Boston-based Massachusetts General Hospital and Fern Health, a provider of digital programs for chronic pain, have expanded their collaboration, giving the company access to 10 million de-identified patient records to help refine and personalize its offerings.
Offered as a benefits add-on through employers, Fern Health’s first product is a digital program that aims to address musculoskeletal pain. The program includes three components: exercise therapy, behavioral education to help patients reframe their pain perception and health coaching to provide personalized support.
To develop this program, Fern Health collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital about 18 months ago. The hospital’s pain management center helped the company gain a deeper understanding of chronic pain and the ways in which it affects people’s bodies and minds.
“From the start, we understood that our approach would be multimodal — it wouldn’t just be about exercise therapy by itself. We wanted to holistically support more than just people’s bodies, but also their minds and the social pressures that happen as a result of having chronic pain,” said Travis Bond, CEO of Fern Health, in an email.
The company now wants to further personalize its program. The expanded collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital will help it do just that by allowing Fern Health access to 10 million patient records that have been de-identified to protect privacy. The company will use the data to build personalization algorithms so that patients can receive pain relief therapies that are customized to them and their experiences.
The major advantage to using Massachusetts General’s data set is that it is a “massive real-world data set,” Bond said.
“If you look at most other pain management offerings, everyone is building their products on publicly available data sets or their own user data, which is capped based on their limited scale,” he said. “So, our data advantage will help us better serve those in chronic pain much more effectively.”
For Massachusetts General, expanding the collaboration with Fern allows for a deeper dive into the patient experience as it relates to chronic pain.
“[The collaboration] really allows us to tap into that data and be able to define and understand the experience of patients dealing with pain such that we can come up with innovative and more sophisticated patient-facing solutions” said Mihir M. Kamdar, MD, an attending pain physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and digital health advisor.
“[We are thinking] about how we can digitize evidence-based pain management in a way that could be scaled not only to our community at Mass General, but well beyond,” he added.
Fern Health plans to expand its offerings to include programs targeting pain associated with specific conditions, such as diabetes and cancer. Though Fern is currently offered through employers, these new programs will be piloted among providers and patients at Massachusetts General.
Fern Health will also work with the hospital to develop new services that will be available to clinicians, so they can electronically refer patients to its digital programs.
With the help of Massachusetts General, Fern Health will begin to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval next year as a digital therapeutic for chronic musculoskeletal pain, and in 2022, the company plans to provide further protocols for other types of pain, Bond said.
Photo: 9amstock, Getty Images
