All right you ready let’s play a game think back to when you were 12 years old okay I think that puts you in sixth grade seventh grade go there in your mind’s eye and take a good look around you’re doing it all right Mack Pritchard what city were you living in Davenport Iowa dough Mayer where are you dough what’s the name of your school school 26 those creative names and Christiano are you there and do you remember any of your teachers names mister of heard of mister mister Ferda do you have one teacher one homeroom teacher that’s it see I probably just remember mister Ferda did you have an affair with him that was inappropriate sorry rich name and you over there rich can’t see you rich did you already have an idea of what you want to be when you grew up what do you want to be and how did that work out go well that’s right all right so does everybody do all of you have a pretty good picture in your mind of your 12 year old self you all there okay so the game continues but now in this game you’re gonna draw a bad card in fact it’s one of the worst cards you can draw you’ve just been diagnosed with cancer as it turns out the doctors have caught it early and you have been told that you have an 80% chance of survival but to get there you’re gonna go through surgery and radiation and chemo and you’re gonna feel like complete for months at a time and to make matters worse at the end of another long day in the hospital at a time when all you want to do is retreat into your doctor is going to ask you to fill out your pain journal for the day and it looks like this and you say please can I do it tomorrow you’re so tired you don’t think you can even hold a pen and the doctor wants to cut you a break but she says it’s really important for her to get this information and they’ve especially designed this form to make it easy so you can tell them where it hurts and when it hurts and how much it hurts just circle the number there’s closest to the the picture the face with a smile or the frown or whatever and that’s all you have to do that’s easy you can do that can’t you so you take the pen and you start to make an entry but the pen slips out of your hand because you’re so weak from all the chemo and you start to cry and the doctor sees this she sees what a struggle it is for you and she doesn’t have the heart to push and so she says okay don’t worry about it we’ll try again tomorrow but as she walks away she’s a little worried because there’s some data she needs to know if the treatments are working and she’s just not getting it and that’s a problem what I’ve just described this is a very real problem that faces many children’s hospitals across the world including the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto Canada better known as Sick Kids back in 2011 dr. Jennifer Stinson who was then a nurse practitioner who was focused on pain management she looked at this problem she recognized that the traditional pain based journals were not working so she went to an advertising agency in Toronto with a new idea a way of having kids monitor their pain using a technology that they already knew and liked to my mind the solution that she and the agency came up with is the quintessential example of what this year’s Frank conference is all about take a look this is the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto within these walls every single year thousands of children are battling cancer and are having to undergo terribly painful treatments children like Olivia who eight months ago was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma the hospital is continually trying to minimize this pain but to do it they must first and understand it better and most importantly discover the medications that are working best to do this they need these young patients to record exactly how they’re feeling in a pain Journal the challenge is that after multiple chemotherapy and radiation treatments many kids are too tired or discouraged to even hold a pen much less keep a detailed journal and the sad reality is that if this data is not collected daily it’s useless we needed to find a creative solution to collect data every single day and with the pain squad mobile app that’s just what we did to begin our patients were enlisted as recruits in pain squad a special police force dedicated to hunting down pain we gave each recruit an Apple iPhone loaded with the pain squad mobile app then twice a day an alert from headquarters told patients it was time to complete their pain reporting mission because the reports worked with iPhones user-friendly touchscreen kids could easily fill them out with a simple flick of the finger they could identify exactly where and how much it hurt as well as which medications were working best but making it easy was well the easy part we knew to be truly successful we needed to find a way to encourage our young target daily so we called in some police reinforcements hey rookie welcome to pain squad it’s really great you’re here we need all the help we can get to help with pain in place we brought together the cast of Canada’s top police dramas flashpoint and Rookie Blue and filmed a series of inspiring videos then deployed them throughout the app to encourage the kids to fill in their reports we built in a graduation structure when a recruit completed three reports in a row they received a message from HQ informing them that they were moving up the ranks you are now officially a full-fledged detective in pain squad well done at this rate you might even be the next chief they just don’t make them like you anymore you truly are one of pain squads best and brightest keep it up back inside the precinct recruits could check to see when to fill out their reports and how many badges they had earned and once their last report was filed they were sent one final message informing them that they were being retired from the field if this case isn’t closed yet your squad is still fighting you couldn’t have done it without you it’s a way to go the pain squad app is now set to roll out into four other Canadian hospitals and due to its success it will soon be made available everywhere the app is an excellent tool that’s her control over the pain because she’s able to document it herself but she’s using an app she just glides right through it and it makes her feel that she’s a part of this it’s fantastic that you all were able to come up with this it really helps just got the word from chief turns out you’ve been doing so great he feels like they’re ready to move up you’re well on your way to putting pain in its place don’t stop now they’re almost there stations [Music] it’s pretty amazing isn’t it and I’m using my iPhone to send emojis of poop I’m so proud the the brilliance of this solution has been recognized by scholarly articles in the Harvard Business Review it’s been covered in Fast Company numerous medical journals and the app itself has won all sorts of awards but its success the real difference that’s making I think comes down to two numbers what we call compliance rates oops there it is compliance rates are in plain English our patients doing what doctors need them to do with paper-based journals compliance rates were 11% with the sick kids app increased to 81% sick kids took a serious problem literally a life and death problem and use the power of play to solve it which brings us back to Gainesville and to Frank 2018 we’ve got a lot of serious problems facing us right now you don’t need me to tell you that we’re gonna need all the creativity and innovation we can muster our work is cut out for us so I have two words for you for the rest of this conference let’s play thank you very much [Applause]