Leon Young and Frank Iorfino discuss scaling predictive healthcare on Talking HealthTech

Leon Young, CEO of Cogniss, and Dr. Frank Iorfino, Senior Research Fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre, University of Sydney, recently joined Peter Birch on Talking HealthTech. The conversation explored how predictive healthcare is moving from expensive, complex research projects into tools that health experts can build and health systems can adopt through no-code infrastructure.

In the episode titled "Scaling Predictive Healthcare: How No Code Platforms Drive Personalised Digital Therapeutics," the conversation centered on the practical realities of deploying predictive tools in clinical settings. Frank's work in youth mental health served as a practical case study.

He shared his work on Minding Your Mind, an app built on Cogniss that uses wearables and mobile sensors to track mental health patterns and predict events like anxiety episodes before they occur. "We know that one-size-fits-all approaches are really just not cutting it for people," he explained. "We need to try and personalize care to the kinds of things that are going on for a person."

His focus is on indicated prevention and early intervention in youth mental health, a critical area given that 75% of major mental disorders emerge before age 25. For him, building his solution on Cogniss's specialized no-code infrastructure for digital health meant staying focused on clinical work rather than building a tech company from scratch.

Frank's work is one example of a broader shift. Leon highlighted other predictive applications being built on Cogniss, from sepsis prediction in children with cancer at Murdoch Children's Research Institute to autoimmune relapse monitoring and cystic fibrosis progression tracking. The infrastructure is empowering subject matter experts across conditions to build and sustain their solutions at scale.

But infrastructure alone doesn't solve adoption.“The cost and complexity of procurement is huge, very hard for health systems to procure point solutions," Leon explained. "There needs to be a way of mapping demand to supply. Right now there's very poor matching between what innovators are building and what health providers are seeing as their number one problem."

His view is that shared digital health infrastructure, combined with initiatives like Ripple, can help match health system priorities with innovator-led solutions. “We're building a publishing model that starts with what health systems need, then works with researchers like Frank to create solutions with a clear path to adoption."

Listen to the full episode below.