Lowering the cost of chronic pain for health systems and insurers through its clinically-validated digital solution, Manage My Pain.

CEO
Tahir Janmohamed
Founded
Incorporated 2012

Tech Brief

We are the top ranked and most download pain app on the market, with 4.7 stars out of 5 based on thousands of reviews. Our solution is also the world's first and only digital solution for chronic pain that has been clinically-validated to improve outcomes. Our proprietary approach to tracking pain and function is based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy principles. Our precedented ability to engage people with chronic pain has resulted in over 2.9M entries of patient-reported pain episodes - the world's largest dataset of its kind and is longitudinal over 8 years. We have published 3 machine learning papers on this data set, the most recent being one that used one month of app data to predict outcomes 6 months in the future.

Problem Tech Solves

Studies have shown that education and psychological support should be the first-line intervention for people with chronic pain - before medications, surgery, or physiotherapy. However, the vast majority of people with chronic pain will receive neither - largely due to the limited access of pain psychologists typically located in urban academic hospitals. Many people with chronic pain have a similar experience in having to convince others that their pain is real to receive appropriate treatment. As a result, the quality of life of the person decreases over time resulting in disability, loss of income, higher healthcare utilization such as surgeries and ED visits, and an increased likelihood of opioid dependency. Manage My Pain closes this gap by giving people who live with chronic pain a voice. Our users can produce data-centric reports that can be shared with a care team to get the care one needs, earlier in the pain cycle. In addition, it provides resources for patients to better understand and cope with their pain, developed by pain experts using condition and best practices in pain psychology. By helping people better manage their pain, we lower the cost of pain for health systems and insurers.

Validation

In March 2021, the results of our multi-site validation study was published in the leading digital health journal, JMIR mHealth (Impact Factor 4.95). 257 patients were recruited into the study across 3 sites providing chronic pain care: 2 urban academic hospitals and a rural primary care clinic. Patients who used Manage My Pain alongside standard of care compared to the patients who just received standards of care had statistically and clinically significant improvements in two domains: anxiety (measured by GAD-7) and pain catastrophizing (measured by PCS). Both domains are correlated with increased healthcare utilization, opioid use/misuse, and decreased treatment effectiveness. We have published 9 other studies about the development of our solution, engagement levels, integration into clinical pathways, and machine learning concepts applied to our dataset. In January 2020, RBC Insurance (Canada's largest financial institution) published our case study from a 3-year pilot. 209 disability clients on short and long-term disability were offered Manage My Pain. Their claim durations were compared to a matched retrospective cohort based on age, gender, and reason for disability. Those who used Manage My Pain had a 7.5 month shorter disability claim duration, representing over $20,000 in avoided benefits paid by the insurer.