How Gastroenterology and Technology can Combine for Better Patient Care with Javier Mendoza, Gastroenterologist and Medical Consultant EHRead at Savana: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
How Gastroenterology and Technology can Combine for Better Patient Care with Javier Mendoza, Gastroenterologist and Medical Consultant EHRead at Savana: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
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Saul Marquez:
Welcome back to the Outcomes Rocket everyone, Saul Marquez is here. Today, I have the privilege of hosting Dr. Javier Mendoza. He is a Gastroenterologist with international experience, working in various countries, the Netherlands, Portugal, the US and Spain, where he is calling in from. He’s also engaged in entrepreneurship and nonprofit work, all targeted to improve health care outcomes with digital technologies and artificial intelligence. I’m excited to have a good chat with him today. And so with that, I want to welcome you to the podcast.
Javier Mendoza:
Thank you, Saul. Thank you for having me. I’m very happy to be here and talk about my work that this health care. So thank you.
Saul Marquez:
Absolutely. And first of all, you’re calling from South Spain. It’s about five p.m., six p.m. over there. You’re ready for your Friday, right?
Javier Mendoza:
Well, you know, the dinner here is late.
Saul Marquez:
You guys eat like at nine or ten at night.
Javier Mendoza:
Exactly. Yeah.
Saul Marquez:
My gosh.
Javier Mendoza:
It’s amazing. Yeah. I guess you still have plenty of work to do. I’m glad I’m not the thing that’s standing between you and the end of your day so Javier you do such incredible work. Why don’t we start off by you telling us what inspires your work and health care?
Javier Mendoza:
I think with this question, I go personal. If I have to say what inspired me, it’s my father. My father was a nurse and I saw all of his career helping many people ask me, OK, can you define what would you do in health care for me? So it was easy. So I think health care is helping people. And I saw that in my father every day.
Saul Marquez:
That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s so great. And so now you’re a physician. You work with startup companies and you do a lot in the space. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you believe you’re adding value to the health care ecosystem with some of the work that you’re doing?
Javier Mendoza:
Yes, right now I work part-time as a gastroenterologist, so I have this point of view and I talk to the patients and I listen to the feedback and I work part-time. And for me, one of the best company in artificial intelligence on health care in Spain is called Savana. And now we’re moving internationally. It’s a natural language processing company and we’re doing a great job that I think should billions. And I think that now we’re going to do great work in diagnosis, but we have to bring this empathy to be closer to the patients. So I would say that now the future is companies with artificial intelligence on healthcare and I try to work in that area.
Saul Marquez:
Thank you. Yeah. And so as as you think about artificial intelligence and so diagnosis, for example, the work that you guys are doing at the company, how would you say it’s different than what’s out there? And how exactly are you guys helping patients and physicians?
Javier Mendoza:
Yeah, the important thing with this company, its founder is, is a medical doctor a neurologist from Madrid. So we have this point of view of medical company. We’d like to see that type of that type company. So it’s a medical company. We try to have information of electronic health records. So we have a lot of information there. And we have to bring that information, knowledge and with that artificial intelligence can do two things. One is that classification, diagnosis. But the game-changer will be prediction. We want to do that in our company.
Saul Marquez:
Fascinating. So it’s all about the data and where you get the data from. There’s a lot of different places and structuring it the right way. Are you guys pulling patient data from devices? Are you pulling from the electronic health record? What data are you pulling and what output are you getting from the data?
Javier Mendoza:
Yeah, we talk directly to the hospital and we treat the data in a very ethical data. So that’s important. Another thing that I do is collaboration with nonprofit association. Go on this, say that what we do and we working at Ricco in artificial intelligence ethics is very important. And now that we have the practice, folks, now there is a movement that we want to have this technocratic approach. And I think it’s important when you feel that now that technology is the health care summit, that we have to give one more step and explain, OK, it’s not all about that, but it’s also ethics and trust because we work with data, but behind that, the patients are person.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s key. And I think right now we definitely are having a strong shift toward the consumer where we’re seeing the patient is now more shifting to a consumer. And so I’m very happy about that. It sounds like you guys are really focused on that, the work that you’re doing at Savannah, keeping the patient at the center, treating them as a person, as a consumer, not just being patient with the number. As you do the work that you do there, can you think of anything that maybe has been a challenge? We learn more from those challenges than actually our successes? I believe. So talk to us about one of those setbacks and what you learned from it.
Javier Mendoza:
Yes, sure. I’d like to talk about the challenge. And as you said before, I worked in different countries and you say Europe is the same, but it’s not the same, Portugal and Spain. So my first job was in Portugal. It was hard work there with another language and talking about empathy, I would say that I have bad news like a cancer or you have a chronic disease IBD patients in that English, Spanish and Portuguese. So my Dutch is not great. Be one and I’m happy, but I have to be close to the patients. I was always with the nurse there to try to explain what’s happening in the way you look, the way you talk, the way you explain. That’s very important. So the challenge was my first job and the challenge in the Netherlands was difficult in that way. But you always learn that you have to look at the patients to tell the truth and came with trust and ethics in what you do.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, that’s critical. And it’s a tough time Right. when you’re sick and you are dealing with whether it be a chronic condition or something very serious, you want somebody to be with you and for somebody to feel your pain, for somebody to understand. And it sounds like you’re really focused on that, Javier. And I think it’s so awesome. I mean, it’s really important for physicians to do that for their patients. And so as you view kind of the future, what would you say you’re most excited about today?
Javier Mendoza:
That I used to say that I’m a doctor of the century because I finished medical school in 1994. So now I’m excited about the health of this information. So coming back to the beginning, when you in the hospital for one hour, you can help maybe 8 patients. And now with machine learning, you can help in our thousand. So that’s amazing. I like always said the sentence about a proposal that will keep medicine is like the Bible of health protection, billions and machine learning to be closer to the patients.
Saul Marquez:
Man, that’s so great. And yeah, the platform for digital health, the future of it is so great. I mean, we had the challenges of covid, but because of it, we’ve also seen the adoption of digital health go through the roof, the openness of physicians, of the FDA, of regulatory bodies really saying, OK, we have to embrace this and we can’t keep pushing things off. So I think the time is right. The time is right. And I’m glad that somebody with a big heart and somebody that values patients like you is really helping with some of the advancements in that with your work at Savanah and the work that you do. So I really thank you for spending time with us. And I’d love it if you could just leave us with a closing thought for the listeners and the best place that they could reach out to you if something you said inspired them or just if they want to reach out to you for more questions.
Javier Mendoza:
Yes, maybe to finish up some of the things that we have said. I think this is all about health. I think we have to trust technology and artificial intelligence and machine learning to jump to digital health that in that article way. So if we join all these elements of thing, we can jump in the trust that way to focus in digital health in the future and move on. It’s a lot of things to do.
Saul Marquez:
Yeah, for sure. There definitely are. And so if anybody wanted to get in touch with you Javier, where can they go?
Javier Mendoza:
I think maybe the best way is LinkedIn. So it’s JavierMendoza.MD. that, and I’m always active on LinkedIn.
Saul Marquez:
OK, yeah, great, and so we’ll leave a link to Javier’s LinkedIn page in the Show notes, you could find those at outcomesrocket.health. Type Javier Mendoza inside of the search bar and you’re going to be able to find them. Javier, this has been a pleasure. I really, really, really appreciate you jumping on with us.
Javier Mendoza:
Thank you, Saul.
Saul Marquez:
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