’s giving us concern. Here that kind of starts at ground zero. So we had an animation of a stent procedure where it was interactive and it would just highlight in a 3D model. It gave us this idea of whether can we create engaging patient experiences that educate them about what they’re going to be seeking in terms of treatment, or what the disease condition that they’re worried about is before they go in to see their providers. So they’re prepared, how to know to think about what questions would they have, etc. It’s not like you go in on the spot and then get a bunch of medical education and be expected to ask the things that you need to ask. So it started there. We left the company, hired the team that was working with us at the time, and started on this journey of trying to create patient engagement tools that would do just that.

Adam Isley: Along that way, we’re working with one in VR and started to work with DICOM images in that same environment. At the time, my personal, my mother had just gotten another hip replacement. It’s fantastic that she’s in her 80s and her goal is to live as much of that as she can. I love it. But so go to the hospital, I won’t say which one, with her, to do the post-OP and the PA is very nice, very good care. The surgery went great. But the PA was like, well, we show you the records, but it’s all going to look grey. You wouldn’t be able to see it anyway. When we print it, it’s just like one slab of grey sheets straight across and at the same time, during the workday, I’m seeing these very compelling 3D, DICOM, digital twins of patient data sets and like, okay, we’ve got to get this out of VR and get it into a desktop application that could be used by patients or care providers or radiologists or whoever may find the value of it. So that’s how we ended up where we are today. Before that, I was in pharma for a while. I was at GSK where I started my career and got super excited about the business of healthcare as a career, started off in an audit position looking at sales and marketing practices, looking at it security, then moved from that into a brand management position for one of the pharmaceutical lines, then transitioned over to HCP or provider marketing, looking at segmenting different provider behavioral segments and understanding what their goals are and when it comes to treating their patients.

Adam Isley: After that, was able to have an opportunity to launch a brand, a direct-to-consumer brand. So I felt like I’ve been seeing all these different behavioral aspects of health care and of the stakeholders in the system. It was just very exciting. Product design is, there’s a technology element to it that is not present in marketing or commercialization. But the biggest part of it, like with marketing, is understanding your customer and your consumer and what their needs are and what their objectives are, etc. which is the, my opinion, the most important part of the product design process, and understanding what the person is trying to do, the environment they’re in, what they’re used to, all these kinds of things.

Jennifer Callahan: This episode is brought to you by xraytech.org, the Rad Tech Career Resource. If you’re considering a career in radiology, check out xraytech.org to get honest information on schools, degree options, career paths, and salaries. I was reading one of the articles that you shared on Artemis Immersive’s LinkedIn about how you’re going to be part of, was it the five startups in North Carolina. The article was saying how you and your wife developed a company, which I love.

Adam Isley: I think she does, too, most of the time. She was a practicing pharmacist, and I think she was looking to do something different. There was me, her, and there are four other founders that we started this with, and we’ve got a team of eight full-time and 12ish part-time, depending on how much work we’ve got going on, etc. But it does lend itself to work all the time because we’re always around each other. So it’s always you’re just thinking in the back of your head what about this thing that I was thinking about earlier in the day? She’s right there. So it’s like you bounce the ideas off of her.

Jennifer Callahan: You’re just cooking dinner and you’re cutting up peppers and something and then you’re talking shop while you’re cooking.

Adam Isley: We don’t even realize it. So it’s been an amazing journey though for sure.

Jennifer Callahan: What challenges have you faced developing this?

Adam Isley: The development side, I think I won’t use the technical definition of that, but just in terms of getting the product off the ground, I think it’s tough to navigate healthcare networks right now, especially, if you don’t have a presence in there, especially, if you’re a startup that you look at the life cycle and the sales cycle of these large organizations. That in and of itself is a long time, and then you add in whatever designations you’re going to get under, like a reimbursement plan so that a hospital system or a clinic can get reimbursed for the services through insurance. There’s all these things that like, every time it’s like another three months, another three months, another three months. Getting to the right people, I think, and being able to show people this is something that can help. This is something that’s different. That’s probably, been one of the biggest challenges. There have been technical things that we’ve had to work through, but at least from my perspective, and maybe it’s because I’m the one who’s out there running around trying to get it in front of everyone that I feel that. But I do think that the commercialization of it is the hardest thing. There are so many questions to answer is this something that ends up getting offered as a revenue source for providers, something that they could use to sell as an add-on? Do we want to be adding more money to patients’ loads? There are all these things to consider and there’s not a right answer. It’s always like a portion of everything and depends on the situation. But it’s been a lot of fun.

Jennifer Callahan: People that you’re contacting within these health systems, who have you figured out or the people that you need to talk to, is it like chief of radiology or is it like heads of certain departments, certain surgical departments, maybe?

Adam Isley: So the main tactic we’ve employed to get our foot in the door is, is literally show up with a basket of fruit or a thing of cupcakes and just explain local business or a small business, and this is what we’re trying to do. It’s a pretty visually engaging product. So luckily, it’s got that going for it. But it usually me just walking in and introducing myself, leaving them a treat, asking if I can set up a time depending on the size of the institution. If it’s a larger network that we’re working with, it’s someone that’s in a strategy role, that’s where it starts a strategy or an innovation role. Then they facilitate like, here’s the conversation with the head of the radiology department. Some of them will have patient experience teams, which is helpful because a lot of institutions’ reimbursement rates are based on patient satisfaction scores or patient experience scores. So they’ve got some vested interest and improving the patient experience. If it’s a smaller 8 to 15 chain or 8 to 15 clinic chain, they usually have a practice manager that sort of runs the operations of it. So what are we going to be investing in in terms of software, equipment, marketing, etc.? At least in the experience we’ve had, there are the two personas, I guess, that end up making the decisions and helping move it forward.

Jennifer Callahan: So you have the box scan going on, but you also have at least 1 or 2 other different platforms that you’re working on, right?

Adam Isley: So we’ve been calling it a patient empowerment platform. Essentially, what it is, it’s a collection of 3D interactive content. We can surface it to a number of different areas. As we were starting to try to improve the patient experience, there was a VR-heavy part to our work. So a lot of the work we do is in VR. But patients aren’t going to try sharing a headset in a waiting room. There are elements of the healthcare experience that aren’t conducive to that, and not everyone has a headset and it’s not as commonplace as it is. It probably needs to be to do what we want to do right now. So we took the approach of thinking about how we can engage patients and providers in an experience that isn’t limited to one device, so we can send things to your phone that are interactive, animations that explain whatever condition that you might have or explain, like what a treatment process looks like. That could happen on your phone, if they do have a VR headset, they can use that. It works on the AR kit on their phone so they can put a giant beating heart in their living room if they want to or they can just like log in on a desktop. The concept is if we’re trying to alleviate some of the pressure in the health care system, specifically on providers, and make it easier for them to give a better patient experience, how do we start offloading things that a provider is going to need to cover in that patient visit? So giving the stent example, it’s a great one If they’re used to having to provide an explanation of what a stent is at the beginning of every cardiology exam that goes that direction, this is a very well-educated and operationally expensive provider.

Adam Isley: That’s having the same conversation over and over and over again. Let’s create a 3D engaging game or animation or something that tells what that is. A patient can engage with that in the waiting room while they’re waiting. So instead of thinking about how much longer is it going to be before I can get in there to see my patient or get in there to see my physician, they’re like playing with something, and we would take a flower vase and put QR codes all over it and would put it in the patient waiting room. Then as they’re sitting there, waiting for their next meeting to come in, waiting for the provider to come see them, they can play with it and learn from it. So it’s an evolution of when you go into the provider’s office and there are all the little pamphlets on the wall that explain the conditions, it’s just bringing that to life for people.

Jennifer Callahan: That’s nice. But then they can access it again when they go home, they can continue to watch it, and then it alleviates them scrolling through Google and googling what they just got their diagnosis of. Not to say, the diagnosis is life-threatening or anything, but the internet has its ups and it has its downs. In terms of medical care and health care, sometimes it can give you some scary information that doesn’t correlate to what your condition is.

Adam Isley: Yes or maybe it reflects a niche thin silo of the population that has a specific condition. You have a cough and then you think you’ve got some serious life-threatening condition. The WebMD stuff, especially, when it first came out, anytime you feel like you’re sick, you go on there and it’s like, oh, great, I’m going to die. Oh, great. I’m going to Like, oh, I just sneeze and five more years off my life expectancy. I’m kidding. But you know, this way the provider can have input into what information is being shared. So we showed them our our library of animations and engaging content. They can determine that they want to put these different modules out there or these different animations. They do not have to go out and create all this content themselves, but they can still have control of we don’t have looney messaging, going out to our patients, or messaging that is contradictory toward the protocol that they want to use.

Jennifer Callahan: I think an interactive thing like that sounds awesome. I mean, one you had said about having seen a pamphlet in the doctor’s office and pamphlets are great and all. But let’s be honest, they usually get folded, they get put into a purse, they get put into a pocket of something, and they usually stay there for a good amount of time. I mean, it’s just looking at a flat image. It has information, but I like the interactive portion of it. I’m sure it’s more engaging for patients and keeps them not even interested. That’s a weird thing to say about their health, but it’s just more interesting. It probably would explain more, especially, if it’s showing different parts of the body of what they’re doing or like how you’re talking about a Stem procedure, maybe it’s showing the leg that is having a stent put in and how a catheter or the wire is put down and then a catheter and then like a balloon has to put down to open up the vessel, and then the stent goes down and then it’s cranked open. It’s an interactive thing. So they can understand and they’re not going and googling that exactly.

Adam Isley: My dad had a stent and I still didn’t know what it was right until we started building the animation for one. It’s just, as you said, it’s got the guidewire goes in the cage, inflates, the guidewire comes out. But it’s one of those, do you know what it is? Yes, yes. I know it’s a cardiac procedure. They often do it, but I didn’t know what a guidewire was. I didn’t know how the cage expanded, etc. Visually if you’re watching it, it’s much faster for most people to understand what’s going on than reading it. You look at Figure 1, and you try to understand this word that you don’t understand, and it’s just easier depending on where you are. If you’re in a location where maybe for a lot of your patients, English isn’t their first language, good luck. A lot of physicians tell us that I’m trying to explain to someone and they don’t have great English what’s going on. They’re looking at me, nodding their head. I have no idea if they know what I’m talking about. I have no idea if they don’t know what I’m talking about. Your providers tell the story about it, so I pull out my phone and I start googling to show them an image. Because as you say, the pamphlet only goes so far.

Jennifer Callahan: Speaking of people who speak different languages, something I’m not sure if you’ve already thought of this or not, but do you offer these videos in different languages?

Adam Isley: We don’t. The video that would come from it is not recording voiceovers. It’s going through, and you can click on a different element and it starts to show you what’s happening in it. The different languages thing is a good idea though, especially if you have a narrative or an overview that of specific clinic or physician wants to make sure is included of that idea. We’re still working to make sure that we launched this within the US the right way. So we’ve got to focus on that first.

Jennifer Callahan: That’s awesome. Do you have anything on the horizon that you guys are hoping to develop or in the midst maybe anything like leeway that you are hoping for the company to move forward to?

Adam Isley: We’ve certainly got a lot of ideas. One of the things that keeps coming back up is we’ve got the environment, you can access it through a headset, and in the very near future, you’ll be able to log in and access it from a desktop. The concept is it’s like a surgical theater, so you can have up to ten physicians or surgeons or whoever, all come in and look at a visual data set collaboratively. So if they’re planning a procedure or if they want to bring in an expert that’s an expert on a specific procedure or performing a specific diagnosis, and maybe they’re world-renowned and they’re only in some other location you can have them join. I hate to even call it telehealth because because it’s not. When telehealth first started coming out, I was like, oh, there’s all these ideas of like, you’re going to have like floating health monitors in the air and you’re going to be collaborating with your physician. Then you get on there and it’s like this zoom. I think that we’ve got a very large potential to use that to begin to disrupt. If you’re in a rural setting and you’re driving two hours to get a scan done and then you’ve got to come back and do three weeks or whatever it is to see the results of it. Do you need the person to drive two more hours out there? Could they get into a headset and a review with the physician or the care provider of their anatomical record? So I think that there’s a ton of opportunity in this space with looking at how we facilitate collaboration and as different peripheral devices or AR headsets, VR headsets, 3D holographic displays become more and more prevalent, that you’re going to be able to do some amazing and engaging things without having to be face to face.

Jennifer Callahan: That’s cool. Are you hoping to stay just solely within your company, or are you looking to branch out to see if there’s anyone else out in the field who would like to collaborate with Artemis?

Adam Isley: We’re looking to form partnerships with different clinics or different networks. I think we haven’t figured out everything about this application. We know based on the patient feedback that we’ve gotten and shown it to two clinics or two different settings, and both of them were in contracting conversations with so far, so good. So I mean, it hasn’t had a ton of exposure and there is value in getting it in front of a larger handful. So if there are any clinics out there that are interested and trying to explore the software with us, we’d love to establish a partnering relationship where we can help customize it to the specific needs of that care provider or that network. So looking for that.

Jennifer Callahan: You have something great going on there. Good luck with the upcoming. Are you going to be doing a lecture or is it a spotlight for startups in North Carolina?

Adam Isley: I think it’s another pitch competition. So it’s in the middle of a vendor show for SAS software, and it’s put on by the company SAS which is from this area also. It has a notorious reputation for having the most amazing benefits package ever, and they went pretty far to make people never want to leave the company once they’re there, which is great and I think that the box scan could be a pretty compelling employee benefit for someone. So if they’re ever in a position where they have medical imaging and maybe the clinic that they get the scans from hasn’t tried it yet, they could use that. So it’ll be interesting to test that premise out. Not sure yet if I’m going to do that the first time on stage or not. But we’ll see.

Jennifer Callahan: Well, I’m sure it’ll go great. I wish you nothing but the best with that. everybody, this is Adam Isley with me tonight, talking about the new startup company that he’s doing for patient and provider empowerment together. Thanks, Adam. I appreciate it.

Adam Isley: It was great. Thanks for having me.

Jennifer Callahan: Everyone, keep your eyes and ears out, especially, if there are providers or anyone from health systems that are listening in about Artemis Immersive and maybe get in contact if it’s something that you’re interested in bringing into your health system. So catch us in another week with another great guest talking about all the things of radiology and health care. We’ll see you next week.

Jennifer Callahan: You’ve been watching The Skeleton-Crew, brought to you by xraytech.org. In the next episode, join us to explore the present and the future of the Rad Tech career and the field of radiology.