In The Arena by TechArena - Re-architeting Patient Care with Physia

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

TechArena host Allyson Klein chat’s with Physia about their generative AI based patient care platform and how they aim to create a new AI + doctor model to improve patient care and transform the medical industry.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein. We're coming to you from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and I'm with Nacho Gea from Physia. Welcome to the program, Nacho.

Thank you for inviting me. So why don't we just get started in an introduction of Physia and what you're delivering to the marketplace. Great. Well, we are a company from Alicante, the south of Spain. We are all involved in the physiotherapy world and sports. And we found some problems at the time to talk with our clients and trying to solve life problems. So we started developing the database about injuries and so on. And about how we keep on developing, we started with physiotherapy, as I told you, and we noticed that this could be a good tool to use for all health workers. So we tried to increase that database with all kinds of studies or researches from trustful sources like PubMed and other... So you started with physiotherapy and you're expanding for many healthcare issues based on capturing a broad wealth of data.

Now, there's been incredible breakthroughs across medicine in terms of the use of AI. And we've seen x-ray detection and MRI detection increase based on AI scanning images. We've seen assisted robotic surgery with AI. You're taking on a broader and in some ways more difficult challenge. How have you approached training an algorithm with all of this data so that the solutions offered to medical providers and to patients can be trusted? Well, our goal related to

your question is to provide a comprehensive care to both patient and professional. Our assistant records the patient problem and then attempts to provide personalized advice. This has been a significant hurdle to overcome as creating an assistant for each medical specialty is a challenge. However, with the core already well developed, the main body of the program, we can relatively easily achieve this thing. We also connect the assistant with professionals who can also answer that kind of question from the patient's life. If we find some big problems, the program itself will tell the client to ask for the professional.

So it's an AI plus human doctor working together. Okay. What do you think is the market opportunity in this space for a tool like this? Well, the market opportunity presented itself as a virtual assistant at very limited and providing closed responses. And everything is like too prepared and lacking functionalities beyond providing basic information. Our system offers open-ended responses and directly connects you with the professional. So I guess it's what everyone wants when having a problem. What AI model has been trained

and how has Physia captured the data to ensure the medically sound delivery of services? Okay. Well, our AI is fit, as I said before, with data from clinical professionals, from different areas and scientific data from medical databases. Mm-hmm. PubMed, Scopus, Pedro. Initially we used ChatGPT to gather all that data and from interaction with patients to feed our EA. And we use our platform and WhatsApp as the information is end-to-end encrypted.

That's fantastic. What's the response been? I just saw the demo. I saw it online. I saw it in your booth. What's been the response from the medical community in your area? And do you have any key learnings from the early use of the technology? There is a small percentage of people that are hesitant.

But when we explain what we do and the benefits it brings to the daily work, they leave behind those thoughts and try to be more open to know more about it. Something that everyone asks is, what happens when the problem is big and what about your responses? Of course, we are taking it into account and we have our codes prepared to give the client the exact response about that.

What are your plans to expand the solution moving forward? And what has the response been at MWC? We want to add more functionalities like voice, in order not to be typing and try to be focused on the client and create an assistant that handles all the work that the professional shouldn't have to do or has been doing all their life. We want them to focus on what really matters. This is in the short term.

And long term, we aim to further develop the software so that professionals have these solutions and more in a single platform. Having all together well organized

and each patient with each place to consult, whatever you want. Where can folks find out more about Physia and the solutions that you're delivering in market? On our website, physia.com. Easy.

Okay. Thank you so much, Nacho, for being on today. Thank you very much, Alison. Thanks for joining The Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.