This App Can Reduce the Need for Surgery for Osteoarthritis

The Swedish startup Joint Academy is introducing the world to a new way to treat chronic joint pain.

Osteoarthritis is a rising problem across the globe; half of the world’s population aged 65 years or older suffers from joint conditions. Joint Academy, formerly Arthro Therapeutics, has created a digital platform to treat these millions of people suffering from chronic joint pain, all while reducing costly and dangerous surgeries. CEO and Co-founder Jakob Dahlberg took the clinically-validated treatments designed by his father, a physician renowned for his work in osteoarthritis, and made it available for the masses at the click of a button.

Unity Stoakes, president of StartUp Health, recently caught up with Jakob to discuss the growth of the platform, their successes in Sweden and how they are working to commercialize their platform throughout the United States.

Unity Stoakes: So, let’s talk about the vision for Joint Academy, and what you are building, because I think it’s pretty extraordinary.

Dahlberg: We started looking at how successful face to face intervention for people with chronic joint pain is. And then we wanted to digitize all of the components, and make it scalable and cost efficient. Between 42–45 million Americans have Osteoarthritis in the US, but it’s not feasible for them to come into the Nordic clinic office every week. So, we wanted to take this evidence based intervention and put it online and make it global.

Stoakes: Give us a sense of your success in Sweden, and what the platform looks like today.

Dahlberg: What we’ve noticed is that there are a lot of unnecessary surgeries and procedures with people that have chronic joint pain. We went to the health plans and the insurance companies and we said, take a look at your balance sheet. You’re spending a lot of money on these procedures and we could actually avoid them. We’re now having them put their patients through our online intervention instead of doing or paying for these procedures. We’ve seen a lot of success with the program so far. We’ve built up our own network of physicians and therapists that coordinate the treatment and then we enroll the patients through their health plan and then everything happens online.

Stoakes: As you are now expanding to new markets, what are some of the things as an health entrepreneur you’ve had to think about and what has that journey looked like for you?

Dahlberg: Healthcare is complex and it’s fragmented, and I think there are a lot of aspects that an entrepreneur needs to take into account. In Europe, we’re CE Certified, that’s one medical technical product. When we look towards the U.S., we need to focus on the HIPAA compliance. So on a regulatory level, there’s a lot of things that you need to think of.

When it comes to the rest of the commercialization, it’s a lot about understanding, who’s paying for what? Who delivers what healthcare? How do incentives align in the U.S. healthcare market? I think it’s really about digging deep under the hood and trying to understand the revenue streams and who does what.

Stoakes: What are you most excited about over the next two to three years? And, more specifically, who do you hope to target in your U.S. expansion?

Dahlberg: There is somewhere around 200 billion dollars spent annually in the arthritis space and I think we could save a lot of money for US payors. Ideally, we would like to go to everyone that is paying or is a risk-bearing entity. It could be like an integrated delivery network, because they pay for their own insurance, or it could be some that has a capitation based model. But it could also be self insured employers, health plans, etc.

Stoakes: How do cycles of innovation work in different regions? What are some of the main differences — or similarities — that you’ve experienced?

Dahlberg: Our key takeaway was that we really wanted to have a science first approach and focus on getting some peer reviewed, clinical papers. I’m lucky, because my father is an orthopedic professor and I studied computer science. It’s a good intersection for what we could do. We wanted to be very heavy on the science side and get these papers out and published, because that’s how you differentiate. I think thats the common denominator in all markets. They want to see the evidence.

Stoakes: What are your predictions for the future? How will Joint Academy impact people’s lives who are suffering from arthritis or joint issues?

Dahlberg: I think on a micro-level, what is happening is that therapeutics do not have to be a molecule and the procedure does not have to be with a knife. It could actually be software as medicine. Software could act as a therapeutic service. That’s why this very novel and new area is called digital therapeutics, and is directly tied to doing these clinical trials and improving the evidence, the equivalent outcomes, etc. I see the whole digital therapeutic space becoming very, very big in the future and is going to grow very quickly. We’re already seeing it with new innovations for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and Alzheimer’s. And I see musculoskeletal care being very underserved.

Stoakes: Can you share a few lessons learned as an entrepreneur? Any words of wisdom you can share with other founders just getting started?

Dahlberg: Generally, things always take longer than you think and it always cost more than you think. The more specific advice would be, in health care, I think everything boils down to incentives. You have to really understand why things happening in a certain way? It all often boils down to understanding incentives.