Catalia Health

DR. CORY KIDD: My name is Dr. Cory Kidd and I'm the founder and CEO of Catalia Health. So I've been working at the intersection of health care and technology for the last 20 years. About half that time was in academia, and most recent half in startups, including doing my masters in PHD at the MIT Media Lab, which was really the foundation of the work that we're doing today at Catalia health.

One of the things that I've been working on for the last 20 years is understanding how we can help to solve some of the big challenging health care issues. And if we look at the big picture, in terms of the demographics and economics of health care and the challenges, you know what we see as obvious is that with an aging population we're dealing with more and more chronic conditions on her own.

And you know health care has advanced tremendously in the last century. We're living much longer than we did 100 years ago. But the challenge that comes along with that is many of us are dealing with a lot of health care issues that we didn't have to face a century or even decades ago. And what I've found over the last 15 to 20 years is that technology can actually play a significant role in how each of us manages our own health. And that's been a focus of my work that started here at MIT, and has continued through the work that I've done that to startups, including Catalia Health.

So there are a lot of enormous challenges in health care today. Some of the things that we hear about a lot on the news right now have to do with the economics and delivery of health care. But some of the key challenges that people are dealing with is how to manage disease better on their own. And that's a problem that we could tell you health as well as many other companies and clinicians are focused on trying to solve right now.

So health care challenges are somewhat the same yet very different all around the world, in that many people are dealing with the same kinds of issues no matter where we are. But the way that health care is delivered and who pays for what can vary quite a bit from country to country. And when you're building a health care technology company that has to be one of the things that you take into account.

At Catalia Health we're rolling out our Mabu product here in the US first in 2018, but we're also exploring a number of different markets. And for us, what that means is putting together the right partnerships in different parts of the world to help us deliver solutions to patients everywhere.

So as Catalia Health is looking to roll out our product-- the Mabu robot-- in other parts of the world, we're looking for the right kind of partners. And that can vary from country to country and region to region. In some places we're talking more to technology partners. In some cases it's health care partners. Ideally it's some combination of both. And part of what that comes down to is navigating the health care system and the distribution challenges of different parts of the world. And we really have to think about all of these things we want to deliver health care solutions at scale.

CORY KIDD: So at Catalia Health, what we're delivering to patients is a care management program. So we don't actually sell a piece of hardware or software. We're selling a service where we help engage patients.

Now today, the way that tends to be delivered to patients every day is either sending out a person to the patient's home or, more commonly, making phone calls. Now, our interface is definitely unique. We give patients a cute little robot that sits on their kitchen counter or bedside table or coffee table. And there are particular reasons we use that interface. Now, if we look at technology in health care over the last few years or the last decade, what we've seen is a lot of apps that are delivered to patients or maybe glowing or beeping devices in the home to try to offer reminders.

Now, one of the things that we really start with it at Catalia Health is understanding what are the challenges the patients actually have with sticking with therapy. And it doesn't tend to be around forgetting and remembering to do something. That's not the challenge. There are a lot of other issues that patients are dealing with every day around symptoms, or side effect management, or psychosocial issues that come with chronic disease. And the entire reason that we use the robot as an interface has a little bit to do with technology but a lot to do with psychology.

In particular, the psychology of what happens when we as people interact with one another. Now we know that talking with someone face to face is a bit different than talking with them via text or email or even a great video conference system. And when we're face to face with someone, we're more engaged in the conversation. It turns out that we actually find that person that we're talking with to be more credible, more informative, and more trustworthy.

Research that I started doing here at MIT 16 years ago showed that those differences carry over into the world of technology. In other words, when we put that robot in front of a patient that can literally look them in the eyes while it's talking to them, we get those effects-- the psychological effects of face-to-face interaction. And so that's why we use that as the interface with our patients.

Now, the way that Mabu actually works in terms of the day-to-day interaction is kind of like technology that many people are familiar with today, like the Amazon Echo or Siri on the iPhone, which is to say it's simply a conversation back and forth. The robot may start off with something like, oh, hey, how are you feeling this afternoon? I just wanted to check in with you. And depending on that person's answer, it could go off in a number of different directions. So there's a lot of technology that's in the background that makes this work.

What's actually happening is we're using algorithms to generate a conversation on the fly that's really tailored to that patient at that point of time. So we're building up these models in the background, medically, psychologically, biographically about that patient, and we're using our AI algorithms to create a conversation for that patient right then and to get data that we're reporting back to the doctor, or the care manager nurse, or the pharmacist. So while there's a lot of complexity going on in the background, the interface to the patient is as simple as a conversation.

One of the things that I've focused on for the last 20 years is, how do we build technology for an older population? Now today, it's a bit different than 20 years ago in that people are becoming more and more tech savvy. But some of our patients have never owned a computer. They've never owned a cell phone. And so when we're trying to use technology that's commonly built today, there are some particular challenges. This is one of the reasons that we focused on a conversational interface that can understand a lot socially about what's going on with that person.

So if we think about the world of interactive or social robots, then using some of the cues that we commonly use in conversation are very powerful and making this easy to use. For example, our robot actually looks at the patient and makes eye contact. So it's a fairly subtle cue but one that's actually very important. The conversation itself is literally just that-- a conversation back and forth. We're not asking the patient to look up any menus or type anything on a screen. The robot's talking to them. They're able to talk back to it. So over many years of putting this kind of technology in front of patients, we've continuously evolved and refined how it works, trying to make it as simple as possible and as easy to use and easy to understand for anyone as we can.

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DR. CORY KIDD: So Catalia Health right now is in the process of lunching with hundreds of patients in the first part of 2018, which is a very exciting time for us. These robots are going out to patients at scale. We're putting together a number of partnerships, both in the US and around the world. Initially with pharmaceutical companies and with health care systems.

We're always looking for other partners who have patients that are dealing with chronic disease and want to help those patients better do that. Those partnerships look like a number of different things. So we are in a number of exploratory conversations and always looking for others who are helping to solve these challenges at scale.

The Mabu robot is designed to be as robust as we can be. But it's still a piece of technology and challenges happen. Now, right now we're rolling these out to hundreds of patients around the US. So this is the first version that we've started to build at scale, which means things are going to break. Things are going to go wrong. And we've got a couple of things in place. There's an 800 number that our patients can call and get support from one of our nurses if they have any challenges. And so that's the first thing that we do.

Now, unfortunately some of the robots will probably break. The actual technology that is involved is really cloud based. So the robot is the interface to the patient, but all the data is on the back end. So in the worst case, if we need to ship out a new device to the patient, it can actually pick up where the last one left off. And we think that's going to happen with a few of these this year. As we learn what breaks and what goes wrong, we'll continue to refine our design and our manufacturing processes so that we can prevent as many of those as possible in the future.

At Catalia Health we have a number of different types of customers currently. Most of our customers are either large pharmaceutical companies that are delivering care management programs along with a drug to patients, as well as hospital systems. Right now we are rolling out our heart failure product for patients with Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. so it's the first health care system that is making this available to patients.

We're working with a number of other health care systems around the US. Our first pharmaceutical company partners are here in the United States. But we're in talks in several other parts of the world as well. So over the course of 2018 we'll be announcing publicly who some of these are, as we start rolling out to patients at scale.

CORY KIDD: So for the last 20 years, I've been bringing new technology into health care trying to solve some of the challenges of aging and disease. And that by its very nature has involved a lot of innovation, which to me is finding new ideas and new ways to apply technology or, more importantly, techniques that we know work.

So for me, that's involved on the technology side robotics, very clearly if you look at what we're doing. But more importantly, artificial intelligence. And a heavy component of what we do is really around psychology and medicine. And so for me, innovation is about taking these different domains, these different areas of expertise, and bringing them together in a new way to solve real world problems.

One of the things that we are excited about at Catalia Health in working with MIT ILP is finding partners who are interested in and excited by solving the same challenges. Whether that's in the US or other places around the world, we're eager to work with others who want to help solve these problems with us.

Catalia Health is very excited to become a part of STEX25. And so it's been fun for me as an alum from MIT for the last decade to see more and more develop at the institute around entrepreneurship. I mean, there was a lot when I was here, it felt like. But every year, I see new programs.

And STEX25 I think is very interesting at the stage that we're at. We're working with a lot of commercial partners, and this gives us the opportunity to have outreach to many more companies who we would want to partner with.

So 2018 is a very exciting year for the intersection of health care and technology. This is not a new concept that these are coming together. I mean, the first telemedicine applications happened about a half a century ago not very far from where we're sitting here in Cambridge here in the Boston area.

And I've been in this field for 20 years now. And there's been a lot more in terms of actual practical applications in the last 2 or 3 years versus the 15 to 20 before that. So it's an incredibly exciting time in that technology companies are becoming more and more interested in health care, and health care companies are definitely more interested in technology than ever before.

Being someone who's worked at this intersection and running a company, Catalia Health, that is focused on this, we're very excited for the prospect of being able to help many more people than we ever have before.