PainChek Takes Mobile Pain Assessment App to Hospitals and Other New Markets in Partnership with InterSystems

Sydney, Australia – November 7, 2022 – InterSystems, a provider of next-generation solutions for enterprise digital transformation to help customers solve the most critical data challenges, today announced a global partnership agreement with Australian-based PainChek®, developer of the world’s first smartphone-based pain assessment and monitoring application.

Under the agreement, PainChek is using InterSystems IRIS for Health™ to integrate its application with electronic medical record (EMR) systems – including the InterSystems TrakCare® unified healthcare information system. More than one billion health records worldwide are managed using InterSystems technology. Combining the companies’ platforms will facilitate PainChek’s hospital global market entry and help transform pain management in the hospital sector and, in the future, new markets like home care that would also benefit from accurate and reliable pain assessment.

PainChek’s software-as-a-service (SaaS), artificial intelligence (AI) platform uses smart devices with cameras to accurately evaluate patients’ pain levels. PainChek’s reliability and consistency improves care and saves time and money for healthcare providers. For example, clinicians with different bedside manners may record different verbal assessments. Many patients cannot or do not reliably describe their pain levels, are pre- or non-verbal, or are not lucid at the time.

PainChek’s application is already contracted for use in more than 1300 aged care facilities in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Singapore where over 50% of residents are diagnosed with dementia. Among pain management improvements to increase the quality of care for residents, an 18-month case study showed a 20% reduction in the use of benzodiazepines and antipsychotic medications.

In PainChek’s first move into hospitals, the agreement sees InterSystems offer the application to its global customer base. This brings many expected benefits. In emergency departments, for example, triage would be more effective if accurate pain assessments could be performed on all patients.

Additionally, pain management issues commonly delay the release of patients or result in readmission, with additional costs to health systems. People with dementia occupy around 25% of hospital beds and one study found that those experiencing pain were 2.6 times more likely to exhibit delirium, a factor associated with longer hospital stays.

PainChek’s integration with EMR systems in aged care – using custom-built application programming interfaces (APIs) – has been vital to its success. It improves productivity, with pain assessments automatically entered into a patient’s record, and makes them available to clinical decision support solutions for pain management improvements.

By converting PainChek’s custom-built message formats to the HL7® and FHIR® industry standards, InterSystems IRIS for Health eases new integrations and reduces their cost. This scales up PainChek’s capacity to serve new markets and removes barriers to entry by leveraging existing infrastructure. HL7, for example, is widely used in the hospital sector and FHIR is already dominant in home care.

InterSystems has demonstrated InterSystems IRIS for Health integrating PainChek in the cloud to a number of hospitals using TrakCare at the recent HIMSS22 APAC conference. The company’s investments in FHIR also go beyond integration capabilities. The InterSystems FHIR® Server, built on InterSystems IRIS, helps developers create healthcare applications without building their own FHIR infrastructure.

“Partnering with a global leader like InterSystems accelerates our entry into new markets like the hospital sector,” said Philip Daffas, CEO, PainChek. “We know from experience in aged care how important it is to connect to EMR systems. InterSystems IRIS for Health makes that easy and scales up our capacity to connect into hospitals and, in the future, other sectors like home care that would also benefit from easy to use and reliable pain assessment.”

“PainChek’s adoption in the aged care sector – with around 60% of Australian facilities contracted to use its smartphone application and more then 1.7 million pain assessments carried out to date – has been remarkable,” said Luciano Brustia, Regional Managing Director, Asia Pacific for InterSystems. “It demonstrates the benefits of accurate, reliable and consistent pain assessment. Through our partnership, we look forward to accelerating PainChek’s entry into new markets and enabling these benefits for healthcare providers worldwide.”

PainChek has regulatory clearance as a medical device in Australia, the UK, Europe, Singapore, Canada and New Zealand. An application to the U.S. FDA is currently in progress.

About PainChek®

PainChek® Ltd is an Australian-based company that develops pain assessment technologies. Pain often goes unrecognised and undertreated in people with communication difficulties. PainChek Universal is a clinically validated smartphone-based medical device that enables best-practice pain assessment for all people, everywhere. It provides a complete point-of-care solution that combines the PainChek® App with the Numerical Rating Scale (NRS). 

The PainChek® App uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition to detect pain in those who cannot self-report. This gives a voice to those who cannot verbalise pain, whilst also driving objectivity and consistency in all assessments. For those who can self-report, PainChek Universal also includes access to the Numerical Rating Scale, a well-established standard used to document pain levels. PainChek Universal supports pain assessment using both tools at the point of care, for those people whose ability to communicate fluctuates. 

PainChek® is being rolled out globally in two phases: first, PainChek® for adults who are unable to effectively verbalise their pain, such as people with dementia, and second, PainChek® for infants who have not yet learnt to speak. Both the adult and infant products have received regulatory clearance in numerous markets, including Australia, Europe, the UK, NZ, Singapore and Canada. The PainChek® Shared Care Program is a PainChek® licensing model which enables a professional carer to share their resident or patient data securely with other healthcare professionals or designated home-based family carers for ongoing pain assessments or clinical data review. To find out more, visit www.painchek.com.

About InterSystems

Established in 1978, InterSystems is the leading provider of next-generation solutions for enterprise digital transformations in the healthcare, finance, manufacturing and supply chain sectors. Its cloud-first data platforms solve interoperability, speed and scalability problems for large organisations around the globe. InterSystems is committed to excellence through its award-winning, 24×7 support for customers and partners in more than 80 countries. Privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems has 36 offices in 25 countries worldwide. For more information, please visit InterSystems.com/au.