What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Telecom/5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Unveiling MedTech Innovations: FPT's AI Ventures, Cardinal Peak Integration, and Future Clinical Tech Insights
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Ready to uncover the future of AI in MedTech? Join us as we promise a deep dive into groundbreaking innovations and actionable insights. Featuring Pravin from FPT Corporation, Patricia Black from Cardinal Peak, and clinician innovator Gopal, we're bringing you a front-row seat to a game-changing discussion. Pravin sets the stage with FPT's impressive portfolio and their significant strides in AI and healthcare. Patricia then shares how Cardinal Peak's expertise in medical device development seamlessly integrates with FPT Software. Gopal rounds out the introductions by offering his invaluable clinical perspective on innovative medical technologies. Together, we dissect the pillars of connectivity, MedTech decision support, and the indispensable role of talent in making AI solutions successful.
Prepare to be inspired as we explore the future horizon of MedTech and AI. We delve into pioneering projects such as the development of middleware for a leading hematology company, AI applications addressing lung cancer and acne, and cutting-edge tools enhancing clinical workflows. We also examine IoT solutions that simplify data connectivity for medical devices using Amazon Web Services, accelerating their market readiness. Our conversation concludes by focusing on the critical need for data digitization, connectivity, and breaking down silos to fully harness the power of AI and advanced technologies in healthcare. Don't miss this opportunity to get ahead of the curve and envision what's next in the MedTech world.
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Hey everybody, it's Evan and Irma here with Avira Health and we are thrilled today to have a really fascinating talk on hand Making AI Work for MedTech. A huge topic, a big challenge in managing data security, cleansing compliance while connecting more devices yes, more devices. Only 5% of devices are connected today globally, believe it or not. So we're going to explore pillars of connectivity, insights around medtech and decision support, plus the importance of having the right talent on hand to make AI solutions work. As always, let's start off with some introductions. First, pravin, good to see you again. Maybe some introductions for the audience on your role and, of course, who is FPT.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Ivan, for having me. I'm Pravin. I'm the Executive Vice President, Business Head. I'm responsible for new sales for North America, Africa. I'm also responsible for setting up a healthcare practice for North America and also I'm on the board of India Operation. We are part of the FPT Corp. Fpt Corporation is the largest corp from Vietnam Vietnam, which is a land of endless possibilities and now ranked seventh to be most attractive destination for offshoring. So FPT Corporation started in 1988.
Speaker 2:It's a $2.7 billion group with 73,000 employees across all the FPTs and FPT diversified into multiple businesses FPT software, telecom, retail, pharmacy, smart cloud, semiconductor, digital education and many more. Fpd Software, which is the $1 billion company, employs around 35,000 people and we are globally present in 30 countries. Fpd Software provides end-to-end services. I call it sketch-to-scale or concept-to-end services. I call it sketch to scale or concept to delivery. So under the portfolio, we provide services with consulting, application services, product engineering, digital aid services, which includes your cloudification and AI analytics.
Speaker 2:Ar, vr, artificial intelligence, which is the topic of today, is the biggest area of services within FPT. We have close to 3,000 people. We work with different scientists and research labs across the globe. In North America, we have set up a lab. In Quebec, we work very closely with Mila University. We also work with landing AI. In Bay Area. We are also working with Arkansas University of San Diego, university of Liverpool, warwick. We have our own center in Cunha where we are churning 1,300 AI engineers and experts every six months. As of now, we have done close to $175 million worth of AI projects where we applied AI into various customer workflows, and one of the credible in the healthcare space is in the rapid microbial susceptible test, which is basically we reduce the AST from 16 hours to four hours. It is the first FDA-approved AI solution for customers.
Speaker 4:Oh, fascinating. Now if we can have Patricia Black, Director of Healthcare Solutions at Cardinal Peak and FPT Software Company. Pat, if you can talk a little bit about the Cardinal Peak history, what you guys do and now, being part of the family, Tell us how you've integrated.
Speaker 3:So just a little bit about myself. My name is Pat Black. I have over 20 years in experience in medical product development leadership. Along the way, I've worked with teams that have developed products and launched them globally. I've been responsible for a couple of startups and I launched a center of excellence for cross-global product development with a Fortune 500 company and, as you notice, now I'm currently the director of healthcare solutions for Cardinal Peak, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of FPT software, and every day I get to talk to people a wide variety of people doing medical device development, and so that's very exciting for me. We get to help them on their way.
Speaker 3:So about Cardinal Peak we were founded in 2002, and we have about 100 employees, and the focus initially was on audio and video. So today we've expanded the focus and we also do healthcare, medtech solutions, iot, mobile UI, ux, that sort of thing. So now we were acquired by FPT Software almost a year ago October 2023. And so that's really allowed us to expand our capabilities. But still, because we are a wholly owned subsidiary, we still have that face-to-face connection with our customers that we've had for so long that we value. So, from a product development perspective, we do kind of a soup to nuts for a medical device.
Speaker 3:Right, we do hardware development. So printed circuit board design, rf if there's RF capabilities in your device, as well as embedded software C, c++, linux, whatever language that you use and then we also go into the cloud and connect the device to the cloud and to a mobile app. So we have this system integration all the way from the product itself through to the cloud and to mobile apps. We have system architects that help people get all that figured out, and we also have system integrators and QA tests. We have a broad set of industry partners, and one of them that we work closely with is Amazon Web Services. We are a tiered advanced tier service provider and that means that if AWS has a customer that comes to them and they say I want to connect and I want to do these things with AWS as a partner, things with AWS as a partner, we can go in and work with AWS to learn more about what the requirements are and then help their customers be successful as well. So we have a broad set of capabilities.
Speaker 1:Wow, certainly impressive, for sure. And last but definitely not least, gopal, a fellow Bostonian. If you could introduce yourself a little bit about your background and role within FPT?
Speaker 5:Thank you and a pleasure to be on the panel and with the team today. Yeah, new Bostonian, I just arrived, so enjoying the Northeast, so thank you. You know my background is clinical but I'm a clinician innovator. So I began as a physician neurosurgeon out of Australia and had the opportunity to really integrate and work with novel solutions in medical devices from a very early stage of training. So I've seen a lot of various technologies in minimally invasive surgery intravascular surgery, robotic surgery and it goes on. But we've seen a transformation in the device world over the last several decades and as a clinician.
Speaker 5:I came to the United States after having done my NIH research in University of Toronto, done my NIH research in University of Toronto, joined the faculty at Duke where I got my MBA and started to learn and then teach the intricacies of innovation, commercialization and have had roles in business development at Boston Scientific advisor to the likes of Intuitive Surgical and Medtronic and other large medtech as they navigate the world of outcomes.
Speaker 5:At the end of the day, we're all here for the patient's benefit and as a clinician I bring the insights into what could work, how it should work safely and guiding engineers and commercial entities to successful market. I've started several companies across the medical device space, currently working one with ECMO right now, but now also in the new world of AI. Which is really exciting is these devices have always been collecting data, but now we have a way of aggregating, understanding and utilizing that data again for the patient's benefit. Understanding and utilizing that data again for the patient's benefit and my role with FPT is really as a health tech advisor it's to understand the customer voice and that's the customer. That is a medical device company, but through the eyes of the patient and the clinician. What are their needs to service the patient efficiently and with more precision. And now is a really exciting time and we're at the juncture of significant change in the practice of healthcare because we're unleashing the ability to use data that we've seen, we've collected, but we can now interpret in whole new ways.
Speaker 4:Wow, really fascinating personal and professional backgrounds. All three of you bring so much synergy. Clearly the FPT portfolio is all better together and how these specific synergies have helped the two companies now deliver better products and services and health tech and better serve the medtech clients.
Speaker 3:So Cardinal Peak primarily staffed with senior engineers, architects, and so we deliver a really high value, high need for customers, right. So they say a customer comes to us, they have a device, some kind of an instrument or something that needs to be connected to the cloud. We can help them with that and, as well as architect that. An architect like how does this dashboard work for your connectivity to the cloud? You know what are the data components that are interesting for you and we can architect that out.
Speaker 3:What fpt software has done for cardinal peak. This has really expanded our capabilities. Right. So we were focused in certain areas and we could certainly do these medical devices and all of that, but now we can look at what are the best shore opportunities to engage, to do the product development, so we can go in and architect the front end and get these things you know together and get the requirements up there and then we can bring in a lower cost services to help execute this in a budget friendly manner. Right, so that has been huge for us because now we have the also the ability to support like managed services, help desks and things like that and sustaining, and you know, in the past this was just kind of beyond our capabilities. So we're pretty excited about it. It's a great opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and seconding what Pat said, the statement that I made was sketch to scale. So we were missing sketch part and that sketch part was sketch to scale. So we were missing sketch part and that sketch part was added by Cardinal Peak. So now we can go right from concept designing, development delivery right from software, because in the software space, especially in the healthcare, we have a lot of projects and whether it is building the middleware for hematology or backend application for urinalysis, recently we were doing a product for one of the very large health tech company where we finished our software and then they were struggling to finish the hardware part because they were still not able to complete the hardware piece and the current vendor was not able to deliver on time. And we were missing that piece in the past, which now, with the Cardinal Peak, is adding a strength to us. So that becomes a full story now, so we can provide all nine yards to our customer end-to-end. We call it sketch to scale.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, so important. It's all about accelerating development, getting technology in patients and providers' hands as quickly as possible, something we would all appreciate. So, praveen, first I mean talk about the FPT portfolio in terms of accelerating development, and maybe a couple anecdotes or examples on how you're helping clients accelerate their development.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so FPT has been in the health tech industry for over 15 years. We are close to like 5,000 people working purely in the health care space and our primary engagement has been in the product development. That's where we started and of course, we scaled in multiple areas. That's where we started and of course, we scaled in multiple areas. So, healthcare space if you look at, we have our own EMR, ehr and we provide end-to-end service in Southeast Asia. But outside Vietnam we've been engaged by companies for doing the software development for devices like X-ray machine, ct scanner, ultrasound. So we have built embedded softwares for these big machines CT scanner, ultrasound so we have built embedded softwares for these big machines. Besides that, we have also done app development on top of these machines, whether it is a backend application or frontend applications that has been used by the clinicians or the laboratory personals, so that we have been engaged in building the platform where we have connected.
Speaker 2:We've been part of a team building the platform connecting the glucometer, blood glucometer, insulin pen or asthma pumps. We built the middleware, as I said in the past, for the hematology, which is the largest hematology company. They have 80% of the market share. Their entire middleware for the hematology machine was built by us. We also built their application for urine analysis. Percent of the market share. Their entire middleware for the hematology machine was built by us. We also build their application for urine analysis, as I was giving example of a health tech company they're launching their product in 2025.
Speaker 2:We are building their entire application into an. On top of that, moving to the ai, which is the topic of today's discussion, we have applied ai into many workflows. One One example I gave, which was the first FDA approved AI application, but we have applied AI for lung cancer detection on the CT scan, so it helps quickly detect that. Second, we applied AI on tumor detection on the ultrasound machines. We built an AI solution for syphilometric analysis for orthodontists. Then we also built the AI application for acne detection.
Speaker 2:We have recently applied AI for healthcare hospital. When the doctor interacts with the patient Post the clinic visit, they have to create a report. Now AI can actually capture all those conversations live, when they are talking to the patient, and summarize it for the doctors to review it and upload it to EMR, so reducing the time, efficiency and, you know, productivity of the clinician. We are working with one of the customers where we are building the conversational AI for the nursing solution. So this is basically going to help nurses basically follow up with the patient post-clinical visit or pre-clinical visit, and this is a conversational AI. It talks to you like a human person, understands the terminology in the healthcare. So a lot of those kinds of things are building. One of the important thing that we have done we are bringing into this whole fold is the AI tool that can help develop the application in half the time and 40% better price point. And this tool can actually do 40% of the code development.
Speaker 1:So not just helping quickly do the product development, but much faster and a better price Wow that's impressive and, pat, you mentioned data and the importance of getting data from devices to the cloud and vice versa, and, of course, aws cloud and other clouds are fundamental to accelerating development. Maybe talk about your work in that area and how it can help developers as well developers as well.
Speaker 3:Yes, so you know you have to get the data off the device for people like Gopal, right, that can do the analysis and need to understand what's going on. So Cardinal Peak has developed an IoT solution that accelerates time to market, right? So basically, we work with amazon web services. They have connections with this company called expressive. So, say, you have a medical device and, as you mentioned earlier in the opening, so few of those are connected right globally like less than five percent, like less than 5%. So what we can do is open the box and add in this Espressif chip. Espressif will connect to AWS directly and you can use Wi-Fi, if that's what's available to you. You can use local area network, bluetooth, whatever works for your particular device, and you can connect to Amazon Web Services. And then we use a product called BrainMaker, which has implemented a lot of the important factors that exist in an AWS environment, and you use your own AWS account. You don't need a server or anything. So this is really 80% of the work to get connected.
Speaker 3:If you use a product that some folks have like a platform, an integration platform, they're very large, cumbersome, expensive. You're locked into a specific solution and your software updates really are what best serve their community, right, and then there's another way to do it, which is from scratch. You can just build this thing, you know, get all the software, the hardware, figure it all out for yourself. But you know, we kind of liken that to building your own operating system For us. We're like why would you do that? Right, so you can get this 80% solution from Amazon. And then we do the customization. So, basically, what data is interesting to you, where do you want to collect it and how? If you have a dashboard, how do you pull all these things together and these components together, so you get a solution that is not only quicker to market but it's customized more to what your needs are. So that's a very exciting offering for us. A lot of folks seem to be very interested in it because, as we said, there's not a lot of connected medical devices.
Speaker 4:Fascinating Now. Praveen had already brought us into the future a bit, talking about fpt solutions for lung cancer detection and advanced um solutions for like diabetes management, etc. So I want to go even further into the future future of health tech and med tech and ask gopal to comment on um, your perspective on the future of data to make AI and connectivity work in healthcare. Obviously, data is a foundation for all advanced tech, so bring us into the near future with your current plans and your vision.
Speaker 5:Yeah, again, isn't it exciting. There is so much opportunity, but we have to really understand what needs to be paved so that we can actually build upon that. And then, from building upon that, you know what solutions are we really gearing towards or expecting and what are our expectations. But I think you know, when we look at data, we went through a long story of digitization and we talk about digital transformation. The first layer of that was to actually get data actually digital from paper into electronic format and we're still, you know, going through that process. And secondly, you know, the next layer upon that is you know where is the data coming from? Can all of these devices or technologies somehow network and communicate so that the data can be aggregated? We still suffer from the issues of silos, the issues of connectivity. Various layers, languages, formats, protocols and all of those things have been discussed and very good standards of communication have been worked out. Regulatory bodies have rolled their sleeves up, being very positive and forward thinking in laying the groundwork for the future, which again is truly exciting. And I think where we've seen the greatest transformation in the use of AI has really been in diagnostics, because we passed the natural language or language digital barrier because the images themselves are pixels or pictures, and so pattern recognition is really what AI's initial strength was, and we saw a rapid adoption of artificial intelligence and the use of improving diagnostics. And now, beyond that, beyond the diagnostic capability, the ability for them to be autonomous, and so devices have already laid the groundwork and really is providing the future for what AI's potential can be.
Speaker 5:Following that, I think, is the desire of the clinician and patient engagement. The clinician would like data presented in a way that it's a decision assist, so predictive analytics, the ability to use an individual's data in context of population data, in context of pathological or disease-specific data, for the reason is that we'd like to be precise about our care to you. The individual Decision assist also creates efficiency. It creates safety. Things that could or potentially would have been missed are now being flagged and being presented. So we're taking this what we used to call drinking from a fire hose of data. It's now a tidal wave growing into a greater and enormous and unpalatable amount of data, but with appropriate AI, we're synthesizing that into very specific instructions, very specific recommendations, and that is assisting all of the care providers, and its greatest impact right now is in workflow.
Speaker 5:Greatest impact right now is in workflow. We're seeing artificial intelligence flag, where things can create inefficiency because we've missed it, or create recurring admissions or adverse events because we're not tracking it, and I think AI is already making an impact. But then we go in the next step and that is that the patient is wearing or has implanted a medical device and real-time monitoring, where you are now taking the care paradigm to a new level of engagement, where the patient becomes their own advocate, the physician and care teams are alerted and protocols are activated. Wearables and implantable technologies are now looking at and designing ways that we can manage diabetes, cardiac failure, arrhythmia, heart failure all sorts of chronic diseases where it would take a patient several visits over several months to get the appropriate medication. Now intervention can be real-time. That efficiency creates better outcome. So, although we look at AI as an efficient tool, a way of manipulating data, at the end of the day, again, patient outcome, precise, real-time management is where medical devices is going to lead the pack.
Speaker 4:So exciting.
Speaker 1:Wow, what an incredible portrait vision you've painted for us and what a great group of individuals. I wish we had more hours to discuss this and guess what we do. Come see us at MedTech, meddevice Boston September 25th. 26th, ftpt will have a booth 914. They'll have a lunch and learn on the 25th Great opportunity to dive deeper and really continue this discussion with these incredible individuals, including Gopal and Pat. And if you haven't done so, follow FBT, america's Cardinal Peak on LinkedIn, where they put out some really educational, insightful content and white papers and all kinds of interesting insights on med tech and health tech. Thanks everyone, thanks so much for joining Much appreciated and see you at MedDevice Boston on the 25th.
Speaker 4:Thank you so much See you there, thank you for having us here.
Speaker 3:Thanks everyone.
Speaker 1:Bye. Thanks everyone for listening.