Osman Khawar, Diality - Studio Interview | LSI USA '24

Osman Khawar  0:00  
I'm Osman Khawar, CEO at dialty. Dial is a medtech company building a hemodialysis machine. So what dial is trying to achieve is empowering physicians to make the best choices for their patients. We achieve this by doing five things. One is best in class performance. Second is best in class, usability, having a singular device that can work in all care settings. In the dialysis space, having an integrated ro and layering on top of that, data integration and connectivity. When you put all those together, you really get a singular device that's able to transverse all care settings and truly be a singular device for all users. What we're seeing in dialysis right now is a gap in the market, and that gap is really a gap between traditional dialysis devices have and the usability that new entrants have made. And there's a gap and no device being able to transverse both of those so what dial is trying to create is a device that has both usability of these new entrants but the clinical utility, power and flexibility of traditional dialysis devices in a singular device. So traditional devices have a lot of clinical utility. They have wide flow rates and lots of prescription flexibility, but they're not very usable. You need a trained technician, someone who's certified, to utilize the device. And as healthcare becomes more expensive and we get more labor issues. It becomes harder and harder to get trained certified technicians to run dialysis devices. So ideally, you would add usability to those devices, but those devices are very large and cumbersome to utilize. New entrants have come to the market, and those new entrants have improved usability, but have sacrificed in some of the prescription flexibility that we bring, and so we're trying to bring the best of both worlds and get the usability of new technology, but keeping the traditional power of traditional hemodialysis devices. The dowser market is huge. We're a very US centric company. Right now. We're based here in Southern California, in Irvine, and right now we have 650,000 people affected by end stage renal disease. About 500,000 of those are on dialysis, and about 150,000 of those are transplant patients. And on the dialysis side, that 90% of that is in center hemodialysis, and 10 to 12% is home dialysis. It's a massive market, and we've created a infrastructure of dialysis organizations and dialysis clinics from United States, about five, 6000 of these that are built where patients generally go to get dialysis. The total global market is $50 billion per annum is spent, and right now, we estimate 1% of the US budget is spent on real disease. So it's just truly a massive market, and there's a real yearning for some quality and cost reduction in this space, and that's why this move to medical advantage is starting to drive we're seeing people move to value based care, total cost of care, therapy, whereas prior, we're in very much a fee for service market. Despite the size of this market, there's been limited innovation in the last three to four years. We've seen a few devices come out, which is, which is great, but there's still a gap in that market which we're trying to fill. We have an issue with dialysis nurses, dialysis technicians being really challenged in the United States, it's very hard to run dialysis units where 90% of dialysis occurs right now, because there's a challenge in getting that labor in 2023 for the first time, we had less dialysis units in United States than we had the year before. What this means is, particularly in rural areas, patients are traveling further to get their dialysis, and so there's a sort of white space where an opportunity potentially for patients to be utilizing device in their home. And so we want to continue to keep a close eye on the market and understand where the market's going. We do continue to see interest from all stakeholders in the market to drive patients to home. We think that home is really an ideal setting for a lot of patients to get their dialysis, and we're seeing payers and providers patients all time to drive to the home space. The other place that we mentioned before is value based care. I continue to see more and more patients being in value based care models, and I think we'll end up with most end stage Ren disease patients United States, if not all, having dollars at risk, and someone trying to manage that risk and trying to bring down cost. And if the patient and the physicians at the center of that, we think that speaks really well to our value proposition. So creating a usable device allows shorter training time. In our usability training, we've had three and a half hours of training for a person to be able to utilize that device that gives a lot of benefits in utilizing the device, not only in the singular care setting they're traditionally in, but the same device being throughout the care spectrum means that training, shorter training time can be leveraged throughout the healthcare system. What we're also finding is the market has shifted from the payer side. And traditionally, dialysis was paid for by Medicare and it was a fee for service model. And more and more we're seeing people move into Medicare Advantage plans, and so now those are at risk dollars. And so there's a new payer space called value based care, where those dollars are now at risk. So. And people want devices and technologies that are thinking about that risk and thinking about ways that they can decrease the cost of care. So when we think about that, we think about how to have a singular device across all our care settings. We think about usability and ease of training, all being leveraging points to start to think about how to decrease cost of care. When you get onto the true cost of care reduction, we start to layer on connectivity and data, and we would like to get to a space where leveraging some of that with our partners would bring down total cost of care and dialysis. Well, I think there's three or four places we're trying to differentiate. The first is the very proposition of our device, as we talked about, having a device that's usable and across the full care spectrum that really puts the patient and the physician at the center of the prescription flexibility. The first thing, I think, the second thing is capital efficiency. Been very, very thoughtful about capital and time and resource allocation. So we provide value to our stakeholders. I also think that we have a lot of people in dialogy who have a close relationship with dialysis for some reason or another, either a family member or themselves who had experience with kidney disease, and so we're really deep in the fabric of the dialysis space, and that, what does that mean? It means we understand the true needs of our customers and our patients and how to convert that into a design that's going to work for all stakeholders, and really excited about bringing this value proposition to the market. So.