A data-driven pain-management app from Amelio Health is helping Australian miners with chronic pain receive immediate healthcare solutions.
Kathy Hubble has more than three decades’ experience in the medical field as a clinical nurse consultant in chronic pain management and psychology.
She has seen first-hand how chronic pain can have severe and long-lasting impacts on a person’s life. In particular, Hubble has seen how workplace injuries or chronic pain being managed by those in heavy industries like mining can affect not only people’s lives but their careers.
She has also worked as a return-to-work technical specialist and senior claims manager in the insurance sector.
This mix of experience has seen Hubble develop a specific interest in helping those with chronic pain and workplace injuries navigate not only their own healing journey but the healthcare journey.
“I’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly of treatments and the management of chronic pain in all domains,” she told Safe to Work.
Hubble said she found those who were under workers compensation, or some form of income protection claim, often had worse health outcomes than their non-workplace-related injury counterparts.
These challenges inspired Hubble to develop a non-medicinal system that could be accessed by patients dealing with chronic pain.
“We wanted to supply these individuals with an evidence-based platform that would allow them to access a behavioural program based on what is being administered in pain clinics,” she said. “We developed an app that can be accessed instantly on any device and provide tailored care for patients at any stage of their healing process.”
The Amelio Health app uses a patient’s own data to develop its programs. By using a wearable device like a smart watch, users can input live data that alerts the platform to their present state. The platform is proving beneficial for industries like mining, where remote sites can make it difficult for patients to receive consistent, tailored care.
“One of the biggest challenges encountered by miners is access,” Hubble said. “With the Amelio Health app, we can develop behavioural feedback through wearable devices that is sent through notifications to alert these workers to changes in their body immediately, rather than having to go off-site to receive health advice.”
Every module on the Amelio Health app has been mapped back to the core competencies for the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), a global leader in the study and practice of pain management.
IASP brings together scientists, clinicians, healthcare providers and policymakers from around the world in pursuit of their mission to help those in pain. Its competencies are considered the global standard for effective healthcare.
Hubble said the app is also based on Bloom’s taxonomy of learning theory, a set of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. The three lists cover learning objectives in cognitive, affective and sensory domains, namely thinking skills, emotional responses, and physical skills.
“As people’s knowledge increases, it changes their behaviour, which can have positive effects on their function and pain scores,” Hubble said.
A common treatment for chronic pain is opioids which, aside from being potentially addictive, can have lasting impacts on the body. Hubble said that, over time, opioid use can create hypersensitivity in the nervous system that continues to create pain long after the initial injury has healed.
Through 24-hour monitoring, app users can quickly pick up on early indicators of opioid over-use based on their oxygen saturation.
“We’ve been operating with much success in the UK for a few years now, and we have launched in the US and Australia, where people are already seeing the benefits of the app,” Hubble said. “Our goal is to identify and reduce the suffering of those with chronic pain and who might be at risk from over-prescription.
“The Amelio Health app was able to identify dangerously low oxygen levels in one of our clients who had been prescribed three different opioids by her general practitioner.”
Hubble said fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) workers in the mining industry are under a lot of pressure to balance their work and home life, creating psychological stress. When this is coupled with chronic pain or illness, opioid dependency can become more of a risk.
“It’s critical that we find these people early in the process after their injury so we can help prevent them going down the pathway of using opioids that can ultimately make their chronic pain issues worse,” she said.
The Amelio Health app is bio-psychosocially-based, combining the data from wearables, pain diaries, mindfulness techniques, behavioural changes, and sleep prioritisation. It’s designed to empower patients with the knowledge and tools they need to become an active participant in their healing and pain management.
Embedded into the app’s behavioural program, health professionals and rehabilitation consultants can see their patient’s live data being tracked in real-time and follow their progress.
Amelio is also in the process of developing a new app that takes a completely AI-driven approach to healthcare. This multi-tiered app will soon be available to the public and features data-driven health coaches who can help users through their pain management programs.
Amelio has also developed a simple screening tool based on data collected from the company’s pain management program. By collecting this data over long periods, Hubble said it can present employers with strategies that can help them prevent incidents that lead to injury or ongoing chronic pain before they occur.
“We want to become even more intuitive in terms of the data we use so that we can eventually predict who is likely to develop a chronic pain problem based on a range of data-backed parameters,” she said.
“This will help to reduce costs across the board for employers, insurance companies, and employees alike, as we will be able to help workers recover effectively before an ongoing problem develops.
“This groundbreaking digital health solution provides good evidence supporting a shift away from the mainstream approach to managing chronic pain toward a system based on outcomes.”
This feature also appears in the March–April issue of Safe to Work.