Taking Chronic Pain Therapy From Face-to-Face to Digital

[0:00] I’m Dr. Bethany Raines, and I am an applied neuroscientist. I work with clients who want to apply more cutting-edge science into technology and products that are customer-facing and can make more of an impact in the real world.

[0:09] And I recently worked with Tech Rivers to put together an app for one of my clients that is working on a mind-body approach and a digital application for chronic pain treatment.

[0:24] What we’re doing with this project is applying a very successful and popular chronic pain therapy, pain reprocessing therapy.

[0:32] We’re taking that and trying to scale it out with the creator of that therapy and make it into a digital app that can be used by people to do self-guided healing, make it easier for them to get in touch with a therapist or a coach.

[0:47] So, it was a challenge in and of itself for us to determine whether or not the therapy was even appropriate for digitization.

[0:55] And we really wanted to make sure that by putting it in a digital format and getting it out there as an app that we weren’t going to lose the magic, we weren’t going to lose the effectiveness of this therapy that had been so amazing thus far, more in face-to-face environments.

[1:12] We wanted to work with somebody who would hear us and really be able to respond to our needs as we were doing this and were open to experimenting with us as well, because we didn’t know exactly what this was going to look like since it was our first approach at digitizing the therapy.

[1:19] And we talked to quite a lot of developer teams, and Tech Rivers really stood out to us because of their approachability.

[1:36] Right from the beginning, they were wanting to have a conversation. They didn’t just want to give us a quote. It was like, “Talk to us about what you’re doing. We want to get to know you. We want to see what you’re doing.”

[1:44] They were very transparent about their processes. And a lot of the other groups we were looking at really needed something to be already thought through, already designed.

[1:52] They needed a very tight road map. They weren’t super flexible.

[2:00] And with Tech Rivers, they felt more like a partner and a conversation.

[2:04] So, we really loved that. It was obvious to us this was great value, but also kind of what felt like a boutique hands-on service. And we saw the work they had done with healthcare.

[2:15] They had a lot of really great comfort and experience with HIPAA, and so we felt very safe there and knew that they weren’t going to cut corners or put us in any kind of risk as we were putting the project together.

[2:22] All of our contacts on the team from Tech Rivers were really good at understanding things and putting things into plain English for everybody.

[2:37] That wasn’t hyper technical.

[2:40] Sometimes with a tech partner, that’s not always easy to get people who are so tech-savvy and so talented who also are so good at the customer side.

[2:50] So, I liked that a lot. Our initial plan and idea and concept ended up being very different than where we landed. And at no point did Tech Rivers make us feel like they couldn’t work with us.

[2:58] If you want to be successful in any kind of a digital product space, obviously agility and iteration are critical to your innovation and success, and Tech Rivers really is exceptionally well suited for that.

[3:12] Just with all of the sort of the invisible soft skills that go along with tech development. And so I definitely would encourage people to work with this group of folks because your psychological health will thank you. Ha!