Realizing the value of DTx

Every year, more people are diagnosed with chronic pain than common conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. It’s truly staggering. What’s more concerning is the fact that nobody has really figured out yet how to treat it at scale.?

Living with chronic pain is an incredibly individual experience. The needs of one person experiencing chronic pain varies from the 51 million other U.S. adults who are living with it. Our healthcare delivery system, however, isn’t equipped to meet the needs of a massive population of people who all require high-touch, personalized care.?

So, the care journey of a person living with chronic pain ends up looking a lot like this: treatment is likely limited to prescriptions like painkillers and muscle-relaxers, with the occasional injection treatment every few months. Longer-term pain management solutions exist, but mostly for those fortunate enough to be able to afford the out-of-pocket expenses.?

It’s easy to feel like a ping-pong ball in the system, bouncing from specialist to specialist in hopes of finding needed support and care. It’s harder to feel as though any of them truly understand or are able to help.?

At BehaVR, we’ve seen this care journey play out countless times. It is tragic. The healthcare delivery system struggles against a constrictive supply-demand ratio that limits clinicians’ ability to go above and beyond for people experiencing chronic pain. And while members who are able to experience our products have been able to manage their pain – and their lives – differently, they’ve only been able to do so when they arrive at a clinic where our products are available.

This is the problem we’ve been trying to solve for the past few years. We know that Digital Therapeutics (DTx) work. But how can we fundamentally shift the accessibility and the economics of care delivery to help healthcare providers, health plans, employers, and patients realize their value??

Now, we finally have an answer. Today, I am thrilled to announce our merger with Fern Health, our rebrand to RealizedCare, and the launch of an evolved model for care management, powered by DTx.

The first area of focus for RealizedCare will be chronic pain management. To accelerate this initial offering, we’ve merged with Fern Health and, importantly, forged a critical strategic partnership with Fern’s parent company, Grünenthal. Fern’s clinical protocols, coaches and virtual platform, combined with our DTx and wraparound services, will provide people living with chronic pain everything they need to address their symptoms whenever they need help, wherever they are.?

This is the future of DTx

Over the past few years, our team at BehaVR has been developing a pipeline of digital interventions designed to regulate anxiety, free people from fear and pain, and alleviate the discomfort and improve the success of addiction recovery. Some are general wellness products, others are undergoing the FDA clearance process. To date, VR has been our medium of choice, and for good reason: VR is uniquely suited to create multi-sensory experiences of carefully crafted virtual therapeutic protocols, which are used for exposure therapy, gamified movement, mindfulness practices, and embodied learning experiences to deliver effective, evidence-based mental and behavioral health treatments.?

Along the way, we’ve been fortunate to forge some amazing innovative partnerships: with Confluent Health, Sumitomo Pharma, leaders in pain and addiction science like Dr. Eric Garland, and of course, we acquired OxfordVR and by extension the groundbreaking work of Dr. Daniel Freeman and his team at Oxford University. Our products have been used by tens of thousands of people experiencing mental and behavioral health conditions across the spectrum from anxiety and depression to chronic pain to serious mental illnesses. We’ve been intentional about exposing our products early and often to real people in the real world, and the payoff has been a trove of learnings, product improvements, and real world evidence.?

But above all, our journey thus far has reaffirmed our belief that DTx will, beyond a shadow of a doubt, fundamentally change the accessibility, scalability and economics of care delivery. It is the mechanism by which our healthcare system will be able to unlock immense value, and perhaps the only solution that will cost-effectively close the gap between supply and demand for care. These solutions are capable of keeping people engaged with their care as they receive evidence-based treatments, often from the comfort of their own home. They unlock ever-decreasing marginal costs of care, and perhaps most critically, are exponentially scalable, virtually without limits.

As the industry continues along the uncertain path towards fee-for-service reimbursement for prescription DTx, the simple fact is that we need a way to realize the value of DTx now. RealizedCare’s first digital care management offering is designed to do just that.?

Realizing a new patient journey

For health plans, self-insured employers, providers in value-based care arrangements, and the people they serve, RealizedCare is an end-to-end digital care management solution that provides fully-managed and personalized digital treatments supplemented with vital services like human and AI-driven coaching, care navigation support, and peer community support as members progress through their recovery.??

RealizedCare is not the ping-pong ball experience people living with chronic pain have grown accustomed to. This is a personalized, on-demand care journey. There is no bouncing from specialist to specialist, hoping to see the right one. Rather, members are guided along their journey by a navigator who understands their needs, and can refer them to appropriate clinicians when necessary. They have access to a community with lived experience of chronic pain, a much-needed resource among a population that often struggles with loneliness and isolation. And, of course, digital interventions designed to bring them comfort and freedom from pain are at their fingertips.?

We could not be more excited for this new phase of DTx. In some ways, RealizedCare is a return to our roots – a return that was, in retrospect, somewhat inevitable. Care management and value-based care is in our DNA as former health plan leaders who were frustrated with the lack of access and uncoordinated care our highest risk members were receiving. It’s a turning point, we believe, for DTx. Creating value is about more than transferring dollars from one pocket to another via fee-for-service reimbursement. And as we’ve all seen, the road to fee-for-service reimbursement is cluttered with obstacles and not aligned with the evolution of our healthcare system. If we don’t find another way to scale DTx now, our healthcare system will continue to struggle through a devastating clinician shortage, costs will continue to escalate, patients will go untreated, inequities will continue to be unaddressed, and we’ll continue to fail those who need help most.??

Digitally-powering care management models focused on high-cost populations, and leaning into value-based care is, we believe, the most direct way to realize care and create value now.?