Maxwell Murray: Welcome back to the Radian podcast. Your go to source for digital product focused discussions on design, technology and digital health advancements. I'm Maxwell Murray, your host and I hope today's episode inspires your next big idea in this episode.

Deborah Dullen: You know, as individuals that are working in digital health are working in innovation is part of the the job, the role is to help people see the aha moments, right? How do we innovate unless we can generate the aha moment?

Maxwell Murray: Ok. Hi. So Deb again, I wanna thank you for, for joining us here. Can you tell us about Pain Trace and your role as the, the president and CEO there?

Deborah Dullen: Sure I'd be happy to, first of all, you know, I just, you know, being here is, is, is really, is wonderful. So I appreciate that Pain Trace is the ability to quantify acute and chronic pain. And it's done via a wearable, we are able to detect afferent and efferent signaling. So, neuro signaling which is processed by the brain. But we can do it with skin based sensors. But you know, that's kind of the very, you know, sort of nuts and bolts of version of it. You know, acting as a CEO president of, Bio Trace It, and bringing Pain Trace to market. It's been an interesting ride. I gotta be honest when I think about being able to quantify pain. When I first started this role, I literally was sort of embarrassed. It was like, people ask what do you do? And I'd be like, oh, we measure pain ha you know, and it was like, and I know that sounds crazy. And, but it, it got to the place where, you know, it started out with just watching it. I've been in health care for a long time, so watching it to see what it does, you know, figuring out and observing. Wow, this is really measuring and quantifying pain. But it also being president and CEO is about meeting with people and, and helping them understand what you do. And, and helping them understand and see what Pain Trace is capable of. So, when I was, when I was, first, beginning my work with Pain Trace, and Bio Trace at the company. A friend of mine, I worked in orthopedics for, about a decade earlier and, the chief of orthopedics at, at University of Pennsylvania hospital, said Deb come on in, I'm, I'm gonna set up a meeting with a couple of orthopedic surgeons and anesthesiologists and I, I want them to see PainTrace and I went, ok, so we start chatting and, and, you know, true to form. Like, let's not bore everybody. He just like picks up the device. He goes, I wanna try this out, put down a couple of sensors and then takes a pencil or pen. I can't remember. It must have been a pen most likely. And he just jams it into his forearm and it was before we actually could watch everything in real time and it's just the number and nothing's happening. So he turns to the, you know, the director of the anesthesiology and he goes here hands him the pen. He goes, obviously, I can't put myself in enough pain. And the anesthesiologist jams the pen into his forearm and all of a sudden the numbers just start dropping and back to what I was just saying. When you first start saying we quantify pain, you feel a little bit stupid. You know, it's like not to use that word but you just feel like, yeah, I'm not crazy but we do. And everybody just want, wow, you know, because seeing was believing and so, you know, when you ask what is Pain T race yes, we quantify acute and chronic pain. And we do that with a wearable and what is it like being the president and CEO of Bio T race I t? It's one of those wild and crazy rides that come with a lot of funny stories and quite frankly, there are those moments when you're like, I know this sounds crazy, but we do this and then, just because, you know, a lot of people for many, many decades and they know who you are, they believe you.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah, and you said something so important, the things I've seen, as you've demonstrated and we've been at conferences and, and places together. It's always been so interesting to watch the aha moment across the room. You know, at first you're like, ok, quantified pain how? And then you show people how it's done and it's like a ha. And so that's, that's one thing that's so impactful here.

Deborah Dullen: Thank you. Yeah, it is the aha moment, right? And I think that, you know, as individuals that are working in digital health are working in innovation is part of the, the job the role is to help people see the aha moments, right? How do we innovate unless we can generate the aha moment.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, from the perspective of the work we do that's very much so driven by really thinking about the influence it'll have on the human experience. Like at the end of the day, patients, clinicians, everyone, they're human beings and maybe not, everyone learns the same way I do. But examples are helpful. It's all like bringing ideas to, to fruition that actually apply to my life and we'll, we'll get into that further in discussion later. But that's what that makes, that's what makes innovations and solutions like this. So, so interesting and you know, you know, humor me, like, do you, do, you know, kind of like, what was the original inspiration for even exploring this technology? Like, how does someone even say, like, hm, we should figure out how to, to better quantify pain?

Deborah Dullen: I really describe my life as a series of stumbles and dumb luck and, and quite frankly, because people have asked like, how did you get here before? I'm like, it's a series of stumbles. But years ago, I was working with Synthes, which is at the time, it was the largest orthopedic company globally. And I was working on a rather large clinical study was 250 sites around the world. And in collaboration with Eli Lilly and I was reviewing the protocol that had been already passed through the FDA. I was not involved with that part of the, the program. And I remember reading it and going, why are the outcome measures for this study? In other words, how we're measuring pain that we're going to have somebody stand up and walk a certain distance and time that and then why are we asking them to tell us on a scale of 0 to 10, what their pain is because I hadn't had pain at that point I have now. But it didn't really dawn on me that we, we don't, we do, we, we do now with, with Pain Trace, but we, the gold standards for pain measurement are self report, which is a good thing. And, but there are, there are some sub subjectivity there and, and things like timing how fast somebody can walk, how fast they can do a particular activity, how far they can bend a joint, you know, flex a joint. And it, I almost actually like contacted the people in charge of the protocol and said, why did you do this? And, and then I realized, well, maybe I should just look it up and I found that that was the gold standard and I went, ok. Wow, ok. I am ignorant now, I am learned. And then literally the other aspect of it is again, like a series of stems of dumb luck. I, I'm really, I, I do believe in random acts of kindness. I do believe in talking to people that you don't know because that's how you learn more and in doing so and engaging in yet another random conversation. I met a person while getting on a train that had some access to some technology that was the beginning of PainTrace. But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't because I was like, you know, so super smart. But more because, you know, I was able to really engage people, be open, be willing to learn and put in the hard work.

Maxwell Murray: I, I actually had a mentor that once said something very important to me. You know, I was young in my career and trying to figure some stuff out and I felt embarrassed that I was asking a lot of questions and he was like, look, it's the mark of a wise person is the person who asks questions. And that is right here is evidence of that, right.

Deborah Dullen: 100% And, you know, you made me think of something else. I remember sitting at a a conference and it was related to Pain. It was one of the, it was a Pain Summit down in DC and they were discussing the eurekas that we've come across in treatment. And basically what they said was, we don't come across eurekas in treatment because we're diligently seeking that answer. And we have that and we have an idea what the solution is most. Eurekas come by over time observing and seeing that there is this one little point of information that is intriguing and that, that ability to observe and patiently wait, opens up the door to that eureka. And most of us, you know, again, I guess if, if you come at the right time, like you just said, you're lucky enough to see that eureka.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah. Yeah. Persistence in working at things on, on locks, things. It reminds me of my, my dad bought me a book when I was a kid and I can't remember all the products off hand. So don't, don't quote me on this. But there was, it was a book of accidents that turned into like, massive companies and brands and like a lot of ideas that just originally the out the original intent wasn't XYZ, but it certainly turned into something. Absolutely.

Deborah Dullen: It's like the microwave actually, right? The story of the guy that was working at the, I think it was a, a plant. I, you know, I won't get into what kind of plant, but he had, he liked chocolate and he would carry a Hershey bar in his pocket and he noticed that every time he walked past this one piece of machinery that had microwaves that the chocolate would melt. Yeah, that observation led to the microwave.

Maxwell Murray: Thank goodness because there's been many times where I didn't plan my lunch appropriately or something and I need that, please.

Deborah Dullen: Yes. Thank you, Hershey. Thank you guy. That was like chocolate.

Maxwell Murray: Love that. And so, I, I wanted to, to dive in a little bit more about Pain T race because like it, it's such a cool idea and I wanna help the audience understand how it works. So, one question I have for you is how does it work? What makes it unique compared to other pain management solutions that you see in the marketplace.

Deborah Dullen: So Pain Trace is unique when we talk about pain. Each one of us has a very individual experience of pain. And so I think that's what initially seems very difficult to understand. Like my pain is different than your pain. So how could we measure pain and PainT race with skin based sensors actually is quantifying the activity of the brain. You can actually pick up on different parts of the brain that are processing the neuro signals that are coming from the body. So when let's say you have knee pain, we'll call it that you have knee pain. It sends a signal up to the spinal cord and then the spinal cord of the central nervous system from there, it synapses, it sends a signal to the brain and then the brain has this part called the thalamus and that actually directs the signaling. And it says, hey, you know, we need to figure out where this is and what this is. Let's send this a message over to the cortex. We need to figure out how do I feel about this? Let's talk to this part of the brain. And we need to figure out how this happened before. Let's like, you know, loop in this part of the brain. Let's take all of this information and send it down to a central processing system, which is the Amygdala. And then let's, let's sort that out. How do I feel about it? Where is it, what is it, how do I feel about this? Has this happened before? Is this something I'm worried about? Is this threat? Yes, this is threat. Let's send a signal back down and PainTrace picks up on that central processing, which is what allows us to understand not only pain, physical pain, but also emotional pain.

Maxwell Murray: Interesting.

Deborah Dullen: We can tap into how you feel.

Maxwell Murray: That has so many implications because it's not only like my elbow hurts, but like the other thing that's tied to injuries and and trauma that have acute or chronic pain to to to, to follow up with that experience is anything like emotional, anything tied to that can be very interesting as we continue to learn more about mental health and, and incorporating that into care.

Deborah Dullen: suffering, right? It's suffering is the word that I see in some of the articles that I read and and functional magnetic resonance imaging has given us so much information to truly understand what is happening within the brain and how exactly like you just said, our cognitive health and our physical health intersect and much of that. I mean, it's so fascinating because you can take that and you can even delve even deeper into ACEs, right? Adverse childhood events, you can connect those to the neuro circuitry that you're forming throughout your entire life and all those experiences, because neuroplasticity is the whole concept that the the nervous system can change over time. And so it's literally a culmination of everything. Everyone, all the experiences that you've had, it's constantly learning and reframing. But early childhood or adverse childhood events are connected with chronic disease states and pain is kind of at the center of that cause pain isn't necessarily what we consider just pain. It's stress, right? It's stress on the tissues, it's stress, emotional stress and all of that is literally a big nerve loop. It's literally a feedback loop between the body and the brain.

Maxwell Murray: There's so much data, there's so much you're helping me imagine this network in my body that is fine tuned and, and designated to help me understand like, hey, something's going on, right? Take your hand off of the, the stove.

Deborah Dullen: You're right there.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah, that, that, that, that's a, that's quickly observable pain. I, I wonder how it connects to the, the patient experience and, and like taking all that information and putting it in the right position for clinicians and, and people providing care. Can you speak to how that works with Pain Trace?

Deborah Dullen: Yeah. So that's actually, you know, it's funny, I, I did pull up some slides that I, I presented at a conference a couple months ago and one of the things that I stumbled on and I'm actually gonna, I just wanna look back because there's a number I'm looking for. So it was a study, it was a meta meta analysis and what it did is it looked at the impact of mistrust on the patient and health care provider relationship and the effective outcomes on mistrust that mistrust has. And it was kind of this kind of eureka because when you think about it, if you have an objective piece of information that both the patient and the health care provider can work with together, that create that level of communication, creates trust. And if you can develop trust and between the people that are working together teamwork, and you can actually then work off of an objective measurement, you have the ability then to truly affect the outcomes because without trust, patients actually changed their self report of pain. So if we're, if we're depending on a patient's self report of pain, but there's a lack of trust in a particular group of individuals, then what do we do with that? That affects the outcome that affects the treatment? And and so if we just have an objective measurement, I think that's kind of a step one. We've actually established a great communication tool.

Maxwell Murray: I think that's abundantly important, important.

Deborah Dullen: But then if we can do that and you said this, so and I may be extrapolating beyond your question, a little bit but you said this and I loved it and I followed through with it. Because you and I talked about this a little bit before KPIs, right? So we now establish this core piece of information that we're working with, which establishes trust and communication, right? And we also now understand what the delta should be, right? So we have an outcome measure. So we understand you this individual, we're giving you this treatment and we understand that this is an average outcome. So if we understand that's an average outcome and you are have a better than average outcome. Cool. Let's do, please tell, am I doing better than you expected?

Maxwell Murray: You scared?

Deborah Dullen: You know, how do I go around man? You know, like, you know, we can see that you're doing better, you say you think you're doing better, maybe you don't think you're doing better, but the data says you're doing better. So that can also help in that process, right? Or you think you're doing better, but your doctor doesn't think you're doing better. But we look at the data and it tells us that we're doing better or worse, right? You think you're not doing as well? Your doctor still thinks you're doing fine and you look at the delta and you realize that you're not, you know, now if you have that, it it starts to personalize the care, right? Everyone's working off the same piece of information. We have a KP I, we can understand does this work for you or doesn't this work for you? And then what we can do from there is iterate.

Maxwell Murray: Yes.

Deborah Dullen: Better, better, better, better.

Maxwell Murray: Yes, it is always easier to talk about the objective, like quantifiable information, especially in scary conversations that could drive quite a bit of emotion. You know, my wife can testify to her pain threshold being very different than mine. I'm a big baby in comparison to her. By, by her marks, I would love this could solve some issues outside of you guys go to the test. But jokes aside, I think that's a, a remarkable moment. There are so many, you know, audiences and, and demographics that complain about maybe not, not hearing, not being heard or, or being viewed in the way that they need to be viewed when they're in quite a bit of pain or, you know, vice versa to be fair to clinicians as well as you know. So I've got to be careful the, the, the path forward to treating pain as we all know, has, you know, many implications that are not so great and so to be able to truthfully discuss this and, and point to real data and, and tell that longitudinal story with KPIS is so interesting.

Deborah Dullen: Absolutely. And to your point, like, you know, a lot of times I have people come to us and say, oh, so, you know, you're gonna be able to see if someone's drug seeking. And I'm like, that's really not the main point here at all. The main point is actually to be able to understand if the treatment is working or not, if there's a requirement for treatment, if the treatment is working and to personalize that care, I was just over in, England and to your, to your point about voices that are not heard or people that are in pain, but it's not actually clinically able, you know, clinically, observable fibromyalgia, right? So I was over in England, I was at a conference and I was, when we're at a conference, you know, we will, we will demonstrate PainTrace to people. So we measure people's pain. And I literally had a man come over to me and he said, some people have been telling me about this and I'm just wondering if you can help me. He said I have fibromyalgia. He said, but the doctors say it's in my head and I was like, ok, you know, no stress here. I'm not, I'm not panicking yet. But I said, of course, I said, let's, let's, let's do this, let's let's just measure your pain. So we could see that based on the baseline was just the chronic pain. We could see that he had a negative baseline. So we could tell he has chronic pain on that on just an everyday moment. It's kind of like stepping on a scale. And I said, ok, so you've got a negative baseline. So I can see that there's something going on with you. I said, but I don't know, I don't know what it is. Is there something that you, where you someplace where you feel pain, something that you could do that would, that would show that. And he said, and he kind of went like this with his hands, you know, he, he flexed his fingers and I go, OK. Well, we see that and he's, he was watching and he goes, Oh Yeah. Yeah, that is painful. And I was like, well, we see that there, there's the acute response right there. And I said, is there anything else? And he goes, well, sometimes, you know, like my back and flex at the waist and we could see some response there. And he said, but the other one is, is really here in the, in the axilla, you know, on, on my side here and I go, OK. And he started to palpate but we had the sensors in a place that they were gonna be in the way. And I said, tell you what I said, do you mind if I just touch you, you know, in that area? And this was just completely just we're at a conference. It's just a nice way to demonstrate what this does and not, you know, nothing, nothing clinical. And I, I touch him here in the axilla and, we see the acute response and I said, you know, he said, can I take a picture of this? Of course, you can, you know, but it was almost like, like it broke my heart a little bit because he has pain. He's been told he doesn't have pain and we were able to just show him, you know, at least give him the, the satisfaction that we see it too.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah, at minimum, maybe he, you know, the, the cause of that pain. He, he may not be correct. He may be correct. But at minimum, you know, when you can see again objectively through observation, something is taking place. Well, how do we continue to, to have the conversation, which dovetails nicely into a question, you know, given, given what this technology can do, you know, if the point is to quantify pain is the point to the point is to find that observation that clearly states something is going on here. How might physicians, clinicians leverage this? I know we've talked about it a little bit earlier in the conversation but, you know, let's use this as a thought exercise. What next?

Deborah Dullen: Right. Yeah, we've had a lot of conversations with, with physicians and, and, you know, and, and I, and what, what their, what their applications would be. You know, one of the, one of the conversations that always comes to mind is in speaking with the, the, the person that has run the inpatient pain management program at Johns Hopkins. And you know what he said is one of the most difficult things is when you're looking to maybe ask a, a person to stop using opioids and move into other modalities of care, physical therapy, greater movement, maybe another pharmaceutical. And you know, a combination of treatments, He said one of the most difficult parts is actually convincing somebody that they're getting better and that they don't need the opioids. And and we talked about PainTrace as almost like stepping on a scale when you're losing weight or having like genes get bigger and bigger. You know, and because or if you, if you think about it, when you lose weight, oftentimes like somebody you haven't seen for a while, it's like, oh my gosh, you look great, but you looking at yourself in the mirror every day, don't see that change, not to the same degree, correct. And so the ability to actually show somebody that there is objective improvement, pain mitigation that this is working for you is, is one of the, the feedback that we received from practitioners, which I think is, is valuable. You know, the other is surgeries. So, I worked in orthopedics for a decade, right. So, I know a lot of surgeons that we work with a lot of surgeons and they when you look at the data, surgically for joint replacements and back, back surgeries, about 20% of the patients have still have pain, they still have a bad outcomes. And the number one reason for a bad outcome is pain, that's the number one factor there. So, ultimately, you know, the question is why, right? Like why does somebody have pain? Even though the surgery could have been just like, absolutely picture perfect. So the other fact there, when you look at the data is that in surgical operations or surgeries, you'll find that 30% of people that come out of surgeries have immediate post operative pain. And we also work with a fair amount of anesthesiologists and an anesthesiologist will tell you that about 30% of blocks are insufficient or, or, or don't work. So if you're having surgery and we're cutting open your skin and we're, you know, removing things or putting things back together, you betcha that if that nerve block will not 100% there's a signal going from that point of surgery up to your central nervous system, up to the brain. And that's called a no susceptive barrage, a mass amount of neural input. And that can actually cause the central nervous system to become maladaptive. Meaning your central nervous system is gonna create what's called centrally mediated nerve pain potentially. So it's gonna have this pain signal that is just existing in the brain. Even though the body goes on and you know, the surgical site heals, everything was picture perfect. It's all good. And of that, the 30% of people that wake up after surgery and have immediate post op pain, 80% of those people go on to become chronic pain patients. So you asked, what's, you know, where does the clinician see that this is useful to be able to look at an individual in advance of the surgery and be able to determine, do they have some form of anxiety or predeterminant it that their central nervous system is going to be more wound up and their pain response is going to be heightened. We can manage that via anesthetic protocols. With anesthesia, anesthesiologist, intraoperatively, what I just described if a nerve block is not 100% and there is what's called a deceptive barrage, we have the capacity to detect that while a patient is sedated or anesthetized and manage that and take down the number of people that are having post-operative pain and take down the number of people that become chronic pain patients. And so ultimately, and we can also follow them after the surgery and figure out like, hey, how you doing? Oh, wait, you're so painful. You shouldn't be, why don't you come on back in here or you're still painful? Hey, physical therapy is gonna really be a good thing for you or laser or whatever, multimodal care. Yeah.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah. To, to jump on one of the, the important things I keep hearing at conferences and in these discussions, this is exactly what digital health should be involved in this notion of being proactive and thinking ahead. Like, you know, what have we learned from the old way of doing things and how might we rethink the experience? Like, you know, if I was choosing between one surgeon, surgeon A and surgeon B and surgeon B was speaking to me the way you just were speaking where you're like, I'm, I know this is going to be painful, right? We're going to go and, and, and disturb your body for the better. But you know, it's a, it's a major disturbance to, to do this procedure and we're gonna be thinking of your, what your pain state was before after and, and continue to track in preemptively proactively go after ways to, to make this a better patient experience for you. Love, love the notion of that.

Deborah Dullen: It's all about quality of life and what if we can motivate. What if we, we can motivate you to go. It hurts to walk. But I can see because I'm monitoring my pain every day. I can walk five minutes longer and you do that for two weeks and you find out by the end of that you're, you're capable of walking an hour longer than when you first started without pain. And the walking is good for you because movement is life and life is movement.

Maxwell Murray: Yes. Yes. And thank you for calling at that point. That's so important like the, the measurement, the incremental improvement, especially when something that is so natural to us when we're healthy and just an assumed function. Like I'm gonna wake up tomorrow, I'm gonna walk over to the coffee maker and make coffee and, and, and that's gonna be that's gonna be my, my life. But when that's not there, when that's no longer the case, it's not just an assumed portion of the, of the quality of your life. Like how can we communicate to patients? How can we communicate to doctors? You know, because it is a two way street as you mentioned before, like, hey, like this is what's going on, but here's the number that is that, that beacon of hope or maybe a a heads up that there's some areas we need to improve on as well.

Deborah Dullen: Absolutely. Right. And I think that's the interesting part about pain is because they're, they're, they're truly because it truly is the cognitive side and also the physical side and your motivation, right plays a very large role and, and your cognition plays a very large role in your experience of pain and also how you manage your lifestyle, which manages your quality of life and mitigates your pain. And to your point because I really do believe in in digital health, I do believe that there are a lot of opportunities. I actually pulled some of these slides because I, you know, from a previous talk and I was like, the numbers are pretty telling and, and this is part of what I think is really interesting about the notion of digital health and where we can go with this. So one of the studies I found showed that monitoring of heart failure, patients reduced mortality and the days spent in hospital by one third. So digital help, right? This one was by adding an additional 1000 steps per per day. You could decrease you could increase your lifespan between six and 30% depending on how you were before, right? This one, I was like, oh, because this is really where I think I I would love to see all this go. 80% of diabetes can be prevented by changes in how we lead our lives. $280 billion a year is spent nationally in the United States on those, those diab those diabetes treatments, that's half the entire public schools budget in the US had no clue what. So, so the ultimate goal you know is from our perspective is OK. So we play this role in in monitoring acute and chronic pain. We want to personalize medicine because we want to create like we talked about those KPIS that allow us to go, hey, this is working for you. This isn't working for you. Let's iterate faster and get you back to health. Let's make sure we, we have you not in pain and keep you out of pain whether it's preventative or proactive. But if we can personalize care and we can actually personalize outcome measures, then that leads to value based care, which makes sure that people are well, we're doing it efficiently and we're saving a ton of money. And then for saving in that example, 80% of diabetes can be prevented. And the cost of that is $280 billion a year. And that's half the entire public school's budget. What do we do with all that extra money so much about that?

Maxwell Murray: Yeah. No, that's that you make a very good point. And thank you for sharing that stat I hadn't realized the, the comp the comparable budgets between those two, I mean, very important things to address. But you, you it when you put it in that perspective, it's like, wait a minute, right? There's room for improvement and, and so, you know, it's so fun and energizing to talk about innovation, but you and I both know it does, it's not absent of challenges. So, you know, could you when I'm drinking my water, right? I should have time that better. It's not a it's not absent of challenges. Do you have any challenges that you face, that you're willing to share with the audience and just kind of talk about, you know, maybe some of the, the tougher parts of innovation in, in this space.

Deborah Dullen: Yes, I would imagine that all founders have PTSD. Yes, there are, there are certainly quite a few challenges. You know, and I think the challenges are money, money, money. And does anyone care about your innovation? You know, and, and, and quite frankly, you know, focus, focus is a really big one, right? So you've got a great innovation and, and unless that you even got a patent or two or three or four, you know, we, we're there, we've got all that. But what do you focus on and how do you get there? What is your pathway? And, and then you think you've got a great pathway and guess what, a million and one things go wrong and that goes back to the first part, money, money, money. Because when things go wrong and they take longer than what they were supposed to, you're gonna need money, money, money to make sure that you can get to the final, the final place. And I just had a conversation with, with another company because this is the other really big part about the hurdles. But how do you overcome them? There are a lot of different skill sets that it takes to be able to achieve the ability for an innovation to become an actual revenue generating business. And the way that you get there is by partnering, you're not gonna go there alone. That doesn't happen. Right. You could get pretty far. But I don't think you're gonna get there alone.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah. Yeah. You know, you're queuing yourself up to be introduced to someone I spoke to this morning that I think you two should meet. I won't go into too much detail here. Keep it moving, but you're absolutely right. And that's one thing I love to do is just try to foster collaboration wherever I see it because like you said, there's a you need to be focused on your thing and you need to position your innovation to plug in with other innovations because at the end of the day, especially with the mission and vision of making the quality of life better for patients and clinicians and all of us who inevitably will need care is to create an environment where the best solutions are put forth and focused on what they're supposed to be focused on and integrated into other solutions.

Deborah Dullen: 100% And I think that's where, you know, Radian and the work that you do is is super important. And the conversation that you and I have had around like the quality of the solution that we create is truly a partnership and working, you know, with a company like Bio Trace It and a company like Radian putting together a thoughtful solution. Because one of the things we talked about was what do you do with information, personal information that can be really sensitive to an individual, right? How do you deliver that information in a digital manner that is going to be valuable to them as an individual as a person? Right? And you know, one of the things that I think both you and I agree on when we talk about like creating solutions for, for individuals is having this level of empathy and sensitivity about how we deliver that information. If we're going to interact with a person to create contextualization around data, like Pain Trace, then how do we ask questions? How do we deliver information in a motivational way rather than a demotivating way? Yeah. Our goal is to get people to actually, you know, get up and, and change their lives for the better.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah. Yeah. And we've chatted about it before and I, I also continue to think about family members that are getting older. You know, sometimes I look at how messages are sent to them and how things are communicated. And it's like boy like that could have been done with a little bit more empathy and you don't think of technology as a a vehicle of empathy. And I'll refrain from telling the, the jokes about all the generative A I stuff where you see messages from the bots are more empathetic than human beings. We won't go deep into that. But like you just pointed out if thoughtfully created, there are some really important moments that can take place or decisions to refrain from communicating something through a app notification and trigger your automation to make it a phone call or request for an appointment or whatever is more human, right? Because at the end of the day, we want to put all this technology kind of in the background and take this very human experience. That is your health, that is your journey towards healing, that is prevention of, of future ailment and and make it as human as possible and and not feel like just an app that's cold and, and, and calculated, you know what I mean?

Deborah Dullen: Absolutely. And I think that that is exactly it right. You know, and I was reading it, you know, you just looking at different articles because it's a combination that's never ever going to be all the tech, right? It it really won't be it is it is this seamless combination of human interaction technology, right? And how we, how we apply that. And you know, in, in conversations with, with individuals that are in the digital health space, you know, one of the things that's really important for health and mental health and I think also physical health because of the interconnectivity of the two is getting out and talking to people. OK? Like what if Pain Trace not only measures pain, right? But it also measures on the flip side of that, how, how unpainful you all, we'll call it that for now. So, so that I, you know, I have to be and, and then I have to say potentially, right? Because like everything, you know, has to go through its process. But on the flip side of that, like, how well are you, right? How, how, how optimal are you or how peace free are you? And you know, what if we could actually show people having important interactions with other individuals going out and, and hanging out with friends, you know, getting back into life is, is important and it makes you feel that yes, yes.

Maxwell Murray: You are, are you, are you petitioning for a follow up episode where we talk about?

Deborah Dullen: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the series is all ok, it's all good with me because I always love talking Max. Like when you asked me to come on, I was like, yeah, this would be so much fun because you and I always have the best conversations like, you know, and I'm so thankful for that, you know, back to the, you know, life is a series of stumbles and random conversations, right? The whole reason why we are here today is because you and I sat down at a random table for breakfast. At a, it was, it was HTLH at the conference and and literally just started chatting, had such a great time bonded over music. And and some software that I had mentioned to my son Fenton recommended that and, you know, and here we are. Yeah.

Maxwell Murray: Yeah. And, and that's why I'm so excited about continuing to have conversations like this. And again, I'm going to be following up with someone I talked to today that you should be talking to. So if, if you're listening to this podcast, you know, that's a part of what's so important about what we want to be doing in, in the coming future. Here is just continually driving these, these conversations, thoughtful technology rooted in health care and to that, to that point because that's often a forward looking conversation. One question I have for you is when you look 5, 10 years out over the horizon, where do you see Pain Trace?

Deborah Dullen: Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting, we, I think it goes back to that focus thing, right? So our initial focus is quantifying me and doing that in a manner that starts out in a point of care setting. So we can create that bond and relationship for a team mapper around patient care, right? And drive personalized medicine and value based care. But we know that we can do a lot more, you know, moving into the ability to become a factor in lifestyle choices. I think it's something that, we see, we see coming, and then there's a whole bunch of other stuff that we can do that we don't talk about. And so, I mean, you know, ultimately, you know, when I don't, I don't like to think about the money part of it. But a friend of mine did put us into an A I perplexity app and he was like, and it, it spit out, it's spit out the markets and I was like, oh wow, ok, that's a lot, you know, $80 billion annually, right? So if we ever, you know, got into and that was like, you know, the obtainable 10% or something like that. If we ever got into a revenue like that, then I would like to see us be a benefit corporation and we do very cool stuff beyond, you know, what, what a business does. Because I think that, you know, there, if it, if it ever really came to be what it is, which is we quantify pain. We have a really big opportunity to change health care and then to start to take that opportunity to change a lot of other things to look at Children you know, and their well being and, and education and how does all of that play a role because pain starts the minute that you enter this world and the spectrum of that is, is all inspiring.

Maxwell Murray: it impacts us all. And you're like, you're right from start to finish. It's a, it's a major factor. I I, I guess I have one last question and it's just centered around how our listeners can learn more about Pain Trace, get involved in supporting your mission.

Deborah Dullen: The best place to go is, is just our website to start Pain trace.com. You know, and, and we've been kicking around the idea of doing a Kickstarter, We'll see, you know, or crowdfunding situation which would be, you know, the ability for people to become a part of our mission to, to, to change the, just to change the face of how we look at pain and, and impact people's lives. But our website Pain trace.com is really the best place to go. And as new things arise, we'll just keep putting them, you know, out there. And I also think that the next the next podcast that we do together will be another great place to come. So, definitely Max and Radian is the way to go.

Maxwell Murray: Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Yeah. No. Looking forward to continue conversations. I just want to express my gratitude for you, you know, joining us and, and having this conversation so insightful every time I learn something new and amazing from you. So I appreciate your time. Deb

Deborah Dullen: Max, I absolutely, 100 100% appreciate you all day long. I can't wait to learn more about Stoicism from you and well, I know you are a master. And I'm I'm not worthy.

Maxwell Murray: Yes, we, we definitely continue to connect about that.

Deborah Dullen: Looking forward to it.

Maxwell Murray: Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Radian podcast. If you found this episode, insightful, we'd love for you to subscribe on your favorite podcast app or youtube and follow us on linkedin or X for more updates and insights.