Cure: What was your inspiration to start Collogh Cares?
Collins Oghor: When I was 12 years old, my aunt, who was also my godmother, died from kidney failure. She was young. I went with her to her dialysis appointments about three times a week, every single week in her final year. She developed kidney failure because she didn't get early access to preventive care, and she could not get consistent access to dialysis. That was a big driver for me to go into medicine.
Cure: So what exactly is Collogh Cares?
Oghor: Collogh Cares is a public health company with a mission to prevent kidney failure one family at a time. We emphasize that because kidney failure not only affects the individual but also the whole family. Our approach is to work with nephrologists (kidney doctors), enabling them to provide better and more consistent care to people at risk for kidney failure.
Cure: Explain more about the magnitude of this problem in the US.
Oghor: The World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have called kidney disease a neglected epidemic and a silent killer. In the United States, 37 million Americans have chronic kidney disease (CKD), which means they're at risk for developing kidney failure. CKD causes 80 percent of the kidney failures. If you diagnose CKD in primary care through routine screening, you can slow the progression by controlling blood pressure and blood sugar. The problem is that when you have CKD, you are not symptomatic or have nonspecific symptoms, so many patients are not caught early enough. And this disease is extremely debilitating and extremely costly.
Cure: What are the inequities you see within chronic kidney care?
Oghor: Kidney disease in America is a poster child for racial inequity in healthcare and access to health care. African Americans have a five-times higher risk of developing kidney failure and
35 percent of the people on dialysis in this country today are African Americans. That’s because many patients of color in the United States do not have access to primary care. They don’t get routine blood tests or urine tests. As a result, many of them are diagnosed when it's too late.
Cure: What happens once a patient of color gets a CKD diagnosis?
Oghor: Well, you have the historical context of mistrust between the community and the healthcare system. The other issue is the average time spent with a physician in the US is only about seven minutes. So, imagine a patient who may not be very educated, who’s already scared about what's going on with their health, with a mistrust of the system. They get seven minutes or less to hear about a condition that is explained using medical jargon. They don’t know what to do next. So, they often don't go to their health care provider even after they're diagnosed. There’s a term called “crashing into dialysis,” which means a patient begins dialysis to survive and was not seen by a nephrologist in the four months leading up to starting dialysis. Among African American males on dialysis, 42 to 45 percent crashed into dialysis, in contrast to 20 to 25 percent of Caucasian males. So, you can see the disparity here.
Cure: Yes, and it’s very troubling. So what is your AI solution?
Oghor: Collogh Cares uses AI to predict when somebody is going to need dialysis, years ahead of time. So instead of just saying to a patient, “You have chronic kidney disease” we can say, “You're 18 months away from needing dialysis.” That will impact how the patient manages their lifestyle and how their provider organizes their care to get them optimized for dialysis or a transplant. Or, better yet, to extend the time before they need dialysis.
The second aspect of Collogh Cares is a clinical decision support tool, which helps the nephrologist provide every patient with an optimized treatment plan, putting their patients on the right therapy, such as starting with blood pressure management.
Cure: Where does the name Collogh Cares come from?
Oghor: My aunt always called me Collogh. She, in many ways, predicted the trajectory that I'm on. Once, when I went with her for a dialysis session, I told her that I wanted to build a hospital like the one that we were in. I was a kid with wild ambition. She laughed, but she told me, “You know what, if you want to do it, you will do it.” Then she asked me, “What would you call it?” I said Collogh Cares. So when we named the company, we wanted to pay tribute to her.
Cure: You currently live in Boston. What would winning the Cure Xchange Challenge and coming to New York do for you, that Boston has not been able to?
Oghor: If we're going to scale, we're going to need a lot of capital, and New York is number two in the world after Silicon Valley in terms of funding for tech companies. So that is an ecosystem we definitely need to get into. New York is also a great place for strategic partnerships with the local traditional health system. And finally, New York is an environment that's been experimenting heavily with addressing health inequities through technology. It’s exactly where we need to be.