Business as Usual: Explores Hiring During COVID-19 with Noctem and ERT

 

Transcription: 

So good afternoon, everyone. This is Audrey Russo, President and CEO, the Pittsburgh Technology Council. Very happy to be here today, we're always trying to change things up. And we have two guests that I'll introduce in a moment, I want to give a big shout out to Huntington bank. But we also are running simultaneous to this, between 11 and three a virtual higher up. And we have a whole bunch of sponsors there. As you can see IQ Oxford solutions engineer. And they are helping us today in terms of we have 23 companies, I believe that are out there. And two of them are right here with us today. So I'm pretty excited to have a chat with them, and particularly on the work that they're doing. So we've muted the microphones just for making sure that we're not hearing crazy stuff in the background. And we have a chat, and the chat will allow you to ask our guests questions, Jonathan will keep his eye on that. And at the end, we're probably going to do a flyby into our higher ups. So you can see actually what's happening there, we're pretty impressed with the work that's going on. So as you can tell here at the tech Council, we're spinning many plates at the same time, all with the intention of keeping everything connected across the tech ecosystem and providing you with information on what's happening, whether it's hiring, whether it's new companies, whether it's in patients, as well as what's happening around the world. So I want to thank we have two guests today, Jason Eger, he's the site lead for er ci, and he'll tell us a little bit about that. And then we have Anne Germain founder and CEO of a company called Noctem. So and thank you so much for joining us. And let me see if I can find you in the sea of people here. There you are. And so and you have been a long standing member of the faculty at the University of Pitt, and recently you jumped it's like it's been a few years recent, you've jumped into, you know, right in to entrepreneurship. Tell us about your background. And before you launch noctem, so we can just know a little bit about your journey. And thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you for inviting me, it's really a pleasure have attended many of these lunches, sessions, we've learned a lot. So it's a pleasure to be able to participate more actively today. And I, you're right, I'm a recovering academic. And I have my background is in clinical psychology. So by training and clinical psychologists and neuroscientists, I've been at the University of Pittsburgh, and from 2001. That's what brought me to Pittsburgh, until 2018, when I decided to take a leave of absence to really dedicate 100% of my time of growing and building the sort of company to really take a different route and, and transferring what we've learned in research research to clinical research findings that we had collaborative work that we had done, to really go from the academic path to a path of commercialization to really try to have the impact that I fundamentally believe we can have in helping poor people sleep better and their providers getting the tools they need to be able to serve people more effectively.

So that's the that's your journey, right? And very impressive. What gave you the itch to a detox academic,

at something in academia is extremely fulfilling. And you know, it's it's challenging and it nourishes curiosity and the the intellectual way the questions and the pursuit of knowledge. But eventually, the itch really came to articulating how I wanted this knowledge to get outside of the lab outside of our research clinic and into the hands of people that don't spend their days in a very, very kind of in the research environment, barely taking it into the real world into the clinics where people go to seek help for their sleep. And beyond not just in the clinic, but in more operational frontline environments. And at some point, it was clear to me that while there are they were and they're still very interesting, research questions that we can ask them about how to do it. I really got the, the urge to try to do it in the real world outside of the research and clinical research environment. And that's what we're trying

to do. That's that's, that's fabulous. Thank you for sharing that because I think a lot of people, you know, forget it is a giant It's not that easy. It's not that easy to just say I'm gonna take all this stuff that I'm really interested in and passionate about and sort of in a safe environment experiment with, and then put it out into the real world. So tell us the premise of the company knockdowns. So what is it that you do,

we basically combine evidence based behavioral Sleep Medicine, with state of the art digital health technologies and machine learning going towards artificial intelligence AI down the road, to be able to scale the access and delivery of evidence based they will seek medicine. So there are problem that we have that there are very few providers who can provide and deliver the first line recommended sleep treatment for a common Sleep Disorder, that is insomnia, the difficulty falling or staying asleep. Now, it's not sleeping pills that are recommended. The first line recommended by the American College of Physicians, the American Academy of sleep medicine and other professional organizations are behavioral modifications to support consolidated restorative predictive and insufficient sleep. The problem is that there are very few people like me that are have 25 years of training in delivering these kinds of interventions. But the truth is that with the right tools and the right information, a much larger number and different types of providers can effectively inform people and provide instructions on how to modify sleep related behaviors to promote consolidated sleep. And that's what we're really doing, like combining the technology with the clinical science and clinical practice, to bring it into the hands of the first line health care providers that see people with sleep disturbances.

So, you know, sleep is actually the new sexy, right? You've been way ahead of the game. And Huffington has written a book about sleep. And, you know, she's like, to me, you're the master of it. And you've been way ahead of your game. So what are you doing with God right now, the Department of Defense. So through,

we continue the collaboration that we started, while I was at the University of Pittsburgh, as you can imagine, there, servicemembers and veterans have all sorts of sleep difficulties, sometimes sometimes related to the operation, sometimes related to the consequences of extended periods, and all sorts of very stressful environments. So we build a relationship. Now what we're doing is basically seeing if we can help them meet the needs that they have in sleep healthcare, by implementing the kind of technology that we have in military treatment facilities, and different affiliated clinics, training their providers, all sorts of providers, primary care doctors, with nurses, psychologists, social workers, and other kinds of embedded mental health technicians that are available across these different clinics to basically train you train them in the basic principles of behavioral Sleep Medicine, giving them the tools so that they can then app deliver the treatments to their patients to the end user in a way that is very consistent with a high quality care that people would receive in a specialty sleep clinic. But without having to wait for six to six months to two years like is typically the case for waitlist so we can really, what we're doing with them right now is basically deploying the technology training people to use it and assessing what kind of barriers what kind of facilitators support the implementation and deployment of health technologies for sleep here in the Department of Defense there in different military treatment facilities, and assessing what kind of impact do we have in terms of improving sleep in the end users and their patients?

Well, I'm gonna pause right here because we're going to come back to you and, and thank you so much for setting the table so that people understand the work that you're doing. That's why I get so stuck, because people are here in Pittsburgh working on the stuff that the rest of the world is just starting to catch up to. So I'll be out. I'll come back to you in a moment. So thank you for setting the stage for that. So now we have Jason Egger. He is the site lead as I mentioned earlier for a company called er T. And we're going to hear a little bit about Jason's background. So er t acquired in in vivo data. So make sure when we talk about you, Jason, the man and your journey let's let's we'll jump into the in vivo data in ER t. So thank you for being with us. Well,

thank you, Audrey. And thanks everyone for having me. I don't know how I'm supposed to follow up behind and I always get placed in those positions right after her her stellar credentials. But listen, I'm happy to be here. As Andre had mentioned, I'm a native yinzer, I came back to Pittsburgh in 2002, to work for a company called invivo data. And we were a startup company back then, in which we were our bread and butter was collecting data from patients in clinical trials. So fast forward over time, we were acquired by er t in 2012. So er, T is is where I am now. And we are we have an office in Station Square, about 180 people on the second third floors there, when we get to be in the office, and and what we do is we collect data from patients within clinical trials. So similar to what we were in vivo data, we also collect, whether we call them clinical outcome assessments, so questions that may be asked you about a drug that you are testing, or cardiac safety. So an EKG within a clinical trial, or imaging or respiratory, so a variety of product lines that really help us be involved and get the data directly to the pharmaceutical companies. So we can see whether a drug works or not. With with that, I mean, it's a variety of different indications of different medications that we test. I mean, the most relevant, I think, to all of us right now is COVID. And we're doing some happily able to do some work in the in the COVID vaccine areas. And again, it's just a company that is full of pride. We have about 3000 employees in 14 across 14 offices in six different countries. So we're in the virtual environment, as you all are. So that's the basis of our company. As Audrey said, I run a variety of roles there. But my my key role right now is really making sure that our employees are happy and safe in this environment and really driving towards ensuring that we're we're still productive, but we're somehow maintaining this work life balance that we're all in.

How are you doing with that? How's it going? Any helpful hints?

I mean, honestly, I think it's been it's been great. We our teams have been so focused on on making sure that we tell our employees, it's okay to step away. So someone needs to go take the kid to school, someone needs to go take a pet to the vet, we are ensuring that they declined a meeting and they go get done with they need to do. I don't know what it's like for everybody. But But there without the commute. Sometimes we're starting meetings pretty early in the morning, to be able to deal with our call our colleagues in Europe. But But again, I think our executive team has done a great job of really ensuring that the employees take the time they need and, and the company's been great. As far as you know, there are some people there that need some help. And we've we've sent people to go do grocery shopping for them more or send meals to people as they need it. Really. It's been great. And we and I will tell you, Audrey, we also have had a lot of virtual happy hours.

I mean, have you so that way, you know people don't drink and drive. That's great.

Oh, that's right.

People probably really get drunk then.

At some point, you have to end the meeting early.

So So before I get back to an Are you hiring now?

in Pittsburgh, we actually we are globally. But in Pittsburgh, I think we have about 20 open positions. Wow. As you have a Have you had mentioned earlier, we've got the job fair going on concurrently that I think Jonathan mentioned as well, we'll be doing a flyby in a little bit. But we have different positions open from project management, data management, what you see our bread and brothers really getting that data or today, pharma. So helping people within managing the data. We also have some what I'll call less science based positions, the proposal writers, the contract analysts, really some sales support roles as well. Mm hmm. Good.

And you and, and the number of clients that er T has what's like the number of clients, you know,

so, um, you know, ongoing, we, I think we have close to 4000 clinical trials at this point. revolving at any time number of clients, I'm going to tell you probably between two and 300. I think overall, we've done somewhere between somewhere 15 to 20,000 overall clinical trials that we've been involved in as a company.

Wow, that's pretty impressive. So how's your sleep? Before I get back to an how's your

well I need to talk to and because my sleep is not great, but it never has been. Okay, I'm going to go I'm way too close to the coffee machine here.

So how many hours do you think asleep? You get Jason?

I would probably a five hour a night sleeper.

Hmm. And we have a problem on our hands here. Right. Okay, we have a problem on your hands. So hopefully the two of you will get together because I'm a reformed now. I'm in To sleep, okay, I'm happy. Okay, so I'm just telling you, you know, it's cool to sleep. And so and I'm glad you're getting a chance to hear what Jason's up to I'm sure that there's some kind of a collaboration that could come from the relationship here. So before we, let's talk about jobs, and Are you Are you hiring right now? You're on mute. She's on mute. Can you try to unmute yourself? Yeah,

I had a message that wasn't allowed. But they definitely need more than this seven to nine for adults, seven to nine hours of sleep for adults recommended by the National Sleep Foundation. Right, and no coffee after, I would say four o'clock or ideally not after noon. So

just as an aside, you're that person,

I heard it, I got it.

And the or at least no caffeine at least six hours before your scheduled bedtime. And I'll be knocked inside. Yes, we are hiring we're looking for, we really want to build our software development team, we have open positions for front end, back end developers, full stack developers, these are kind of our short term needs. Down the road, we want to be able to expand on the designing the UI designer team, as well as more the customer oriented Customer Care oriented type of positions. But that's going to come a little bit down the road for now. I really want to build our software development team.

So that's great. And you're recruiting right now and i and i think you're at the job fair, I'm not exactly sure.

And we are. So I would say that you saw me probably try to get on my computer to turn off the sound. Every time we have someone in the room visiting the booth, there's a beat that was coming out. So I didn't want it to make sure that it wasn't distracting. So I turned it off. But yes, we're there. And there's a lot of activity, it's actually very easy system to use. If I do a virtual hiring event. And so far, it's very going very smoothly. So

that's great. Good News. I'm glad we're doing this all live in real time. Yeah, yes. So how many hours of sleep do you get? Me? Yes. You know, we

do, as I say, don't necessarily do as I do, but I aim for seven is between 630 and seven hours a night is where my sweet spot is.

I don't think that's enough. I need to talk to you offline.

I'm on the lower end

of this. acceptable. Yes. So I will gladly give you some my own tips and tricks. Okay, so yeah, you need more sleep. So let's go. Let's go back to Jason real quick. Let's talk. Let's talk about the data. Right? You gather so much data, right? I mean, from hundreds of thousands of people at a time across all these different customers? How does that work? How does it work? Like just to simplify it for all of us here so that we can understand how does that does that work?

Well, the theory, let me the old days, right. So clinical trials when that when drugs are run, before it was a true regulated process were tell us how you feel, write it down on a piece of paper, come back to the doctor's office and turn it in. So what are we managing when managing data, we're really driving compliance, right? So what we want to do is make sure that people are entering data at the right time of the day based on the drug that they're taking. So fast forward to what we do now, depending on what it is the belief is, let's make sure that we are getting data directly from a patient so that we know that that patient is valid, that data is valid, I'm sorry for that patient, we have to do it obviously, in a way that's an anonymous, right so that you're not collecting any personal information. And as you do this globally, every regulatory authorities is mandating that as we know, but it's really about getting away a device, a handheld, any of our smartphones, or at some points, you have to go into a doctor's office to take an EKG or some respiratory measurements. But it's really about getting a device via the help of a site investigator or coordinator, which are nurses and doctors that are that are specializing clinical trials. So they give the device that we provide to the patient, patient goes home, fills it out as they are guided by the device. And that data comes directly back to our servers. We have some analytics that we run to make sure that data is what we call clean. So if you were being asked a question that was, let's say, how's your headache, mild, severe, unbearable, whatever it might be? You have to make sure that that they answered all the questions that are within those constraints. So they could only answer those three answers that we do, versus the old days where paper was, someone might put, it's really, really bad. And then you can't do anything with it, though, we could find the data to a way that we can make sure it's clean data and provide it back to the pharmaceutical companies for them to do their full analytics.

So do you create the the interfaces and the portals that actually are used for all of us who might be in the clinical trials?

That's correct. So that's what our technology does, we do that we have the technology, the code that creates the interfaces as well as supports it. So we have, just as Anne had mentioned, we have customer care that will help out with the cmit issues for maybe some folks that are are less technology savvy.

Okay, that's great at that, I think that helps all of us sort of understand how you fit into this, because you have a customer facing a patient facing as well as the support that you're doing for the company, or you know, your 4000 plus clients.

Exactly.

So how busy are you right now, as a company?

I'm very, I mean, that's, that's when it comes into the work life balance we are having, I mean, we have been on a growth trajectory that that's really hot. It's uncanny for, I think, any business over the years. Right now. We our business grew a lot because of COVID. I will tell you, and what I mean by that is, we had to find ways people couldn't go into a doctor's office, though. So with that we had to kind of work and be creative on the fly and introducing new solutions that would allow people to do this virtually have a visit virtually. So that was there. Some of the trials, I will tell you will obviously be delayed because of where the state of the world is right now. But I we are we are poised for enormous growth for 2021.

That's awesome. That's great. So and there's a question in the chat, that. Jonathan, I think there's a question in the chat. It's one of the questions I was going to ask, but why don't we let it's from Dave demoss?

You'll want to know, so is there. What value do you see in the use of a smartwatch to really analyze your sleep? I know, I kept saying I'm only get five hours a night and after a year that I'm like, well, that's where it is. and Audrey gets eight and a half.

But that's a that's a sensitive question. So the the fact that what I think is really positive about all the the wearable, and the non wearable sensors that focus on sleep or claim to focus on sleep, at least, is that it does drive people's attention to their sleep and their core health behavior, you know, you have to exercise you have to eat right. And if you want those two things to be very potent for your health, you need to sleep right and enough as well. So I think the wearables and the non wearables really have increased awareness and provided a way at an accessible way of measuring sleep that is not in the lab with the electrodes like we typically do in this sleep environment. I do want to say, though, that, you know, those are actually really good at monitoring when you're active. And the periods of inactivity, which is really the sleep are used as a proxy to Denton to identify sleep in people who have regular sleep patterns and don't have sleep disorders. What we found and others have found, and there's a big literature on that, too, is that you know, these, regardless of the device are pretty much all the same. When it comes to detecting sleep and wakefulness, they're pretty all pretty perform pretty much all the same in detecting periods of rest and periods of activity, where they really are not good at. And obviously that can create a bunch of problems is interpreting more than activity level throughout the 24 hour period. So a lot of the device will give you some kind of impact about the restorative aspect of your sleep, or worse right the sleep stages. Now I can give you a neurobiology of sleep course. But I won't, but I'll just say that sleep is actually produced in the brain by the brain. And it's unlikely to be detected by something that you wear on their finger or a watch or something in your bed. So so these are proxies, and those measures are not very good. And they're and we know they're not accurate. The issue that comes up and I would say you have to be careful. I'm all for people monitoring their sleep and paying attention to their sleep health. There's a disorder that is actually growing that is called ortho insomnia. And that's when there's a discrepancy between what the device says and people's experience about their sleep. And people start trusting the device more than they trust their body and their brain about their sleep. And it's growing. And we see a lot of people that say, I think I sleep enough, I'm just fine. But my device says it's only five hours. And it increases my risk of having a stroke or a cardiovascular event.

And the first thing we say invariably is take off the device. If it doesn't measure your sleep necessarily, it measures periods of inactivity. So you may have more sleep than what is measured. So that's just the copy up there. They're helpful when you don't have a sleep problem and the help in monitoring sleep health. But we have to be careful in not trusting the device more than we trust our brains and our bodies. feel okay, like it's a high quality sleep and it's efficient. It is good.

That's it? Okay, you're making me sad. I was happy about my sleep. I have been so focused on it that I will talk to you about an offline, you have someone here saying that under interrupt interrupted sleep one to three times a night is common. How does that it you know, factor? I'm sure that's a longer conversation. You know, in terms of behavioral modification, I think that's what you're really getting at? Yeah, well, I like having accountability. And I believe what is on my Fitbit is pretty accurate. And likely

it is if your sleep is consolidated, it's predictable, and you don't miss it. And you don't think that you have a sleep problem. And then your Fitbit is probably very, very close, there's probably very little discrepancy between your experience and the device, the issue comes up and there's a bigger discrepancy between the person's experience and what the device may

listen, we could talk to the both of you for a really long time. This is just awesome to hear from the both of you. But you know what we're gonna do now, we are going to do a fly in into the virtual higher up. Okay, so I think if everyone just sit tight, and I believe Taylor is Marie gonna come on there she is hard, right? Do not fall asleep. She's on you. She's on you. Let's unmute. Okay, perfect. Hey,

don't hear me.

So there you go. This is Marie Maloney. She is on our team. And she is leading some talent work, as well as some pipeline development for young people and take it away.

Thank you.

So yeah,

we're gonna do a quick flyby of our event today, which has been taking place since 11. It goes from 11 to three today, we have amazing companies like these two wonderful professionals that you just talked to. And the reason why it does look so good is because of time that they put into it. We just provided the platform. And then they went in and really made it amazing. So when you enter the platform, you go to a lobby like this. And it offers tech jobs, remote and online jobs, non tech jobs and internships. So if I jump into tech jobs, you can see these are all the companies participating today. They each went in created their booth posted their job postings, they have recruiters and HR representatives live at the event. So when I scroll on down, we'll go right in here to er T's. And you can see right here, I'd already initiated a little bit of chat with one of their recruiters in there, Brian, but this is what their booth looks like. So it actually looks like a job fair booth. And they customize it and they put their branding. You can see here that Brian who is in here, Jason's Brian put in there about their bio, their job vacancies. So job seekers, as they come in, are able to see all of these things at the booth, apply and talk to her recruiter right within the booth and something that we really thought was neat. They just released this. In the past, whenever you were chatting with a recruiter, they had to send you a zoom link to do that virtual five minute interview to see if they wanted to go on to next step. But now when we go into chat now, Brian actually can send me a video he just presses a little button on his end and ask for my permission to meet in person. And then he and I can talk right within the platform. So it's really me. You chat back and forth here. If I leave this booth and go visit noctem booth, and we'll be able to jump on so I can even pop out. Let's go visit and find your booth. There it is. Mm hmm. And then Brian's even able to come find me in noctem booth and still talk to me but I can say hi to and are you because you're in your booth, aren't you?

Yeah, I just brought it up.

Yeah. So I can go in and I can say hi to and and she can reach out, talk back to me. She has all of her vacancies here in her organization bio. So we really need platform. Again, the professionals are what made it. But lots of exciting jobs in Pittsburgh, which really makes me happy. Lots of job seekers in there today looking at them. So it goes on till three o'clock today.

Wow, thank you so much. Okay, well, you got to see what we're doing in terms of toggling both. We're doing business as usual and higher up. And we're always having fun. And if you have any questions, reach out to anyone Murray, will share the link, Jonathan, whoever will help you. So I want to thank Jason agere, for sharing a little bit about er, tea, and very excited that you're growing. And we're thrilled that you came out of academia and are building a company it takes, it takes all of us to be helpful to you. So both of you count on us to do what we can to make sure that your work is successful, and has deep tentacles here in Pittsburgh and beyond. It's really, it's really amazing stuff at each and every day, I'm always floored at the amount of just smart people that are working and forging ahead. It's a privilege to do this work. So I want to thank everyone, and really appreciate you joining us today, Jonathan, who's on the calendar and what day is today.

Well, today's Tuesday, which means tomorrow is going to be Wednesday, which means it's Veterans Day, which we're very excited about. And we're going to do a special show, honoring basely veterans veteran. We have Colonel john Pipi, commander of the 55th maneuver enhancements Brigade, I want that title. And he's also president and founder of PGS tech, LLC. So he's got a little tech company consulting company. Oh, that's

good country. John's

a super cool guy. I can't wait to learn his story and learn more about how his military experience has informed the way he runs his his civilian business. So it's really really fun stuff.

It's good. That's great. Well, again, so here you are working on your behalf to try to keep the community together together. Again, thanks to Andrew Maine and Jason Egger for the work that they do, and follow them reach out to them. And everyone stay safe. It's another beautiful day in Pittsburgh.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thanks

for hosting.

They save everyone.

Bye, everyone.

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