HLTH: How AMGEN is Transforming Patient Engagement and Trial Diversity with Marisa Cruz

(upbeat music) - Hey everybody, welcome back to the Beat Podcast recording live from the Health USA meeting in Las Vegas. I'm so excited to be joined with Dr. Marissa Cruz today, who is the vice president of Global Digital Medicine at Amgen. In this role, she's responsible for designing and implementing a comprehensive digital medical strategy that leverages digital technologies to drive innovation, support clinical decision making, and improve patient outcomes. So excited to have you here on the podcast, Marissa, thanks for joining us. - Thank you so much for having me. - So what brings you to help? - Well, Amgen has been innovating for a long time, but we believe that we're at this hinge moment of really harnessing technology to further our mission of bringing the right medicines, to the right patients at the right time. So we're, Amgen's been around for about 40 years, we're primarily focused on four therapeutic areas, so oncology, inflammation, general medicine, and rare disease. We already have a presence in about 100 countries and regions worldwide, but we're really excited about pursuing science, leveraging technology and innovation. And so, feel like that's very much in keeping with the spirit of health. - I love that, I love that. Well, it's such a pleasure to have you guys here at the meeting as Amgen's VP of US Medical General Medicine. How do you think about the power of technology to serve patients? - Yeah, I'm an endocrinologist and internist myself, and I actually still save patients each week, UCSF, in a general endocrinology practice. So, endocrinology is one of those specialties where you've actually got to see innovation and technology, take shape and really reach patients to enable actionable insights and improvements in all of your life and clinical outcomes. I've had this poor vision of how technology can improve patient outcomes for a long time. At Amgen, I think that's amplified, right? That we have the power to serve patients by transforming this promise of science and technology into therapies that can really improve health and save lives. - That's really great. I think you've got your spot on with that, Marissa. Could you share maybe some examples of innovative digital health initiatives that your company's pursuing to improve patient outcomes? - Yeah, absolutely. So one thing I'll just highlight that digital medicine within the office of the Chief Medical Officer at Amgen is a relatively new pillar. And so we're very excited to stand this up. We're really going to be focusing on a couple of key pillars. One is the development of cutting edge rapid and cost-efficient methods for generating real world evidence to answer questions in real time. And then digitizing and bringing technology to the forefront of how we engage with healthcare providers and patients to make sure that information is delivered in a way that's intuitive and accessible. To highlight a couple of specific examples of things that we've done recently, one initiative that supports Amgen's ambitions to cut the number of heart attacks and strokes by half, which is an ambitious goal by 2023 is called the lattice consortium. And so that's the leading awareness to action through implementation of cardiometabolic efforts. But lattice for short, we a couple, a little bit of context around the lattice consortium is that LDLC is a key modifiable respecter for Afro-Spharotic cardiovascular disease. And if left unchecked, high levels of LDLC may lead to serious cardiovascular events like heart attack and stroke. It's a very asymptomatic condition. So there's often very little way that patients can know that they're at elevated risk other than understanding their family history and crucially getting checked. So we're really trying to put together a consortium of healthcare systems and healthcare leaders with a shared goal of addressing unmet needs of cardiometabolic patient care through evidence-based tools and methodologies. We are focusing on amplifying and sharing these tools broadly and those include EHR integration to address gaps in care and promoting awareness about the importance of testing. - I think that's brilliant. The theme for this year's event is bold. Give us an example of how you and your company are taking bold actions, making bold moves to making healthcare better, accessible, equitable, and more consumer focused. - Absolutely. Our digital health team has been doing fantastic works to bridge gaps in cardiovascular care. ACC driving urgency is one of several lattice consortium initiatives that the shining example of leveraging innovative technology to address gaps in care. And the ACC driving urgency project is sponsored by Amgen. As I mentioned, the burden of cardiovascular disease is immense and given the scope of impact on patients and health systems we thought was really bright for a digital health intervention. More specifically, the project team saw an opportunity to leverage cross-cutting technologies such as AI to increase lipid testing rates and prescriptions of lipid lowering medications for cardiovascular patients at risk of at risk of at risk for the cardiovascular disease. - Well, I love that. And I was actually at ACC this year and saw some of the updates from the projects so congratulations on that. - Thank you so much. - Yes, major progress there. Looking ahead, Maris, what digital health trends do you think will have the biggest impact on patient and healthcare delivery? - So looking ahead, I see three major digital health trends that have the potential to significantly impact patient health and improve outcomes. So first is implementation science where we're very passionate about implementation science in at AMGEN and really focused on how to bring research to healthcare delivery, really bringing research into practice. What are evidence-based guidelines? How can we make sure that positions are aware of the consensus practice guidelines and are bringing them to patients in every day point of care healthcare delivery? Though digital health is critical in bringing implementation science to light by implementing emerging technologies such as generated by AI to make those implementations more seamless, active, and efficient, the second trend I would highlight is the need to increase diversity in clinical trials. So large-scale interventions are only as good as the data that underpins it, but we know that clinical trial diversity has not kept pace with the incidence of major diseases across population groups. Lack of clinical trial participation from underrepresented communities have calculated and complete data. We want to make sure that our clinical trials are representative of the patient population that we're trying to serve. So we've already made strides to address this issue. AI is helping us bring clinical trials to the forefront faster, more efficient, and more accessible. So we can bring these medications to patients in need as quickly as possible. One example of where we're innovating in this space is a model called a TAMMET. And I highlight this a little bit in my opportunity to speak on a panel yesterday at Health, but a TAMMET is an ML based, so a machine learning-based model that uses real-world data to speed up patient enrollment and ensure that the clinical sites that we're targeting are likely to enroll patients successfully. So they're trying to democratize research and to reach out to a broader swath of the patient population that would be available for inclusion in a clinical trial. We have used a number of other tools in other spaces across the drug development life cycle, including using the generative AI to improve efficiencies of our FDA regulatory process, and also has with potential and are we're innovating around tools that can do predictive analytics for safety and identifying early potential problems with our medications or with clinical trials to avoid delays and make sure that our medications are as safe and effective as possible. - That's fantastic. From recruitment to delivery to really tightening down the processes for regulatory approvals, sounds like you guys are really leveraging this technology to make a difference, take costs out, and to make things faster. I think this is a super exciting time. I wanna congratulate you and the AMGEN team for being forward-thinking and being bold and making this happen. - I did wanna highlight one other area where we've been making real strides, and that's in a patient engagement model. So very recently we launched an initiative called PARK, which is our patient activation research community, and that's aimed at helping patients to take a role in their own healthcare. So you can find that at amgdenpark.com. It's P-A-R-C as opposed to P-A-R-K, but we're aiming to enhance the PARK to really include more digital and interactive tools that enable patients with diseases or just with symptoms to understand their healthcare journey to enhance their education around potential disease states, interact with other patients who are going through their own healthcare processes, and really to take appropriate action to understand where testing might be appropriate or medication may help to improve symptoms or long-term clinical outcomes. So we're very committed to developing cost-effective methods to help patients to understand the options that are available to them, and then to digitizing resources that help them to interact with their healthcare providers, understand the questions that should be asked, understand the treatments that are available, and to really be empowered to take ownership of their clinical journey. - That's great. And that's again a testament to the work you guys are doing to consumerize the process and address a lot of the fears that patients have in asking these questions that maybe they're not comfortable asking. - Exactly. It's incredibly important [BLANK_AUDIO] patients where they are that we understand, you know, the hesitations about some degree of interaction with the healthcare system and we work to reduce barriers wherever. Outstanding. Well, thank you so much, Marissa. This has been a pleasure. While closing thought would you leave folks with and where can they find out more? Yeah, absolutely. So I would leave this talk with a recommendation that people engage with a broad swath of stakeholders in this space. I think that there's a number of patient advocacy groups, a number of biopharma companies who are trying to innovate in clinical medicine and about digital health groups who are really thinking about expanding access to care. And so I would encourage people to take as wide a swath of as possible of information that's accessible in the system to be empowered to ask the right questions and to help their providers and the ecosystem to deliver better care. It's fantastic. And among the broad swath is reaching out to Amgen. And so where would you recommend they reach out? Of course, yes. So Amgen, Park is a great resource. It's a good starting place to understand how to engage. We do have a number of coalitions with healthcare systems and providers. And so Amgen.com is a good, you know, initial point to start researching what we have available. Coalitions like lattice and others are another good example of how we can get engaged and work together collectively. Amazing. Thank you so much, Marissa. Folks, there you have it. An incredible opportunity to speak with Dr. Marissa Cruz, Vice President of Global Digital Medicine at Amgen. Make sure you check out the show notes for all the ways to find out resources on Park, lattice, and everything else that she mentioned. Thank you all for tuning in to this episode of The Beat and Marissa. Thanks for being with us. Thank you so much to the inflager. This episode is sponsored by Amgen.