By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
An application that helps chronic pain sufferers manage pain through increasing activity won the Health 2.0 Austin Codeo Sunday, October 21st at the Capital Factory.
Triumph Over Pain was one of seven teams to spend the weekend creating health-related tools at the event, which was sponsored by Athena Health/More Disruption Please. Athena Health is a cloud-based medical management company and More Disruption Please holds conferences and code-a-thons to try to identify new ideas and fresh thinkers in the medical space. Frequently the company adopts some of these ideas into its accelerator.
The codeo teams formed Friday night had a little more than 24 hours to build something around the ideas they’d chosen. Triumph Over Pain was a company already founded by Tricia Scott, Business Office Director for the Cooper Fitness Center Foundation of McKinney Texas. But the app was new.

David Walling, Chris Huntley and Tricia Scott

Scott suffers chronic pain because of an arthritic condition. She founded Triumph Over Pain in 2008 to garner money for pain research after realizing the incredible power that increasing activity had in managing pain levels. The app built by her team, which included healthcare IT consultant Chris Huntley and David Walling of the Texas Advanced Computer Center at UT, helps chronic pain suffers track their pain levels along with their activity levels. It would, the team said, also track other inputs such as medicine dosages, diet, sleep and more. It would include a social aspect, letting the pain sufferer’s support network know the level of pain being experienced at a given time.
But the chief goal of the app was to help people see how increased activity shrinks the intensity of their pain.
Other winners of the competition included CrowdRX, a team from UT’s one semester startup. CrowdRX used data sets to create an algorithm to help doctors know, almost instantly, whether a stroke victim was a good candidate for a drug called t-PA which has remarkable results in helping some stroke victims when administered early; but which has disastrous effects on others.
In third place was Followup Doc, which let emergency room doctors follow up with patients they’ve seen, rather than just treating them, releasing them and not knowing the outcome of the treatment or whether the patient would receive further care.
The most important factor in judging was patient centeredness and application of health literacy concepts. Judges included not only developers for Athena Health, but physicians Tracey Haas and Tammy McConnell, John Lebkowsky, founder of Society for Participatory Medicine and Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW.
Other sponsors included Twilio, Frog design, Texas Health Alliance, attorney Erin M. Gilmer, Ad Clarity, WCG and HCB Health.