The "Mary" Story

This story originally appeared in print along with the story “Positive Outcome”

The name has been changed, but the story is true.

The “Mary” story tells the tale of a 56-year-old woman with chronic knee pain — OBERD uses her to demonstrate how its system is supposed to work.

Mary goes to one physician after feeling pain in her right knee and undergoes two procedures — a total knee arthroplasty, or TKA, and an arthroscopic surgery, to remove scar tissue — that initially solve the problem. But the pain returns.

Mary goes to another hospital, one that uses OBERD, where her doctors use data collection and patient-reported outcomes. After two more surgeries — another TKA on her right knee and one on the left, after pain crops up there — Mary gets back to normal on a more permanent basis.

If her first physician had the capability to match Mary’s case with the patient population and use that data to set a predictive course of recovery, OBERD argues, it could have saved her some time, pain, and two more surgeries.

“It’s a partnership between the providers and the patients,” OBERD chief executive officer and co-founder Dr. Ali Hussam says. “We need the physician to focus on patient care versus focusing on data collection and data analysis. Our goal is that the patient fills the form on time with these other reminders, we process the data, we benchmark them, trend them, and present them to the physician at the right time.

“We’re caring about what the patient cares about: reducing pain, increasing functions, and getting them back to work or their normal daily activities. And we get them engaged with us.”