BehaVR, a VR platform for behavioral health, and Fern Health, a company focused on virtual chronic care-management, have combined their efforts to create RealizedCare. This new entity is a digital care-management platform specializing in chronic pain and driven by digital therapeutics.
BehaVR has developed prescription digital therapeutics for mental and behavioral health, offering treatments for pain, stress, anxiety, and addiction. This Tennessee-based company also integrates biometrics and machine learning models into its solutions.
Fern Health, on the other hand, specializes in digital chronic pain management, delivering tailored programs, education, activities, and other resources to individuals seeking to enhance their quality of life and physical function. The programs cater to the emotional, physical, and social aspects of chronic pain.
Through an agreement to merge their businesses, the new combined offering, RealizedCare, will integrate digital therapeutics with comprehensive virtual services to provide value-based chronic care management.
The partners have also revealed a strategic partnership with Grünenthal, a research-based pharmaceutical company and Fern Health’s parent organization, which has become a key investor in the newly formed company.
Aaron Gani, the founder and CEO of BehaVR and now the CEO of RealizedCare, expressed, “We’ve spent the last five years building, perfecting, and validating evidence-based, immersive, digital therapeutics designed to address fear and pain. Through this new offering, we will unlock the power of those interventions to scale personalized care to individuals impacted by chronic pain in a way that prioritizes outcomes and provides the integrated support needed to effectively manage these symptoms.”
THE LARGER TREND
In 2021, BehaVR and Sumitomo Pharma, a Japanese company, entered into a potential $163 million deal to develop virtual reality therapies aimed at treating social anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder.
This partnership represented a significant collaboration between a pharmaceutical company and a VR firm in history, involving a multi-DTx deal.
Recently, BehaVR merged with Oxford University spin-out OxfordVR, a VR platform for severe mental health issues, and secured $13 million in Series B funding to support the merger.
Other companies specializing in extended reality and providing pain-management tools include California-based AppliedVR, which received FDA De Novo clearance for its EaseVRx system, now RelieVRx, for treating chronic lower back pain.
Additionally, XRHealth, a virtual reality platform based in Boston, announced plans, in collaboration with Nord-Space Aps and HTC Vive, to send a VR headset to space for mental health treatment.
In order to ensure the effectiveness of the headset in a microgravity environment, the collaborators are engineering the Vive Focus 3 headset to withstand space conditions using a simulator mode and specialized tracking methodology through the controllers.
