This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Jim Kaput, co-founder and chief science officer for Vydiant.
This California business is a member of BioForward Wisconsin, and lists the UW-Madison Department of Food Science among its support network. Kaput, who’s based in Madison and is a member of the Wisconsin Technology Council, says the company is actively building relationships in the state. And the Concordia University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences uses its OneHealth Pro software application for certain students.
The podcast highlights the company’s approach to improving health through understanding various lifestyle factors, as well as how it leverages AI and other technologies.
“We know that chronic diseases are caused by contributions of your genes and your medical condition, but also 60% of chronic diseases are caused by lifestyle and behavior,” Kaput said. “And yet, if you go to your medical records, there’s no data on what you eat, what your physical activity is, what your social activity is, stress, sleep.”
He argues the health care system essentially ignores those variables, focusing on the biological aspects of health without the important context of these contributing factors.
Vydiant’s OneHealth app is available for free now, and the company aims to get it integrated with health systems’ medical records systems, Kaput said.
“That serves two functions. One, it disseminates those questions and gathering of that data to hundreds of millions of people,” he said, noting Epic alone now has 250 million people in its system. “So, we believe that getting them in will allow more people to give the lifestyle data to their electronic medical records.”
Using that behavioral data along with traditional medical records, the company will analyze how treatments can be “best targeted to the individual,” he said.
“We can say, given your condition, these are the actions that you can take to manage your health, to maintain it, or to reduce the symptoms of your condition,” he said.
Listen to the podcast below, sponsored by UW-Madison:
