How Catalyst helped QDG scale to patient bedsides
Have a health care innovation that could change the world? If so, consider applying for the Stanford Medicine Catalyst program. Catalyst helps Stanford Medicine innovators translate their promising ideas into transformative solutions. With financial and operational support, program management, business and regulatory strategy, mentorship, access to an investor network and beyond, Catalyst has the resources you need to bring your idea to life. Learn more from a current Catalyst participant, see if your project is a good fit, and apply now.
Stanford Medicine routinely drives novel discoveries and innovations that transform health care locally and globally. Across our organization, promising ideas and solutions are plentiful and just waiting for the right support and resources to take them to the next level. Enter Catalyst.
The Catalyst program nurtures and supports innovations across Stanford by enabling teams to develop and scale high-potential ideas to broad patient populations. Catalyst provides financial and operational support, program management, business and regulatory strategy, mentorship, Stanford pilot and clinical studies, and access to an investor network.
Catalyst has awarded 17 project teams across two prior cohorts. New teams can apply now for their projects to be part of the next cohort.
“Thanks to the Stanford Medicine Catalyst award, we plan to deploy QDG in Stanford Medicine this year as the first and only remote technology that provides validated metrics of all motor signs in Parkinson’s disease, in real time, which will be accessible through the patient’s chart in Epic,” --- Helen Bronte-Stewart, QDG project principal investigator.
Interview with Helen Bronte-Stewart, principal investigator, QDG
One of the projects in Catalyst’s 2022 cohort is Quantitative Digitography (QDG). Below, QDG’s Principal Investigator Helen Bronte-Stewart, MD, MS, and John E. Cahill Family professor of neurology and neurological sciences, shares how the Catalyst program has helped accelerate the her team’s work.
Q: What is QDG? QDG is a unique, remote technology that provides health care providers with quantitative, validated measures of all motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Data from alternating finger tapping on the digitography device is analyzed in our HIPAA-compliant cloud-based service, and metrics are available to the provider in the electronic medical record in real time.
Q: What are the benefits of the QDG device? QDG rapidly informs health care providers about motor symptoms when they acutely worsen and monitors the effect of initiating or changing therapy. QDG remote monitoring will expand access to and improve the quality of care, improve therapy compliance, and reduce complications of therapy that result in expensive inpatient care. QDG’s high-resolution data of all motor symptoms gives pharmaceutical companies their go/no-go answer for early-phase therapeutics in less time, with fewer participants, and for less money.
Q: What are some of the benefits of working with the Catalyst program? The Catalyst team has helped us in several ways since we started working together. We meet formally every week and are in pretty constant communication otherwise. Our project manager also attends most of our other QDG meetings and is always there to help us with the myriad of pieces of the puzzle that have to come to get this up and running. He keeps everyone on track and is watching the budget and milestones on a weekly, if not daily, basis.
When we hit any obstacles, the team helps us navigate the Stanford ecosystem by removing barriers and connecting us with the right people. If there is a bottleneck or problem, the team is working behind the scenes to clear it.
On the business front, our Catalyst advisor is our business guru – providing experience and insight – having started several companies and giving lectures at Stanford GSB. He shares all of that knowledge freely with us and we feel very privileged. The program’s leadership also empowers the project teams by respecting our knowledge, listening a lot, and then making very astute and helpful comments that steer us away from potential bad decisions.
One other highlight is the generosity of the award. We would never have been able to complete this project without the financial award we received through Catalyst, and we are extremely grateful. In addition to all the support and guidance, the people on the Catalyst team are all can-do, positive people, and that has helped us a lot along the way.
Thanks to Stanford Medicine Catalyst we plan to deploy QDG at Stanford Medicine this year as the first and only remote technology that provides validated metrics of all motor signs in Parkinson’s disease, in real time, which will be accessible through the patient’s chart in Epic.
Is your project the next Catalyst innovation?
The QDG project is just one example of the innovative work being supported by the Catalyst program. The program is helping to accelerate the development of several new health care technologies that have the potential to improve the lives of patients around the world.
Catalyst is seeking health care innovations from all members of the Stanford community (faculty, university and health care staff, and students) that can significantly impact global health care. Catalyst will award select projects with validated science that hold the promise of becoming world-changing solutions and are ready to be implemented through piloting, advanced prototype development, or early-stage utilization.
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