season 1:

episode 7: Bringing the Kidney Into the Modern Age: A Conversation with Todd Dunn of Accuryn

We monitor the heart second by second. The brain second by second. The lungs second by second. The kidneys? Most hospitals are still relying on a gravity-fed Foley catheter invented in 1933 and a nurse eyeballing a collection bag every couple of hours. That contrast is the kind of thing that stops you mid-conversation and makes you rethink what you thought you knew about acute care. And it is exactly where my conversation with Todd Dunn, CEO of Accuryn, went on the latest episode of the Kinetic Innovators Podcast.

Todd’s Path from Innovation Leader to CEO

Todd’s career arc is one of those stories that just makes sense once you hear it. He started his innovation journey at GE Healthcare, working on an electronic medical record project with Intermountain Healthcare. When he heard that Beth Comstock, GE’s chief marketing officer, was building an innovation program, he emailed her directly and volunteered. Beth told him it was unpaid and he needed his boss’s blessing. He got it and never looked back. When C-suite leaders at Intermountain asked him to come build an innovation function for them, he asked for the job description. His buddy Mark Probst told him to write his own. That was 2012, early days in the healthcare innovation movement. Todd stayed at Intermountain through late 2019, then joined Atrium Health in February 2020 to lead innovation there. Along the way, his teams tackled needle-free blood draws, wound care assessment, and dialysis innovation. The kidney work kept pulling him deeper, and his team at Atrium eventually shifted from focusing on the dialysis procedure to focusing on the organ itself. That is when things changed. Through direct observation in ORs and ICUs, Todd and his team realized that kidneys are still managed with technology that is over 90 years old: a gravity-fed catheter and a serum creatinine blood test that was never designed to be a kidney marker. A CRNA looked at him one day and said, “Just do something to help us manage fluids better.” So he went back through his innovation contacts, reconnected with Accuryn, and became a customer in late 2021. By March of the following year, he had the opportunity to step in as CEO. As Todd put it: “I liked the company so much I ended up getting to be the CEO.”

The Scale of the AKI Problem

The numbers behind acute kidney injury are sobering, and most people outside of the ICU have no idea how widespread the issue is. In August 2024, CMS declared acute kidney injury a hospital-acquired harm. Todd recently met with the CMS chief medical officer who oversaw that ruling, and the officer told him the patient harm data was “alarming.” Here is what the data shows: Over 3 million AKI events occur in U.S. hospitals every year, roughly one every 10 seconds. Ten to twenty percent of general hospital admissions develop AKI. In the ICU, that number exceeds fifty percent, especially among CABG, MI, major surgery, and chronic kidney disease patients. Approximately 62% of patients with an AKI are readmitted within 90 days. Those patients face a 266% increased risk of death within the first 90 days after their AKI event. The average cost of an AKI-associated hospital stay is $19,200, versus approximately $9,900 for a typical admission. And that cost data is already 12 years old. Six billing codes are tied to AKI-related complications. When hospitals pull their own data, the impact on length of stay, mortality, and readmission rates is hard to ignore.

What Accuryn Actually Does

Most Foley catheter systems are gravity-dependent. Urine gets stuck in dependent loops. Nurses have to physically “milk” the catheter line to move fluid into the collection bag. Once it arrives in the bag, there is no way to know when the patient actually produced it. And measurement is done by eyeballing the bag, typically every one to four hours. Accuryn replaces that entire workflow. Their system uses a patented technology called active drain line clearance. It gently uses air (with no suction on the bladder) to sweep urine through the line anytime the system senses flow has stopped. The urine moves into a cassette where it is measured by an ultrasonic sensor the instant it arrives. From there, the system can display real-time urine output on a bedside monitor and flag AKI based on the KDIGO (Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes) urine output standard, which can detect kidney distress a minimum of 12 hours ahead of serum creatinine. That is half a day of lead time for clinical teams to intervene. The data flows directly into the EMR, whether that is Epic, Cerner, or another system. Hospitals can then set their own alert protocols. Some trigger at two hours of low output. Some route alerts to remote ICU monitoring teams. One hospital is even sending alerts directly to the attending physician. Beyond urine output, the system also measures intra-abdominal pressure 100 times per second via a sensor in the catheter. Today, manual IAP measurement is rare because it is difficult, it takes 20 to 30 minutes, and very few clinicians know how to do it reliably. Accuryn automates it and trends the data continuously, replacing spot checks based on suspicion with an ongoing pressure profile.

The CAUTI Problem, Resolved

One of the most compelling findings from Accuryn’s deployments is the impact on catheter-associated urinary tract infections. Stagnant fluid in a catheter line creates an environment for infection. Because Accuryn’s system keeps fluid moving continuously, their data shows CAUTI reductions of 90% or more. One burn unit recorded over 1,000 catheter days without a single CAUTI. That matters because the traditional tension in acute care has been: you need a catheter to monitor kidney function, but catheters carry CAUTI risk. Accuryn’s position is that they have resolved that tension. Fluid keeps moving, infection risk drops dramatically, and clinicians get reliable kidney data they would not have without a catheter in place.

Where the Technology Is Being Deployed

Adoption is starting where the clinical need is most acute: cardiothoracic ICUs, trauma units, transplant programs, major bowel surgery cases, and burn centers. Accuryn is currently in roughly 10% of ABA-verified burn centers in the country, where fluid resuscitation and pressure management are especially critical. The pattern Todd sees among early adopters is a shared mindset around patient safety and clinical quality. At Atrium, the driver was Dr. Scott Rissmiller’s “Best Place to Care” initiative. Research partnerships with Northwestern, Cedars-Sinai, and a collaborative effort across Wake Forest, Duke, Emory, and the Cleveland Clinic have produced published studies supporting the technology. Since the CMS ruling, Todd is seeing broader awareness among hospital systems that penalties tied to AKI are coming, and that many of those penalties are already embedded in existing metrics (length of stay, mortality, readmissions) even if they are not yet labeled as AKI-specific.

Where This Is Heading

Todd shared a conversation he had with a chief medical information officer who pointed out something worth thinking about: now that Accuryn can provide reliable, continuous kidney output and pressure data alongside existing cardiac and respiratory monitoring, the door opens for agentic AI to synthesize the full hemodynamic picture. Not just fluids and pressures, but procedures, patient histories, DRGs, and diagnoses, all working together to detect deterioration earlier than any single data stream could on its own. As Todd framed it, AI depends on great data. And Accuryn’s goal is to be part of that data foundation. He also mentioned that he has a book on healthcare innovation coming out in November, based on the systematic discovery and transformation frameworks he built at Intermountain (“Design for People”) and Atrium (“Design for Impact”). We will be having him back on the show for that.

Connect with Todd

Todd made it easy: his email is tdunn@accuryn.com. He is happy to share a data template so your organization can pull its own AKI numbers and see the size of the opportunity before any other conversation happens. Give the full episode a listen and subscribe to the Kinetic Innovators Podcast so you do not miss future conversations with leaders who are transforming how care gets delivered.

Episode 6:How AI Is Changing Heart Failure Management: A Conversation with Shawn Kumar of Rhythm Science

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Heart failure is one of the most expensive and complex chronic conditions in the United States. More than 6 million Americans are living with it today. That number is projected to exceed 8 million by 2030. We are spending over $18 billion annually on hospitalizations tied to this illness alone. Despite decades of pharmaceutical advancement and device innovation, the trajectory has not meaningfully improved.

So what is actually going to change the outcome for these patients?

That was the central question behind a recent episode of the Kinetic Innovators Podcast, where host C.W. Hall sat down with Shawn Kumar, founder and CEO of Rhythm Science, to discuss how artificial intelligence is being deployed in clinical settings to help care teams manage heart failure patients more effectively and more safely.

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Who Is Shawn Kumar and What Is Rhythm Science?

Shawn Kumar is not new to the heart failure space. He spent years at Abbott Laboratories helping launch the CardioMEMS insertable pulmonary arterial pressure device in 2017, giving him direct experience with what remote hemodynamic monitoring could accomplish and, just as importantly, where the gaps remained.

That experience informed the company he went on to build. Rhythm Science is a broad-based cardiac data platform designed to help clinical practices manage data for both atrial fibrillation (AFib) and heart failure. The platform aggregates data from multiple sources, including electronic health records, wearable devices, and health information exchanges, and structures it in a way that makes clinical decision-making faster and more informed.

Cedars-Sinai was an early customer. The collaboration grew out of a mutual interest in developing more advanced heart failure management systems, including clinical decision support AI that Cedars-Sinai had developed in-house. That partnership helped Rhythm Science refine what it actually looks like to operationalize AI for one of the most complex patient populations in medicine.

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Why Heart Failure Is So Difficult to Manage

To understand why AI has a meaningful role to play here, it helps to understand just how complicated heart failure management actually is.

Patients with heart failure require careful titration of four distinct drug classes, each with its own tolerability profile and target dose. Managing those medications in combination, while monitoring cardiac output, vital signs, lab values, and patient-reported symptoms, demands a significant amount of coordinated effort from large, multidisciplinary care teams.

The stakes are high. A patient admitted to the hospital for heart failure decompensation faces poor short-term prognosis and a high likelihood of readmission or a severe adverse event. And yet the scale of the population makes the kind of intensive, individualized management that would be ideal largely impractical.

As Shawn put it during the conversation: there is no easy solution to a patient who has heart failure. The challenge is not a lack of good tools. It is a capacity and coordination problem that technology is uniquely positioned to address.

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What AI Actually Does in the Heart Failure Clinic

One of the most valuable parts of the conversation was Shawn’s direct, grounded explanation of what AI does and does not do in the clinical setting today.

AI in heart failure management is not about putting care on autopilot. It is not a system that calls patients and manages their care while the clinician is out of the loop. That vision exists, but Shawn was candid about the fact that we are far from it, and for good reason.

What AI can do right now is significant, but more targeted:

Data aggregation and structuring. Heart failure care involves a constant stream of incoming data from devices, labs, patient reports, and clinical encounters. AI can gather that data, clean it, and present it in a structured way that actually helps the care team rather than adding to the noise.

Risk surfacing and early identification. AI can help identify patients who are at risk for decompensation before a crisis occurs, surfacing intervention opportunities that would otherwise be buried in data that no one has had time to review.

Population-level oversight. Rather than a one-to-one care model that is unsustainable at scale, AI enables a top-down population view where a smaller team can safely manage a larger patient panel by prioritizing who needs attention most.

Agentic data retrieval. When additional information is needed to complete a clinical picture, AI can go get it, rather than waiting for a staff member to track it down manually.

The framing Shawn used throughout the conversation was that AI is a co-pilot in a data deluge where the risks are high and the human cognitive load is already at its limit. That framing is important: it keeps the clinician in the decision seat while reducing the friction involved in getting to the right decision.

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The Problem with Generic AI in Clinical Settings

Shawn was notably skeptical of generic AI solutions being applied to heart failure management without proper domain-specific curation. His point deserves attention from anyone evaluating AI tools for clinical use.

The history of clinical decision support in healthcare is not encouraging. Poorly calibrated CDS alerts have trained clinicians to click through warnings without reading them. Alert fatigue is a documented, well-studied problem. An AI system that surfaces irrelevant recommendations or generates noise rather than signal will face the same fate.

What separates a meaningful clinical AI tool from another source of distraction is deep domain knowledge, proper curation of the underlying logic, and enough operational reps in the specific problem space to know what actually matters clinically. Off-the-shelf models applied without that groundwork are not going to move the needle.

Rhythm Science has been building in this space for six years. That depth is not incidental. It is a competitive moat that is genuinely difficult to replicate quickly, regardless of how capable general AI models become.

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The Reimbursement and Regulatory Landscape

No conversation about AI in healthcare is complete without addressing the reimbursement environment, and this one was no exception.

The landscape for digital health and AI-enabled clinical services is evolving quickly. Payer models are shifting. The role of major EHR platforms like Epic and Cerner in this space is still being defined. Model cycles that once spanned decades may now compress to two years, creating real challenges for health systems and vendors alike trying to keep up with the rate of AI advancement.

Shawn’s perspective on this was pragmatic: if you are going to operate in this space, you have to be comfortable with uncertainty. That is not a bug in the digital health environment. It is the condition of doing business here. The organizations that will succeed are the ones that stay integrative, remain open to collaboration, and build systems with enough data infrastructure depth that they are not entirely dependent on any single model or approach.

The work of connecting EHR data, health information exchange data, wearable device data, and remote monitoring data into a coherent platform is itself a significant and durable competitive advantage. That integration work does not become obsolete every time a new AI model drops.

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A Decade In: Why Shawn Kumar Is More Bullish Than Ever

Shawn has been working in the heart failure space for over ten years. That longevity gives his optimism credibility.

He made a distinction that is worth emphasizing: the goal is not to solve heart failure. It is to contain it. To make something that has been running amok inside the U.S. healthcare system into a managed, predictable condition rather than an unpredictable and expensive crisis. That framing is realistic. It is also more achievable than it might have seemed even five years ago.

The combination of better drugs, better remote monitoring devices, and now properly built AI infrastructure creates a genuine opportunity to bend the cost and mortality curves for this population. Shawn believes we are at the beginning of that inflection point. His track record suggests it is worth taking that assessment seriously.

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Key Takeaways from the Conversation

For clinicians, health system leaders, and anyone working in cardiovascular care or value-based care, here is what the conversation with Shawn Kumar made clear:

Heart failure is a population-scale problem that cannot be solved by individual-level interventions alone. AI that is built with clinical rigor, domain expertise, and proper data infrastructure can act as a force multiplier for care teams managing this population. Generic AI applied without curation will produce noise. Properly built AI will surface signal. The reimbursement and regulatory environment is uncertain but moving in a direction that rewards innovation. Six years of domain-specific development matters. It is not something you replicate overnight.

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Learn More

Rhythm Science is available at rhythm.io. Shawn Kumar is active on LinkedIn and plans to increase his presence on X and Blue Sky in the coming months.

The full episode is available now on the Kinetic Innovators Podcast on all major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Subscribe so you do not miss future conversations with the innovators, clinicians, and operators changing how healthcare is built and delivered.

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The Kinetic Innovators Podcast features conversations with leaders at the intersection of technology, clinical innovation, and healthcare delivery. New episodes drop regularly. Follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube for updates.

EPISODE 5: Rethinking Healthcare Workforce Strategy: A Conversation with Trevor Strauss of Trio Workforce Solutions

The healthcare staffing industry has a well-known problem: every sector, from nursing to physician staffing, is short on people, and the traditional outsourced agency model is showing its limits. On a recent episode of the Kinetic Innovators Podcast, host C.W. Hall sat down with Trevor Strauss, Chief Growth Officer at Trio Workforce Solutions, to unpack how a fundamentally different approach to managed service programs (MSPs), vendor management systems (VMS), and internal resource management is giving healthcare organizations back their operational leverage.

Strauss brings more than 20 years of experience in healthcare workforce strategy, covering retained physician and executive recruiting, locum tenens staffing, nurse staffing, recruitment process outsourcing, and enterprise-level MSP and VMS program design. His core thesis is simple but disruptive: healthcare organizations have been surrendering control of their workforce to staffing agencies for too long, and technology now makes it possible to take it back.

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The Problem with Agency-Led MSP Models

Strauss opened by drawing a sharp distinction between what the industry calls an MSP and what most vendors actually deliver. In traditional agency-led arrangements, the managed service provider is also the primary staffing supplier, which creates a structural conflict of interest. The agency’s financial incentives point toward filling roles with external, higher-cost contingent labor rather than toward optimizing the client’s total workforce spend.

“MSP does not mean a managed staffing program,” Strauss said. “Agency-led solutions are working hard for healthcare organizations, but their value proposition is truly on external agency staff.”

The result is margin compression, workforce fragmentation, and an inability to accurately forecast or control labor costs at the unit level. With operating margins already thin across most health systems, that dynamic is no longer sustainable.

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The Trio Model: From Fully Managed to Fully Yours

Trio Workforce Solutions positions itself as a healthcare-only workforce optimization firm, serving organizations ranging from small rural medical groups to large integrated delivery networks (IDNs). Its flagship differentiator is a tiered engagement model that allows clients to start wherever they are and build toward complete internal program ownership over time.

Strauss described three primary delivery modes:

Full MSP

Trio assumes day-to-day management of the client’s entire contingent labor program, including FTE utilization analysis, float pool optimization, internal agency development, external agency management, and workforce reporting. This is the appropriate starting point for organizations that have never run their own workforce program or lack internal infrastructure to do so.

VMS-Plus

For organizations that have internal resources and some program management experience, Trio provides its technology platform paired with a lighter advisory layer. The client retains more day-to-day operational control from the start, with Trio serving as both a technology vendor and a strategic resource.

SaaS (Technology Only)

Mature clients with seasoned internal teams can license the Trio platform outright and run the program themselves. Trio’s VMS is among the most widely adopted by staffing agencies in the market, managing over $1.2 billion in annual labor spend across more than 500 active agencies. Organizations that reach this tier can effectively run their own in-house MSP, transforming what was once a cost center into a potential profit center.

The pathway between these tiers is what Strauss calls the “fully managed to fully yours” roadmap, a structured 18-to-24-month transition plan that Trio co-develops with each client. The framing has resonated strongly in the market: organizations are explicitly requesting it in RFPs and conversations with Trio’s team.

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Internal Resource Management: Seeing the Full Labor Picture

One of the more underutilized levers in healthcare workforce strategy is internal resource management (IRM). Strauss walked through a real-world example in which a large health system’s float pool had been treated as a cost center and was running with numerous unfilled slots, creating strain across clinical departments.

When Trio stepped in, it identified that certain contingent workers were logging near-full-time hours in specific units on a recurring basis. The practical recommendation was straightforward: convert those workers to permanent FTEs. The cost of statutory benefits and salary still came in below the premium associated with sustained contingent labor rates. Visibility into those patterns, made possible by the Trio platform, is what allowed that analysis to happen at all.

The platform supports a layered internal pool strategy, including retiree pools, flexible shift pools, and five-shift-per-month arrangements, giving organizations the ability to build variable cost structures that track actual patient volume rather than fixed headcount commitments.

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Who Uses the Platform and How

A common question for any workforce technology is who actually interacts with it day to day. Strauss described a role-based access architecture that scales from the C-suite to the unit level.

Senior leaders, including CEOs of multi-hospital systems, can access consolidated dashboards showing system-wide labor costs and utilization metrics without ever touching job-level approvals or invoicing. Service line leaders can drill into cost-center-level data, approve staffing for their units, and track every worker assigned to their departments. Front-line staff services personnel can submit and fulfill shift orders in real time.

Integration capabilities extend to back-office payroll and invoicing systems, timekeeping platforms, and HR information systems, with Trio’s onshore engineering team managing the full implementation. Rather than promising plug-and-play connectivity, Strauss emphasized a deliberate mapping process that accounts for the reality that no two hospital systems have identical tech stacks. The approach follows a phased crawl-walk-run methodology, starting with flat file data exchange if needed and advancing to API integration as both sides establish alignment on requirements.

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Vendor Rationalization Done Differently

Vendor rationalization is a polarizing topic in healthcare staffing. The instinct is to cut the vendor list, but Strauss argued that the question is not how many agencies are on the panel; it is which agencies are actually performing.

Trio’s process begins with a full analysis of client labor spend by category, geography, and unit. If a client has 75 agencies under contract for 150 nursing and allied needs, Trio will assess fill rates, response times, pricing relative to market, and specialty alignment before making rationalization recommendations. An agency that has a low fill rate may simply have never had a real partnership opportunity with that facility; cutting it without that context can eliminate a relationship that could be valuable.

The platform itself enforces accountability on both sides. If a preferred agency is consistently responding to fewer than 40 percent of assigned jobs within the agreed lead time and pricing above market, Trio surfaces that data and facilitates a client-side decision about whether to maintain the relationship. Agencies retain the ability to choose which programs they participate in. Trio does not mandate placement sequences or exclusive first-call arrangements.

Strauss described this as genuine vendor neutrality, something the industry has claimed for more than two decades but rarely delivered. The “three legs of the stool” behind the Trio name represent the healthcare organization, the staffing agency, and the clinician or provider, with all three considered stakeholders in the outcome, not just the end client.

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What Drives the Choice Between Managed and Self-Run

The shift in how healthcare organizations approach initial conversations with Trio reflects broader market maturity. Strauss noted that historically, 80 to 90 percent of conversations began as straightforward MSP inquiries. That figure has moved to roughly 60 to 65 percent, with the remaining 35 to 40 percent coming in asking specifically about hybrid or technology-forward models.

Organizations that jump directly to the SaaS tier typically have internal experts who have run staffing programs before and genuinely need only the platform. For others, the desire to self-manage is real but the infrastructure is not yet in place, and Trio’s role is to be direct about that gap rather than sell a solution that will fail at implementation. The conversation about which tier is right tends to unfold over a series of discovery sessions before any contract is signed.

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The Market Opportunity and the Innovator Mindset

Healthcare workforce challenges are not abating. Nurse and physician shortages span every geography and practice setting. Margin pressures from payers, including Medicare Advantage plan dynamics and rising labor costs, are compressing the operating room that health systems have historically used to absorb inefficiency.

Strauss closed by framing Trio’s position as that of a market challenger rather than an incumbent. “You can’t solve a problem from the same place that created it,” he said, invoking the Einstein attribution. The goal is not to build a better staffing agency. It is to give healthcare organizations the tools, data, and structural support to stop being dependent on staffing agencies for workforce visibility and control.

For organizations that want to explore what that looks like in practice, Strauss directed listeners to TrioWFS.com.

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Listen to the Full Episode

This conversation is available on the Kinetic Innovators Podcast on Spotify and all major podcast platforms. If you are a healthcare administrator, CFO, CNO, or workforce leader navigating contingent labor costs, vendor consolidation, or internal agency development, this episode is worth your time.

Follow Kinetic Innovators on your preferred platform and subscribe so you do not miss future conversations with innovators reshaping healthcare operations, clinical services, and workforce strategy.

Episode 4: Depth Health using ai to optimize hospital patient flow

Patient flow has always been treated as a logistical problem. But for Nicole Denham, Chief Clinical Innovations Officer at Depth Health, it has always been a clinical one.

In this episode of the Kinetic Innovators Podcast, host C.W. Hall sits down with Nicole to explore how Depth Health is using artificial intelligence to help hospitals and health systems move patients more safely, efficiently, and intelligently across every level of care.

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From the Bedside to the Boardroom: Nicole Denham’s Background

Nicole’s perspective on healthcare operations is grounded in direct patient care. A critical care nurse by training, she studied at Georgia State University and practiced at Gwinnett Medical Center outside Atlanta, where she led the cardiology service line. That role brought her into frequent contact with biomedical technology teams and sparked a career-long interest in how data can support safer clinical decisions.

Over the next decade-plus, Nicole co-founded a consulting firm that worked with health systems across the country on enterprise strategy for command centers and virtual care centers. She also earned a master’s degree from Penn State to strengthen her understanding of the business side of healthcare.

When her mentor, one of Depth Health’s co-founders, invited her to join the company roughly a year ago, she left her firm to step into the role of Chief Clinical Innovations Officer. The reason was straightforward: she believed in the people and the mission.

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What Is Depth Health?

Depth Health was founded by two innovators with 30 years of shared history in clinical-grade surveillance technology. The CEO and CTO built their careers developing middleware that could pull infrastructure data from any health system and surface it for command center use, agnostically, regardless of the underlying EMR or device environment.

Their current focus is on using clinical insights to optimize patient flow. As Nicole puts it, patient flow has historically been framed as a logistical challenge. But if a patient is not placed at the right level of care, the consequences are both clinical and financial. Depth Health is closing that gap.

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The Two Core Solutions: WRAP and RACER

WRAP: Retrospective Analysis

The WRAP process is Depth Health’s entry point for new health system clients. Rather than running a traditional pilot, Depth Health ingests up to 100,000 retrospective patient journeys, typically three to six months of historical data, and deconstructs them against five core KPIs. They then run the same data set through RACER to show the health system exactly what outcomes would have looked like with the platform in place.

The result is a quantified view of the gap: clinically, organizationally, and financially. Health systems can see where value is being lost before they commit to anything.

RACER: Real-Time Routing and Decision Support

RACER is Depth Health’s proprietary real-time platform. It integrates agnostically with a health system’s EMR and patient monitoring devices, creating a data mesh that surfaces actionable insights to patient access centers, nursing teams, and executive users simultaneously.

For clinical staff, RACER provides transparent, data-backed routing recommendations, showing exactly why a patient is being directed to a particular level of care. For executives, it delivers real-time performance metrics embedded directly into their login experience, aligned with a Baldrige-inspired performance model.

Nicole notes that clinician trust is baked into the design. Having charted on paper at the start of her nursing career, she understands firsthand the skepticism that comes with being told what to do by a system. RACER is built to show its reasoning, not just its output.

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The Five KPIs Depth Health Tracks

Depth Health anchors its value proposition around five measurable indicators that touch both clinical quality and financial performance:

1. Reducing LWOT (Left Without Treatment) in the emergency department
2. Reducing ED boarding time for admitted patients waiting on inpatient beds
3. Optimizing ESI-3 over-triage, ensuring patients are not classified as sicker than their presentation warrants
4. Reducing cardiac telemetry overutilization in step-down and telemetry units
5. Eliminating unnecessary internal transfers within health systems, particularly cases where satellite facilities had the capability to treat but sent patients to the main campus anyway

Each of these KPIs carries a measurable financial value and connects directly to patient safety and satisfaction outcomes. HCAHPS scores, length of stay, and avoidable costs are all downstream of getting these decisions right.

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Who Uses the Platform?

Depth Health’s primary user group is the patient access center or virtual care center, a mix of clinical and non-clinical staff responsible for bed management and patient placement. Nursing leadership, including charge nurses and virtual nurses, forms the second major user group. Executives interact with a dedicated performance view that gives them real-time visibility into organizational throughput metrics.

The platform is designed so that each user type sees what is most relevant to their role, while all of them are oriented around the same underlying data and the same five performance anchors.

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Health Equity and the Rural Access Mission

Depth Health’s harmonized data layer is built to evaluate every patient as a whole person, pulling from their full clinical record to drive routing decisions. By design, that approach is equitable: every patient’s data receives the same structured analysis.

Beyond individual patient equity, Depth Health has joined a Rural Health Transformation Alliance to extend its capabilities to critical access hospitals. Rural health systems operate on thin margins and cannot afford inefficiency. Depth Health’s goal in that space is to help those systems optimize throughput and access the grant funding and financial resources that are already allocated to them, so community hospitals can stay open.

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The Bottom Line for Health System Leaders

Patient throughput is a challenge for every health system, whether urban academic medical center or rural critical access hospital. The question is not whether inefficiency exists. The question is whether leadership can see it clearly enough to act on it.

Depth Health is making that visibility possible, with the clinical credibility to back it up.

To learn more, visit depthhealth.com (two H’s) and explore the performance page to see how their five KPIs map to your organization’s pain points. You can also connect with Nicole Denham directly on LinkedIn.

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Listen to the Full Episode

This post is based on Episode 4 of the Kinetic Innovators Podcast featuring Nicole Denham, Chief Clinical Innovations Officer at Depth Health. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

episode 3: Faster Answers in Women’s Health: A Conversation With Somer Baburek of Hera Biotech

On this episode of Kinetic Innovators Podcast, C.W. Hall speaks with Somer Baburek of Hera Biotech about endometriosis, cervical cancer screening, and how faster, less invasive diagnostics could improve women’s health.

Women’s health has lived for too long in the space between common and overlooked.

That was one of the clearest takeaways from a recent conversation on the Kinetic Innovators Podcast, where host C.W. Hall sat down with Somer Baburek of Hera Biotech to discuss two major issues in gynecology: endometriosis and cervical cancer. The discussion centered on a frustrating reality many women know all too well. These conditions are common, serious, and often emotionally exhausting to navigate, yet the path to answers can still be slow, invasive, and inconsistent.

At the heart of the conversation was a simple but important question: What happens when diagnostics get faster, more accurate, and easier to access?

Why endometriosis and cervical cancer still demand attention

Baburek opened by underscoring how widespread these issues really are.

She described endometriosis as being as prevalent as diabetes, affecting a significant share of reproductive-age women and remaining a leading cause of female infertility. What makes that especially troubling is that despite how common it is, patients often do not get quick or definitive answers. In the conversation, Baburek noted that diagnosis can take years, leaving many women stuck in a cycle of pain, uncertainty, and delayed care.

The discussion then turned to cervical cancer, which Baburek characterized as both highly treatable and, in many cases, preventable when caught early. Yet it still claims hundreds of thousands of lives globally each year, with the greatest burden falling on underserved and lower-resource populations.

That contrast shaped much of the episode. These are not rare problems. They are widespread conditions where earlier detection could meaningfully change outcomes.

The real problem: women often wait too long for clarity

One of the most compelling parts of the conversation was not just about disease prevalence. It was about the patient experience.

Hall pointed to the emotional toll of waiting for results, and Baburek expanded on that idea. For many women, especially those with symptoms, family history, or elevated concern, the waiting itself becomes part of the burden. There is the physical discomfort, of course, but also the mental load of not knowing what is wrong, what comes next, or how serious the issue may be.

That uncertainty is especially painful in women’s health, where symptoms are sometimes normalized, minimized, or tolerated for far too long.

The conversation made clear that speed matters in diagnostics, not just from a clinical standpoint, but from a human one.

Why endometriosis diagnosis has been so difficult

A major focus of the episode was the diagnostic challenge surrounding endometriosis.

Baburek explained that the traditional definitive diagnosis has relied on surgery, with tissue confirmation through pathology. In practical terms, that means many patients spend years navigating symptoms, imaging, clinical suspicion, and treatment attempts before receiving a firm answer.

She described this as one of the core failures in the current system. When a condition is common, painful, and linked to infertility, an eight-year path to diagnosis is not just inefficient. It is unacceptable.

Baburek also discussed the broader movement toward a more comprehensive diagnostic approach, including symptom awareness, imaging, and biomarker development. In that context, she positioned Hera Biotech’s work as an effort to move endometriosis closer to a more reliable, office-based diagnostic pathway.

According to Baburek, Hera’s approach involves analyzing a gene signature from an endometrial biopsy collected during a routine in-office procedure. In the conversation, she emphasized that the company’s goal is to build a more robust diagnostic standard by comparing findings against pathology-confirmed lesions from prospective studies.

The broader message was clear: women with suspected endometriosis should not have to rely on years of guesswork before getting meaningful answers.

Cervical cancer screening is due for a better patient experience

The second major theme was cervical cancer screening innovation.

Baburek made an important distinction between HPV and cervical cancer, noting that while HPV is a risk factor, it is not the same thing as cancer. That distinction matters because fear, confusion, and incomplete understanding can shape how patients experience screening and follow-up.

She then walked through the current screening pathway, describing how traditional Pap smear workflows can require careful cell collection, transport logistics, lab review, and follow-up appointments that may take weeks. For many patients, especially those in rural or underserved areas, each extra step creates another chance for delay or loss to follow-up.

This is where Hera’s cervical cancer screening concept stood out in the conversation.

Baburek described an in-office device designed to assess cervical tissue using electrical and optical spectroscopy, allowing clinicians to evaluate tissue health at the point of care without relying on a physical sample sent through traditional lab logistics. The idea is not to eliminate the larger care pathway, but to make the first step faster and more accessible.

In her words, the goal is to support a more immediate see-and-treat workflow, helping providers identify abnormal tissue in real time and move patients more quickly into the next stage of evaluation when needed.

Why point-of-care diagnostics could matter most in underserved settings

One of the strongest parts of the discussion was its focus on access.

Baburek connected women’s health innovation not only to cutting-edge technology, but to the practical realities of care delivery in places with limited specialist access. She noted that many women live in areas without a practicing OB-GYN, which makes traditional screening pathways harder to navigate.

That has major implications.

When diagnostics depend on specialist availability, sample shipping, pathology turnaround, and repeat visits, the system works best for patients with time, transportation, local access, and flexible resources. It works far less well for women in rural communities, lower-resource settings, or areas where coming back for follow-up is difficult.

The promise of point-of-care women’s health diagnostics is not just convenience. It is the possibility of reducing drop-off between suspicion, screening, and action.

That is a meaningful shift.

The bigger issue: women’s health has been underfunded and underbuilt

Beyond the individual products, Baburek offered a broader critique of the women’s health landscape.

She described the field as historically underserved, underfunded, and under-researched, especially compared with areas like oncology. Her view was that meaningful breakthroughs in treatment and precision medicine depend on having strong diagnostic tools, high-quality tissue-based data, and deeper scientific infrastructure.

That belief appears to shape Hera Biotech’s broader mission. In the episode, Baburek described the company not simply as a product developer, but as a diagnostics-focused organization built to support better disease understanding, progression tracking, and future discovery in women’s health.

That is an important frame. Better diagnostics do not just help today’s patient visit. They can also help build the knowledge base for tomorrow’s therapies.

Final takeaway

This conversation was about more than two disease states.

It was really about what women’s health looks like when the system starts taking speed, access, and diagnostic rigor more seriously. Endometriosis and cervical cancer are different conditions, but the common thread is obvious: women need answers faster, with less friction, and with more confidence in the process.

That is what made this discussion compelling. It was not innovation for innovation’s sake. It was innovation aimed at a very real problem: too many women still wait too long for clarity.

When diagnostics improve, the benefit is not just technical. It is personal. It means less uncertainty, fewer missed opportunities for follow-up, and a better chance of getting the right care at the right time.

Episode 2: Gavin Philipps, Cco of egg medical

Protecting Clinicians in the Fluoroscopy Suite: The Burden of Radiation and the Promise of Egg Medical’s EggNest

Clinicians working in fluoroscopy suites experience some of the highest chronic occupational radiation doses in medicine, and this exposure has real clinical consequences over the course of a career. New table‑mounted shielding platforms such as Egg Medical’s EggNest are redefining how we protect teams by dramatically reducing scatter radiation at its source.

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The Hidden Cost of Life in the Fluoroscopy Lab

Fluoroscopy‑guided procedures have transformed modern medicine. Interventional cardiology, electrophysiology, interventional radiology, vascular, orthopaedic, and pain procedures all rely on X‑ray guidance to deliver minimally invasive, often life‑saving therapies. But every second of fluoroscopy generates scattered radiation that fills the room and irradiates everyone around the table.

Unlike patients, whose exposure is episodic, interventional clinicians and staff are exposed daily, often for decades. Over time, that chronic low‑dose exposure adds up. The literature has consistently shown that interventional cardiologists and interventional radiologists are among the most highly exposed workers in medicine, with measurable long‑term health impacts.

Occupational radiation exposure in the lab contributes to three major problems:

• Deterministic effects, such as lens opacities and cataracts, skin changes to the hands, and—at very high doses—erythema and epilation.
• Stochastic effects, namely a small but real increase in lifetime cancer risk, driving ongoing efforts to reduce dose even when per‑procedure exposures appear modest.
• Musculoskeletal disease from personal protective equipment: heavy lead aprons, collars, and glasses that must be worn for hours each day, year after year.

The result is a professional environment where clinicians accept not only the usual stresses of acute care, but also a steady accumulation of radiation dose and physical strain.

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How Common Are Radiation‑Related Injuries?

One of the starkest signals in the literature is the prevalence of radiation‑associated lens changes in exposed staff. Multi‑center studies of interventional cardiologists and cath lab personnel have reported posterior subcapsular lens opacities in a large proportion of operators and staff, with relative risks several‑fold higher than in unexposed controls.

These findings are strong enough that international regulators have responded. The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) reduced the recommended occupational eye dose limit from 150 mSv per year to 20 mSv per year, reflecting emerging evidence that cataracts can develop at doses far lower than previously believed. That change alone underscores how much we underestimated the risk to the eyes of interventionalists for decades.

Beyond the eyes, room‑mapping and dosimetry studies across cath labs, interventional suites, and orthopaedic operating rooms tell a consistent story:

• The primary source of staff exposure is scatter emerging from the patient and table, not the primary X‑ray beam itself.
• The operator’s position, closest to the X‑ray source and patient, receives the highest scattered dose, with steep dose gradients even over small distances.
• C‑arm angulation and procedural workflow can create “hot spots” where dose to staff accelerates, sometimes in locations where traditional shields are difficult to position.
• Staff who are not at the table full‑time—nurses, anesthesiologists, technologists—still see measurable cumulative exposure simply by being in the room over many years.

Taken together, these data make it clear that radiation‑related injuries in interventional medicine are not rare outliers; they are a predictable consequence of current practice if we do not aggressively optimize protection.

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Limitations of Traditional Protection

Historically, the response to occupational radiation has focused on personal and fixed shielding:

• Personal shielding: lead aprons, thyroid collars, lead glasses, and sometimes lead caps.
• Fixed shielding: ceiling‑mounted screens, table skirts, mobile shields, and floor‑standing shields.

These tools are absolutely necessary, but they have important limitations.

First, they protect individuals rather than the environment. The radiation field in the room remains unchanged; the operator simply stands inside a lead shell. This does little for staff who are not consistently behind shields, and it does nothing to reduce exposure to unshielded body parts (for example, the head above a ceiling screen).

Second, traditional shields are highly dependent on positioning and compliance. Small gaps, shields left a few inches out of place, or room crowding can create significant “leaks” that allow scatter to reach the operator’s torso, head, or extremities. Observational studies show that real‑world use of shields is often suboptimal, especially during complex cases when multiple devices and personnel compete for space around the table.

Third, the orthopedic burden is now impossible to ignore. Lead aprons and protective gear are heavy. Over a twenty‑ or thirty‑year career, the strain on the neck, back, and joints can result in chronic pain and even disability, prompting some interventionalists to reduce caseloads or retire early. In many ways, we have traded one occupational hazard (radiation) for another (orthopedic injury).

What is needed is a shift from “personal armor” to “environmental safety”—from protecting individuals to reshaping the radiation environment itself.

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EggNest: Reducing Scatter at Its Source

Egg Medical’s EggNest system represents this new environmental approach to radiation safety. Instead of relying solely on wearable lead and ceiling shields, EggNest integrates radiation protection directly into the procedure table and draping system, creating a near‑continuous barrier around the patient.

The concept is straightforward but powerful: intercept scatter radiation where it emerges (from the patient and table) so that the radiation field in the room is dramatically reduced. When scatter is blocked at its source:

• The operator, assistant, and scrub nurse stand in a markedly lower radiation field.
• Personnel farther from the table—anesthesiologists, circulating nurses, technologists—also experience reduced background exposure.
• Protection becomes less dependent on perfect positioning of mobile shields or personal gear.

Bench and phantom studies comparing EggNest with standard cath lab shielding have reported impressive results. Across multiple positions around the table and a variety of commonly used C‑arm angles, EggNest has demonstrated:

• Average scatter reductions on the order of about 90% or more at the operator and other key working positions.
• Peak reductions approaching roughly 98% at some positions compared with standard shielding alone.
• A shift of scatter levels from the order of hundreds or thousands of microsieverts per hour down into the tens of microsieverts per hour during test conditions.

Egg Medical’s own compiled clinical and bench data similarly describe approximately a 90‑plus percent reduction in overall scatter exposure to the cath lab team when EggNest is deployed, without disruption of normal workflow.

These reductions are not incremental tweaks at the margins; they represent nearly an order‑of‑magnitude change in the radiation environment in and around the table.

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From Phantom Data to Real‑World Practice

While early evidence often comes from phantom and bench testing, initial clinical experience with EggNest is beginning to track with those findings. In real cath lab programs that have implemented EggNest, reported operator badge readings per case have been extremely low, suggesting that the large reductions seen in controlled experiments can translate into day‑to‑day practice when the system is used correctly.

For clinicians and program leaders, this has several practical implications:

• Lower cumulative dose to the lens and brain over a career, making it easier to remain below the stricter occupational eye dose limits and potentially reducing the risk of cataract formation.
• The possibility—over time—of rethinking the intensity and weight of personal lead, particularly for high‑volume operators, thereby easing chronic neck and back strain.
• Improved protection for the entire care team, including members who may not always be optimally shielded by traditional devices but nonetheless accrue long‑term exposure.

In short, environmental scatter control has the potential to change the trajectory of occupational radiation exposure in interventional medicine.

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A New Era of Radiation Safety

For decades, the culture of the cath lab and interventional suite has quietly accepted radiation exposure and heavy lead as the “price of admission” to minimally invasive care. The emerging data around radiation‑related lens changes, orthopedic injury, and long‑term risks make it clear that this bargain is no longer acceptable.

Technologies like EggNest point toward a different future:

• A lab designed from the ground up to keep scatter as low as reasonably achievable for everyone in the room.
• A workflow in which high‑quality imaging and operator safety are complementary, not competing, priorities.
• A professional life where interventional clinicians do not have to choose between radiation safety and orthopedic health.

If the last generation of radiation protection was defined by personal armor, the next generation will be defined by engineering the environment. Egg Medical’s EggNest is a leading example of this shift, offering substantial reductions in scatter radiation and a tangible opportunity to improve the long‑term health and safety of clinicians who dedicate their careers to fluoroscopy‑guided care.

Episode 1: Innovations in Healthcare: Insights from Scott Becker

Scott Becker, partner at McGuireWoods, founder of Becker’s Hospital Review, and serial entrepreneur, joined host, CW Hall. He talked about his evolution from being a junior healthcare attorney to his role as a Partner, CEO, board member, and investor. He also discussed his decision to create a digital newsletter, which became Becker’s Hospital Review. Additionally, he shared how he built a series of popular healthcare conferences. These conferences became a successful business, standing on their own.

We talked about his new book, “Building Great Businesses: Create Momentum, Overcome Setbacks, and Scale With Confidence“. Scott shared several concepts he wrote about in his book, such as leadership evolution, building teams, delegating authority, and building new leaders. He also discussed the importance of owner-obsession in their business-building activities. This high level of passion and drive is powerful for pushing through challenges.

Scott is offering a promotion where those who pre-order his book can get a $25 Amazon gift card by sending him a screenshot of their purchase receipt. We shared the number on the footer scroll during the discussion. The promotion may end without notice.