Mathea Ford: Hi there! It's Mathea Ford with Renal Diet HQ and today I'm here with Nataliia Karpenko. We're going talk today a little bit about RenalMate as you may remember I am an advisory board member with RenalMate and Natalia is the CEO and creator and she's like the inspiration behind a lot of things. She's always coming up with great ideas and why don't you tell us how you got how you came up with RenalMate? And what it is?
Nataliia Karpenko: Yeah. Hi to everyone! Today, we are at ISN, a Medical Society of Nephrology event in Washington DC. It's Kidney Week 2019. It's the opening day so it's really important to be here with Ms. Mathea Ford and thank you Mathea for this occasion. I just really think that it is so important to know why people have that passion for renal space and for nephrology.
I'm a former kidney patient. And beside this, I worked in a Technology Innovations Corporate Values. From the professional side, many people in the United States are dealing with chronic illness and they are overstressed, knew so little about diet and then you go to renal disease and you go to nephrology and you then realized that it is exponentially higher in terms of the amount of adherence and amount of comprehensive compliance patients have to have but sometimes Education is not there with education that is fully understood by patients as well as necessary simple work that will allow patients to feel empowered to start moving, to feel empowered to know that they can change, that they can improve their quality of life.
Since, I was very passionate about my personal craft, looking at that and say, “When I was a child and given is my kidney condition, what would become better?” And I certainly knew that it could be done in better ways that my family would recede back to education. How we can work on effective ways of improving the quality of the diet, improving the quality of life management, and luckily, it is the technology. Yeah. These days, there are so many ways how we can improve the quality of vitals management. Where some medical team would be on board knowing what's happening to patients with remote monitoring well designed in one side, patients will be able to manage their rate and blood pressure and the medical team could be informed if there are any abnormalities happening to patients.
There is a lot of value in it in passion, science-based approach, expertise, and technology together to really create something innovative but valuable for patients.
Mathea Ford: Yeah. I think it's what you mentioned is the kidney disease is really a hard diet to follow but it's got so many other layers that we don't even realize. You know, there's the family dynamic, there's the diet, there's the medications. Everything changes with kidney disease and putting that all together can be hard. So, we're here at ASN this week because we have a program called LEP. It was Life Enhancement Program. It's like a coaching program for kidney patients and we've done it a couple of times and we're presenting to the Nephrology Conference about the outcomes and stuff but what this is is RenalMate is an app and we're working on building it to make it so it's helpful to people who have kidney disease regardless of the stage and try to focus on the different areas of kidney disease.
If you're CKD 3 or CKD 4, before you get on dialysis, then it helps you to understand what is important at that phase because as your phase goes along, as you go along different things become important. You may have different medications, you may change, you're looking at your labs, you're you know you may have to have surgical prevention, surgical procedures done.
All those things so you had the passion because you're a kidney patient and you love technology and so Nataliia is out in San Francisco and she's around all the technology stuff so I guess that's why you decided to do an app.