Our guest this episode was Patricia Bradley, CEO of MindMaze. Patricia is an innovative commercial executive leader with over 25 years of healthcare experience. Previously, she held senior leadership positions as a vice president of sales and marketing at Nova Nordisk, where she built a successful clinical education business unit from the ground up with over 300 employees that was recognized as best in class within the industry. Currently at MindMaze, she is leading a team of 50 that are working from all over the world.
Patricia joined Reuben Hall to discuss her work in digital therapeutics, neuroscience, and neuro-rehabilitation helping to improve the outcomes of patients with stroke, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson’s disease, MS, and more. They also discussed the gamification of rehabilitation, using digital health products.
“You get lost in these [digital therapeutic] games so you can get extra. We already know from our own work that we’ve done that you’re getting statistically significantly more movement in the body… And then you think of it like your kids. They get addicted to these games. They become fun and you can do [your rehabilitation] in a shorter timeframe, and do much more.” Patricia Bradley
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Read Transcript:
Reuben:
Welcome to the MindSee podcast series, Moving Digital Health. Our guest today is Patricia Bradley. Patricia is an innovative commercial executive leader with over 25 years of healthcare experience. Previously, she held senior leadership positions as a vice president of sales and marketing at Nova Nordisk. She built a successful clinical education business unit from the ground up with over 300 employees that was recognized as best in class within the industry. Currently at MindMaze, she is leading a team of 50 that are working from all over the world. Thanks for joining us today, Patricia.
Patricia Bradley:
Thank you for having me.
Reuben:
Maybe we can start by you can tell us a bit about your background.
Patricia Bradley:
So my background is a little eclectic. I started my career professionally in industrial engineering for UPS, helping them to optimize efficiencies for their customers out in the marketplace as an industrial engineering supervisor, and then wound up some weird way transitioning into healthcare, working in pharma and other things. But I remember when I worked for a company that got bought out. by another company and I was in the middle of graduate school and I started working in startups then because startups were way more flexible about where you work, what you did. So I worked in AI for cancer detection many, many years ago before it was all the rage and started in that using, cause you can use things like neural nets to detect abnormal cancer cells and really help assist how people find cancer early cause that was really at the time. thought to be the way to go, early detection, early intervention, trying to help people live better, healthier lives. And then I wound up, after graduate school, went back into pharma for a long period of time, which you mentioned at Novo Nordisk, but when there were some changes of leadership at Novo Nordisk, I left and went back into startup. So I worked for a company called Huma out of the UK that gets into decentralized clinical trials, digital biomarkers. and other things like that, hospital at home type of programs using technology, stayed on for a period of time with them. And then while my dad was in rehab, got approached by Mind Maze and it hit very close to home because my dad was flunking in rehab. Unfortunately, he actually passed away in rehab, but I came on board because of the burden and the problems that are out there in rehabilitation. And it’s a perfect place for technology to step in and fill some of those gaps. I mean, and then I think that’s really what technology is ideally suited for, is helping to supplement where you either have deficiencies, need improvements, can augment what currently is going on using technology, whether that helps diagnose something or helps you do more than what you could do with the current standard of care. And so that’s really where I play now. It’s fascinating because if you look at it, I’m in neurorehabilitation, which means I work on things like stroke, traumatic brain injury, Parkinson’s disease, MS. And in many of these cases, there have been no developments or very few developments over the last 20 plus years.
Patricia Bradley:
So technology can fill the gap. There’s a shortage of healthcare providers out there in the marketplace too. So… You can use technology to set the standard or at least to facilitate that everybody has a similar experience by utilizing it, but we use it. We are a digital therapeutic that works in the area of neuroscience and neuro rehabilitation, and I’ve been leading those efforts globally from sales, marketing, market access, corporate strategy, perspective, thinking about how we step into all the different markets across the globe. And we are in many, we are in. everything from India to Southern Europe, meaning, you know, Italy and Spain. We’re in the UK, we’re in Switzerland, in Germany, and many European countries, and then we’re also in the US.
Reuben:
Okay, I know there’s several different products under the Mind Maze portfolio. Maybe you could give us a brief overview of the different products and the symptoms they treat.
Patricia Bradley:
So they’re all actually part of the continuum of care in the process. And if you think about it, we are digital assets that support the patient at many different points in their journey. So we have the MindPod, which is really kind of that open-ended type of learning environment where you actually use physical movement to tap into neuroplasticity. and rewire the brain after injury, whether that be an injury from stroke or traumatic brain. Not to say that it doesn’t work in other areas, but in essence, if you can see the body moving, or that you can get parts of the body moving, you can help remap it out to make those things happen and actually get disease modifying improvement. And that’s what we’re clinically working to prove that we can actually modify progression of the disease or actually help get back function. after an injury from stroke or brain injury. That happens in the hospital on a floor. And then you have things like mind motion go, which could be in step down care units where patients, generally after they’ve been in the hospital in acute care, they’ll step down into like an independent rehab hospital or some other step down care. We actually go into those facilities and we can do things like assessments. So now you can use technology to do independent assessments. measure movements of limbs, number of movements, range of motion, but also do it in a fun way where you gamify it. And you can even gamify the rehabilitation component of it. And so we can do that in step-down care using tracker-less cameras. So you’re dealing, you’re helping the patient not have to add anything on that can deal with fall risk and other things that they’re already at high risk for. And then we have things like the Izar, which is a handheld device, because if you know anything about stroke, the hand is often one of the areas that’s very hard to rehab, but yet they have so many problems with grasp, activities of daily living. And so we can do exercises specifically for hand and fine motor function to help them get back their quality of life. And then, so all things kind of go in assistance towards that, even where you get into Physiolog, which is a sensor that measures gait and fall risk and movement for remote monitoring in ways like that. So you could see you started in the hospital, you go into step down care. MindMotion Go also has the ability to go home with a patient and be something that they can do at home because the burden of getting patients back into facilities for rehab, even if it’s a local facility, takes a lot of work to get somebody in an accessor ride or. have somebody accompany them to the rehab facility, you can do it at home and still have it monitored, remotely monitored by somebody. But then you also have the ability to put sensors on them and then track their movements and see what their gait is, use the algorithms in it to assess fall risk and get up and go scores and other things like that you can use technology for. So all of our peripherals are in service to the patient. And even if you can’t get them to open the hand, Intendo was designed to help use electrical stimulation so they can get movement in the hand if there was no other way to do it. And so by doing that, you’re again, trying to tap into the neural pathways and plasticity and the movement helps recreate some of that roadwork, as you would say, to get the body moving at the same time.
Patricia Bradley:
So it’s a lot of things in the service situation.
Reuben:
A lot of different products all kind of interacting along that continuum of care, like you said. Now, did it start off with one and then you built out from there? Or are these kind of different startups that came together for a suite of products? How did that all evolve?
Patricia Bradley:
It was multiple companies that came together for a suite of products. So if you look at it, there was a company out of Maryland that designed the mind pod. And that was acquired by mind maze. Mind maze had the mind motion go and the mind pro, which are kind of that more portable type of equipment for neuro rehabilitation, not that it couldn’t be used for regular rehabilitation, but specifically the area that we’re focusing on is neuro rehabilitation. IZAR is something that is homegrown that we developed ourselves to deal with a problem that patients were having with their hands and fine motor skills. And it’s been now incorporated into the games and can be also used as trackers as they do, you know, helps us with tracking motion of the limbs. The Physiolog was acquired from a company that merged with us for the trackers, you know. And so they’ve been doing a lot of work in clinical studies in other areas, tracking motion. And so some of it is homegrown. Some of it we’ve acquired. We were in essence, like five companies that came together at different points in time. We even acquired a gaming company that had specific games for Parkinson’s disease so that we could add that into our suite of games that we offer for expanding our neurological conditions that we could cover. So, you know, it’s, in tech, it’s never one and done. Usually there are multiple companies out there and then it’s just integrating platforms and integrating games.
Reuben:
Okay, and then along those same lines, like are there other products that you’re currently working on that are still to come to add to the MindMaze platform?
Patricia Bradley:
So this whole other side, and it is separate from the business I do, but we have a labs component. So we have Mind Maze Labs, which then works with athletes and other things on their performance. And we can take the key learnings from there and then apply it into the healthcare arena. So we have a whole lab side of it. And you may have seen, people may have seen things on LinkedIn about race car drivers that we work with. I mean, if anybody takes a beating out there, race car drivers, especially in Formula One, are moving at crazy speeds, getting banged around a lot out there
Patricia Bradley:
So we can take some of the data from that, um, and optimizing their performance and then apply that to patients because it does, does play over. So we do a lot of work, even in innovation and exploratory stuff. And then of course, we’re always open to other collaborations. or other synergistic ways to keep on helping more and more people in this process. So you know, we’re open to it all.
Reuben:
Okay, so the area of digital therapeutics is still pretty new. You know, with any of those products that MindMaze has, like how exactly does a physician prescribe it? Or, you know, I guess even before that, how do you get on the physician’s radar so they know about MindMaze?
Patricia Bradley:
So, you know, I mean, and that’s part of the problem that I’m trying to solve for is how, there’s different kinds of digital therapeutics, right? There are many different, you have kind of the remote monitoring end of the world, you’ve got the apps end of the world. We’re a little bit of everything because we’re also a device. So the question is, how do you do it? That’s what we’re also trying to figure out. Like right now, we have healthcare facilities, buying devices. on like a subscription model and having these things within their facilities. We signed a contract with Vibra Healthcare, right? And they are a specialty hospital chain from coast to coast across the US. They have many rehab hospitals. And so they are looking to put these into their facilities, but then they’re also very open to considering a home program, right? So as patients actually get discharged, what do you do with them? right, and making sure that they could have access to that. We’re then working through that process of what does that look like? It’s not like you can just go to CVS and fill a prescription, although all of us would love that, right? You just, you get into digital prescriptions. How do you fulfill that and how, it’s not like the pharmacist then hands you a pill bottle with MindMotion Go in it. It’s not that small, right? It’s, you have to get into things like Hub Services or, follow maybe a little bit of the model like insulin pumps did, where something gets fulfilled, it goes to like a clearing house or something that works on your, your benefits to see if it’s reimbursed or tries to help you facilitate that process. And then it gets shipped to you. Or do we set up a company that goes to your house and sets it up within your home to do that. And then you’re, it’s like a monthly. subscription, so to speak, or a monthly prescription, because it does need to be monitored by a healthcare provider. They do need to set the protocols, even if we give them suggested protocols, they have to approve it or modify it based upon the patient. So there are many different ways, but the current US reimbursement process is not really caught up to that. There are a few digital formularies out there, but… That’s part of what we have to solve. I mean, technology definitely has a place in this world, but how do you actually put it in their hands? We don’t actually have a distribution system set up for digital therapeutics. We really don’t. You’re starting to see a few of them, but it is case by case in IDN or integrated delivery network by integrated delivery network system itself. It’s not like there’s an Aetna or a CVS covering these things broadly. Yeah.
Reuben:
Yeah, in all the different countries and jurisdictions you work in, is there any one where that’s a lot easier, the process is more advanced to getting patients these types of interventions?
Patricia Bradley:
I’d like to say yes, but really no, really no. Let’s be real, even Germany who tried to do this, who set up different processes for digital therapeutics, most of the companies that were doing this went bankrupt in the process.
Reuben:
like through the DIGA process? Yeah.
Patricia Bradley:
Yes, to the DIGA process, right? Because there was, their reimbursement process is a little different than. than us. So I think, you know, on any of these things, you’ve got to find different pathways through it, whether that you work through GPOs, like in Germany, do you work through the GPOs, do you work through the German Pension Fund that has a significant majority of the population, or at least a good, very large cohort. I think there’s different paths forward through this. It does all resonate with data and science and clinical studies, looking at that. But it’s interesting right now, a lot of that is still, even the US, there’s bills on the hill of, how are we going to, you know, are we going to incorporate this into our reimbursement systems? What does it look like? What’s the threshold for data? There’s no good, clean answer on it. And most of these companies, we’re not big pharma. We don’t have billion dollar brands. that we can afford to do studies that are millions and millions of dollars. What you’re seeing in many cases is companies running out of money before things get widely adopted because they, they’re, their pockets are not as deep. They don’t have other assets that are paying for them in the short term.
Patricia Bradley:
Um, and then they run out of money before there’s, before you can get to that point. You’ve seen it happen with Achille. We’ve seen it happen with pair and those were at. based things. So it’s not even like you had to physically ship, always ship big pieces of equipment around.
Reuben:
Yeah, those were well funded organizations too. And I know that the levels of VC funding and digital health have fallen off dramatically along with the cash crunch with all startup investment really.
Patricia Bradley:
And yet some of these things, like in my particular circumstances, there’s not enough healthcare providers to provide rehab services. The burden of getting somebody to a facility for rehab exists even if you’re just me and you and we’re going for rehab after shoulder surgery or knee surgery. It’s not so simple. So there is a desire to get the care home where we can relieve the burden on the family. you know, and the care system for that patient. So you think it would be common sense, but there’s still, we still don’t make it easy. We still don’t really make it easy. Is it gonna be better to have a computer evaluate your range of motion? It’s far more unbiased than, you know, having a different assessor look at it each week and giving a report. Computers don’t lie. It’s gonna tell you how many times you moved and cameras can tell you. how much you moved, and it’s much more unbiased. But I think it’s just our internal systems need to catch up with it, right? Because it may make sense, it may be common sense. How many studies, like for us, I know that I get almost 10 times the number of movements in a game assisted rehab program versus traditional rehab. We’ve seen it. There are lots of studies out there that look at the number of movements you do in traditional rehab. And then we can look at the number of movements you’re doing when you rehab with a mind motion go. And in some cases, it’s almost like a tenfold increase. You know, if you got 30 movements and you’re getting closer to 300, it’s common sense to think more movements is going to help you recover faster or going to optimize your recovery. it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that out. Not to say that you don’t still have to do the studies, but do you have to do them in 10,000 people or could you do it in smaller cohorts? Or do you do more real world evidence type of studies in these cases? So you do it as you go and you’re collecting more longitudinal data versus the trials. The unfortunate part is we used to be where things were paid for until you proved they didn’t work. Now you have to prove everything works before anything is paid.
Reuben:
Mm-hmm. I think those are some great examples of how the mind maze intervention can be better than the standard treatment. I wonder if you have any others, you know, specifically around, you know, what is the standard of care and how the mind maze specific intervention, you know, improves upon that or delivers better outcomes.
Patricia Bradley:
So think, well, there’s many different ways it can help. So if you think about it, things like this can be synergistically with drugs that affect movement, right, to lift it up. So there’s no doubt that in places like SMA, spinal muscular atrophy, or any of these other areas, that getting somebody moving is gonna help them, right? Even when there’s a drug involved, when there’s a molecule involved. So anything that is making it fun that you… you get lost in a game and don’t realize how much you’re moving, it’s going to help, right? So if you think about traditional rehab, you get prescribed rehab for any reason. It’s usually three times a week, right? You gotta go, say Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And then they say, here’s your exercises, go home and do this. There’s no visibility on the exercises. And there’s no doubt that even if you did the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, if you could have a system at home that could pick up Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, you could get to five days a week doing this. You could get to six days a week. You could even get to seven days a week. I mean, do you think your kids don’t use phones seven days a week playing games? They do. There’s an addictive nature to games that we can tap into. And there’s so many different ways you can deliver this stuff.
Reuben:
Yeah, I did. I definitely get annoyed at the amount of time people spend gaming on their phones, especially kids. But I also get excited about using those same techniques and that same kind of plugs into, you know, human psychology and behavior to kind of trick them into getting healthy, essentially by encouraging the movement in the game as opposed to, you know, on the couch with your phone.
Patricia Bradley:
Yeah, and it’s there and it is all protocolized, prescribed, and it doesn’t lie. Like the computer too tells you when you fake it, right? Because we’re using trackerless cameras on the body. When you compensate and you don’t do what you’re supposed to do and say you shift your body to get something versus actually using the limb that has been hurt in the process, the computer will tell you. And then… you use artificial intelligence and other things, you can gamify it and basically force the person to have to work the deficit.
Patricia Bradley:
So therefore you’re really getting recovery, not compensation. And you get lost in these games so you can get extra, we already know from our own work that we’ve done that you’re getting significantly more movement, statistically significantly more movement in the body. So common sense, that’s gonna help. You can get more days because you’re making it easier to get access to the care. It can be reviewed. It’s constantly being monitored where it wasn’t previously constantly monitored. Everything is being looked at. Something is taking an image of you and tracking it, putting it into numerics and giving reports on it, telling you what part of your body you moved, how you moved it, how well, and rating it in a way. so that you can constantly adjust it. And then you can also see when they’re doing well and you can upgrade the games. There’s hundreds of combinations of these games that you can do to work the body that you want. And it makes homework easy. And then, yeah, you think of it like your kids. They, you get addicted to these games. They become fun and you can do it in a shorter timeframe, do much more. And so a lot of this… really opens up so many opportunities for patients to get much more. I mean, and our whole point of this is, if we can tap into all these things, can we get them back or as close back to normal as they were prior to whatever event took place?
Patricia Bradley:
How high can we, you know, how can we take them? Whether they’re on a drug, can we get the most out of the drug and then add on to that benefit? Or can we… you know, and just against traditional rehab, can we get more out of them so that they do better?
Patricia Bradley:
And then even longer term. And then these things are mentally challenging too. So they have what you would call like dual modality. It’s not like there’s no mental challenge to it. And then that works on so many other things. I mean, you know, even places like Alzheimer’s, we haven’t even tapped into that, you know, those things, but movement in general, we know is a mitigating factor. for Alzheimer’s helps delay its onset. So these things can have benefits in so many ways. It’s not designed for mood, but we know physical movement helps mood.
Reuben:
Certainly. And to your point before, one of the biggest problems with rehab is the adherence and just people staying on the program and doing the activities. And if they have an incentive to get it done, then it’s fun. And it can keep them adherent and have much better outcomes. It also gives the clinicians so much more data to analyze and help inform. that treatment, whether they’re ready for an increase or need to dial back and that sort of thing.
Patricia Bradley:
Yeah, I mean, and you’re getting it faster, right? So you can make adjustments because if they’re not, just let’s say they’re not adhering, or they’re not moving, they haven’t been on the system, you’re gonna know it. What’s going on with them? You’ll know it faster than a visit because how many times, I mean, oh gosh, I used to watch my dad, be like, no, I did my exercises. No, he didn’t, he didn’t do
Patricia Bradley:
You really know, and you don’t have to wait that long to know. You’re gonna have instant. real-time feedback. And so you either know that they’re not, and then maybe you do need to intervene in some other way. Maybe there’s something else you need to do to help them.
Reuben:
Mm-hmm. I know like MindMaze is a lot, there’s a lot of different products there, there’s a lot of different diseases that you’re helping to treat. What do you think is the place where MindMaze has been able to have the biggest impact on patient outcomes?
Patricia Bradley:
Well, for us right now, we’re really focusing in the areas of stroke because there’s been no drug development in that area since TPA came out. And that’s been 20 years, right? There is nothing to treat a patient post-stroke, nothing at all. I mean, basically, as soon as the person can be discharged, they’re sent home and then maybe they get a few months of rehab. When we know they’re gonna probably need this for the rest of their life. They’re gonna need something. And how do you do that? in that chronic management, whether it’s post acute stroke and then chronic management, this is long-term, this is long, long-term. They need to be always working their body. So we’re really focusing in the stroke area, but then quickly other movement disorders have kind of come up very quickly that people want us to address. So at the same time, we’re actively… looking at Parkinson’s disease, MS, and then also other cognitive assessments and things like that for us to add in there because people often have multiple issues going on at the same time. And so can we address cognition and then even things like mood and other things can we assess those things along the way. So there are some things we’re at you know that we’re in the process of our product planning. components to add to our systems. But really stroke is the first one. And then other, like I said, Parkinson’s, MS, cognition, those are coming up very fast and furious behind them.
Reuben:
Excellent. Well, it’s clear you’re doing some great things at MindMaze, and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat about them.
Patricia Bradley:
Thank you, thank you for having me. I think that it’s so interesting to see how quickly this is evolving. And hopefully some of these things will find a good way to have widespread adoption. And I think there’s a lot of good technologies that can supplement the current issues we face, right? Helping with healthcare provider shortages and other things that we’re currently facing and connectivity. I mean, if COVID taught us anything is we need to have patients connected.
Reuben:
And I think everyone sees that and knows where we have to get to. It’s just the slow pace of change to get to that point and to achieve the potential of digital health integrated into the system.
Patricia Bradley:
Yeah, it will take some partnerships of multiple companies similar to mine and others working together to make that happen because none of us are big enough to do it alone.
Reuben:
Well, thanks again for joining me today, Patricia, and thanks for everyone for listening to the Moving Digital Health podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, please go to movingdigitalhealth.com to subscribe to the MindSee newsletter and be notified about future episodes.
Patricia Bradley:
Thank you!
