Q&A: Why Leading with Evidence is Necessary for Digital Therapeutics

Swing Therapeutics CEO Mike Rosenbluth discusses the company's fibromyalgia management tool and what's necessary to make digital therapeutics mainstream. The startup's CEO, Mike Rosenbluth, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss why Swing's first product is focused on fibromyalgia and what's necessary to encourage provider uptake of digital therapeutics. People with fibromyalgia and other chronic pain diseases may try to naturally figure out how to minimize symptoms in their lives, and how to change their lives to make their symptoms more manageable. And so, what ACT tries to do is to help people accept, which isn't so much to say that you're resigned to the disease, but to say that it's there, and you can live your best life alongside the symptoms and alongside the pain. So, it's really trying to think about how you can change your relationship with pain – which is a lot easier said than done - but trying to get to a point where you're living a fulfilling life where the symptoms of the disease are more an annoyance, rather than a central part of your life. We ended up speaking with a lot of physicians and a lot of patients, and really got pointed to fibromyalgia as a place to start. So, if you're a primary care physician or you're a rheumatologist, you don't have a pain psychologist in your Rolodex that you'll typically refer to unless you're in some specialty clinic or the Mayo Clinic or some chronic pain center, which most people don't have access to. But the general idea is, as we've been really understanding more and more about this patient population, realizing that a digital therapeutic can be really powerful, and additionally powerful would be to provide these patients with a care specialist that truly understands their disease.