Justin Mortara on AI-powered CPAP therapy

MADISON, Wis. – EnsoData President and CEO Justin Mortara is a physicist by training and naturally fascinated by artificial intelligence (AI), but he knows the technology’s superpower is in its ability to be incorporated into “real-world tool sets.” 

Here’s what Mortara, a recent guest on the HME News in 10 podcast, had to say about why the company, which first applied AI to speed up the sleep testing process, has now integrated its technology into the React Health Connect platform for managing CPAP therapy. 

Riding the wave 

“In waveforms, think about a chart. You’re running a business and you’re looking at a chart that goes up and to the right. That’s generally how we like our trends. Our sales are growing. If you turn that chart 90 degrees, all of a sudden, your sales look like they’re going down and to the right. It changes. Understanding the difference between an image, which doesn’t change meaning with rotation, and a wave form, which can change meaning significantly by changing rotation, is the secret sauce of EnsoData. Understanding how to apply AI to wave form data or time series data is our unique edge.”  

Finishing the job 

“One thing we saw as we were diagnosing more and more patients, achieving more than 1 million patients diagnosed with our AI, was we saw that next step was also challenging. Those patients diagnosed with OSA were then moving to CPAP therapy. CPAP therapy is a challenging therapy for some, and what we learned was, patients really struggled. Going back to our core value of ‘Making health care better,’ we thought the job was unfinished. Simply helping to diagnose those patients wasn’t enough. We saw an opportunity in therapy to also help those same patients and to make sure they had the resources and support they needed to be successful on therapy.” 

Powering predictions 

“Being proactive and intervening with patients is always better than being reactive. We know this in all aspects of medicine. It’s also true that HME providers are faced with extraordinarily daunting tasks. There are a tremendous number of their patients going out on CPAP and following up with each and every one of them is simply not possible with current resources and reimbursement. So, we have to get smart. This is a classic opportunity to apply AI. Can we use AI to anticipate, to predict early on which of those patients is going to struggle? Can we make sure that we get the right clinical resources and coaching to those patients before they really fail CPAP?  That’s the application of AI. Using utilization patterns, other aspects of patient demographics and diagnostics, we can power that prediction.” 

Listen to the full episode here.