Patheous Health | Michael Peck, CEO

Michael Peck  0:00  
Good afternoon, everyone. As John mentioned, my name is Michael Peck, I'm CEO and co founder of Patheous Health.

And as CEO and co founder, you definitely need the clicker. So we're gonna start there, I think so. So we are focused on dysphasia. If you heard my friend this morning, Reinhard with Phagenesis, you know, this is a actually a very sizeable, problematic issue in healthcare. And so what we're collectively trying to do is solve that issue. So if you enjoyed your morning coffee, if you've enjoyed your breakfast, your lunch or your drink, during your bottle of water, or whatever you have in front of you, or even a MacAllan 12 Scotch that I enjoyed last night, and basically didn't even think about it, that's something that you took for granted, you enjoyed it, it was nice, pleasurable for millions of people, that's a problem. And that's what dysphasia is, it's a swallowing impairment, food gets stuck in your throat, you can't eat, you don't enjoy it, it's embarrassing. You go hide, you don't eat it, all your nutrition goes down the down the drain, literally. And so that's a problem. So what it turns out is that about 15 million people suffer from that exact condition. In 2021, there were 15.3 million diagnosis of dysphasia. It's a huge cost to healthcare, it's about almost approaching $29 billion in costs. And the in the really interesting challenges, there's a disproportionate impact to the senior population, you'll see that's a growing, growing market. And in fact, within just the skilled nursing community, in the residence in those skilled nursing facilities, it's almost 52% of those residents have some form of dysphasia. We think that's solvable. When you do have it, it's a poor quality of life. And if it really gets bad, it leads to some some really bad outcomes, it leads to death. So it leads to malnutrition, dehydration, pneumonia, and death, and something my grandmother just suffered from not too long ago. So the challenge is big, it's expensive. It's a complex condition. It's not just something you just walk up and try and fix. It takes a lot of training. Various clinicians, whether it be a physician, speech language pathologist, other therapists, nurses, dieticians, the whole group needs to come together to really help manage this problem. The interesting part is there's really no consensus, there's no standard of care, and that's something we're trying to fix. And there's also very limited self care options. So you're gonna go to your primary physician, if you have, and they're going to kind of throw up their hands and say, I'm not sure what to do, they might send you a GI doctor, or they might send you to some feeding clinic. But there really is no set way to really go after this, as it stands now. And if you have some of these really bad initial conditions, whether it be stroke, Parkinson's cancers, you know, your your elderly, it's a big impact, it's a huge secondary problem that you see in the in the area of health care. And so what it also happens as I as I mentioned earlier, when you do have it, it increases all these really bad, other morbidities. If you have dysphasia, you have a four times increase of pneumonia, malnutrition is almost two times it can lead to dehydration, in fact, 40, almost half the skilled nursing populations have some sort of dehydration issue, and almost 10% of that that group ends up with feeding tubes. So it's a really, really bad outcome. And feeding tubes alone can cost 30,000-$40,000 a year within the skilled nursing community. So obviously, I've already kind of given away how we're approaching this market. Today, we're focused on that senior care population. Unfortunately, I'm part of this. And what you're going to see is a growth in that population over the next 15 years. In fact, for they're going to be 45 million more of us, pains me to say that, over the age of 65, in the next in the next 15 years or so. And for the first time ever, that aging population is going to outnumber the under 18 population. So you're gonna see this massive change in health care. For us, what we're focused on is all those senior places of care, right, there's over 28,000 locations where you find that senior population, and that's going to start growing, and that's our focus. So we're trying to do is really, we think dysphasia is a manageable condition. And we're really taking a true medtech 3.0 approach to this if you will, and we call it integrated dysphasia healthcare. And so we're really taking an end to end approach focusing on the screening part where you have to identify early, assessing it properly, diagnosing it properly with imaging, and then treating it on the back end, and then under underwriting all that with the right workflow solutions, and so we're bringing all that to the table.

So first, we're going to focus on that screening part we have we are developed hoping as we speak a novel bio sensor that will measure swallowing rate as a vital sign. So we're going to be a major swallowing and swallowing swallows per minute and that will help us then predict the next stage where you're at where you're at today with that swallowing problem. So this is truly disruptive, good enough solution, to figure out what's going on with that swallowing problem. The next is critical, we have to assess you properly. The good news is we have some digital health solutions that are in place. And we're packaging those up in a little bit better format as we speak. But this is really disruptive to the current standard of care. When you go in and assess dysphasia, as a clinician, you really are kind of out there on your own, you're really out there in the desert. And so we're really trying to solve that problem. In terms of the imaging, again, this is a critical component in that stage, we're bringing two gold standard components to the table to diagnose. And after you assess, you're diagnosing that condition that really lays out the next next in this crucial lays out the next stage, which is that treatment solution. And so there's a lot of different techniques, methods, devices that are out there. We saw one this morning. There are others out there that we call McNeil metrics, where we're coupling this proven methodology with our biosensor that we're developing. And then we're going to bring on as a service component, we're bringing on what we call devices of service. So dysphasia is not a one size fits all, it takes a tailored treatment plan. And so we're bringing all this to the table, particularly for our skilled nursing and senior care providers. And then looking down the road, there's a lot of home care, there's obviously what we call the community dwelling adult, that's your over 65 population. All those folks are at risk. They're not necessarily in a facility, but they might be at home, they might be suffering quietly, we can bring various tools to the table that we've all seen, whether it be digital health, telehealth is certainly a big component. And then nutrition management is huge in when it comes to dysphasia. Making sure you have the right foods that you can consume. Or if you can't consume something, that's a problem. So there are various techniques or various foods out there that that you can bring on, incorporate into your diet, as you're going through this condition to train either manage it or just rehabilitate out of it. So for us, we've been busy, we started our company by acquiring an existing business, we bought a 23 year old company that gave us on day one, about 400 customers and real money, real revenues. And so that's how we started life. For us, we have now some of the leading senior care skilled nursing health systems in the country and we're continuing to add more as we speak. And then for 2022, we're really starting to partner with some of these and some some of our existing clients. And then some new clients as well, to bring on new models of care whether it be a, you know, a clinic within a clinic type of model, more mobile services, some of the things I've talked about as well, putting them in maybe a standalone clinic, things like that. And so a lot of partnership opportunities are underway. We're also growing through acquisition as well as organic growth. And so we think there's a lot of fragmentation that we can take advantage of out in that market. For myself, I'm gonna skip through the Who I Am My co founder and I. But the upside is we have one of the world's leading researchers in the area of dysphasia care. His name is Dr. Michael Curry. And so we're very fortunate to have him on our team. We also have an outstanding two Clinical Directors as well. And then in terms of our capital raise, we're now topping off our Series A as we speak, trying to wrap that up, and then looking for a much larger round later in 2022. And that'll bring on the menu of options to increase our development, scale acquisition, and our exits we think are across the board. So whether it be strategic roll ups or public markets, so thank you