Rachel Trobman, CEO and Co-Founder of Upside Health, shares how healthcare IT can support patients and providers in understanding and alleviating chronic pain.
Upside Health is a digital health company dedicated to improving chronic pain care. The company builds upon Rachel’s decades of experience in product development, patient advocacy and personal experience with pain.
Highlights include:
2:19 – RT: “Chronic pain is complicated on so many fronts. I mean, there’s a well-documented bio-psycho-social component of chronic pain, which means that the pain signals are firing and the pain signals are real, but the cause might not be there. So you can’t just tackle it from a one-sided approach.”
3:58 – RT: “Pain interference is actually a much better marker of pain than the scale of 1 to 10 for pain intensity because when pain starts creating social isolation and limiting your ability to work, limiting your ability to socialize, all of those things that create human connections, and also create purpose, it becomes even more of a detriment.”
11:13 – RT: “There are clinicians that don’t know what to do with the chronic pain patients. They can’t get them into a pain specialist or there’s no pain specialists nearby. They don’t know what tools are appropriate. They don’t want to not give them anything and have the patient go into the ER in severe pain. So it’s like, what tools are available within my tool belt and then, of those tools, what is the appropriate solution for this patient?”
15:06 – RT: “One key way that tech can be brought into chronic pain is to help create a shared language around pain, to create a more nuanced and complete picture about the pain, the patient’s pain experience. And then use that data over time to allow the clinicians to be able to see the various levers that are changing the patient’s pain experience.”
Leading with Health is hosted by Jennifer Michelle. Jennifer has a Master’s in Public Health and Epidemiology and is a former EMT. As President of Michelle Marketing Strategies, Jennifer specializes in healthcare marketing. She is on a mission to create a healthcare system that actually cares about the patients and the providers.