Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Force Therapeutics CEO Bronwyn Spira (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that I should have asked you?

Bronwyn Spira: One topic is the value of data and how it can spur healthcare on to the next iteration. One of the the things we’ve seen is, because we collect so much data and we’ve treated hundreds of thousands of patients on the platform over the past 10 years, the incredible value of that data is that we can now predict outcomes.

We can predict things like the best cost of care, what social determinants of health mean and their impact. As we look at the changing healthcare landscape and what drives positive change, I think it’s really looking at data, organizing data, and leveraging data for the good of the future of healthcare.

One of the things we’ve been working a lot on is our predictive analytics module where we look at all of our data across hundreds of thousands of patients and overlay that with clinical insight and clinical questions. Healthcare has to be driven by clinical thinking.

That combination of clinical thinking and data is incredibly powerful. There’s a lot of new and exciting change that we’re going to see in healthcare not only because of this virtual revolution but also because of the availability of good clinical data that I think is going to improve the way we deliver healthcare to the population. 

Sramana Mitra: What interventions have you been able to recommend based on your early predictive analytics experiments?

Bronwyn Spira: We’ve worked a lot with pain data in the opioid crisis. One of the things we do on a daily basis is collect a pain score from our patients. We can see trends at any stage of recovery and we can glean a lot of insights from those pain trends.

One of the things that some of our health systems taught us to do is they were giving opioids routinely in post-operative care. With the opioid epidemic, we wanted to help them understand what it would mean if opioids were no longer prescribed after surgery.

We found that non-opioids pain pathways were as effective, if not more, in treating patients while they recovered from surgery. We looked at things like functional outcomes. We looked at patient satisfaction. We looked at longitudinal pain scores.

As a result of that research, we’re able to make recommendations back to our health systems to say, “Here’s the data. Do with it what you will, but it’s clearly stating that we don’t need opioids after most surgeries.”

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. That, in itself, is a very good intervention. That’s scalable and a major intervention.

Bronwyn Spira: Because we have an engagement platform underneath us, we can study anything like that. I think about this kind of analysis as a byproduct of what we do, but it’s very important and impactful. We can look at multiple things like outcome and patient satisfaction.

Anxiety is another big one especially with Covid. We’re doing a study with Dartmouth on how anxiety levels during the Covid era impact functional outcomes. We’re able to look at all these different aspects of care and ultimately come out with a recommendation of what’s working.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Force Therapeutics CEO Bronwyn Spira
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