This is a story of how a new medical adherence and management, TrackMyStack.com — designed to help people manage their regimen for their health condition is helping patients quickly learn about alternatives for their treatment and discover other’s going through the exact same thing as them.
About 125,000 deaths occur annually in the United States alone due to non-adherence to medical treatments. Now that I’ve got your attention (hopefully!) let me tell you more about what adherence means in this context, it means taking the right dose at the right time at the right frequency, consistently till required.
The reason people become non-adherents is because they either forget to take their medication, run out of it, patients feeling like it is ineffective or because of side effects. The best way to address these issues is to build a platform that would provide reminder cues, educate the person about the disease & treatment, and provide a community for reinforcement.
This was our vision that led us to start something we are calling TrackMyStack for now. It is a platform where people like you and I can play a more active role in managing our own health and wellness — whether it is to manage a chronic illness or whether to simply stay on track with a health goal.
For Patients
We would provide tools for the user to record their daily activity (ODL’s) in hopes of finding triggers that could be causing flare-up’s and also the effects (positive or negative) of a drug or supplement being taken. These logs and any changes to a regimen are all logged as part of a journal. They can then be printed before going in for a follow-up with your primary care provider.
Our mission thus is to facilitate a place for people to meet and empower them to have discussions on the best course of action to reach their health goal, whether physical, emotional or mental with tools to measure effectiveness, complementing but not replacing feedback from professionals.
This simple, noble idea is to help people that want to practice ‘participatory medicine’ by helping them make a stack of what needs to be taken, help them adhere to the stack, and let them track any side effects and symptoms, and quite possibly help educate them on alternatives if possible. This data in our mind was then to be donated for free to researchers which would in some way accelerate research and development of new treatments.
The CDC states the leading causes of death in the US are: heart disease and stroke, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, obesity, respiratory diseases, and oral conditions, all of which to an extent it considers ‘preventable’ rather than infectious disease (communicable) which was the leading cause of death just decades ago. Whether it is because of modern medicine or because they were just naturally declining is up for debate. http://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/pdf/2009-Power-of-Prevention.pdf
So What Does it Do?
Treatment Management & Adherence
In a nutshell, the platform does a few things really well, it will help you track your stack effectively. The platform will send reminders as needed and it will alert you of interactions if any, it will also let you provide a glimpse of your habits to your family or caregiver more effectively.
Database of Treatments
With all the data we have built up information pages which are starting to look more and more like infographics. For example, a page on ADHD shows what the most common supplements and medications are, what kind of demographic is taking them, the dosage, frequency, and side effects. Something we do differently is we crowd-source a treatment, so now anyone can see your treatment (you can hide it too) and ask you questions and help you stay on track. You can see what other individuals are taking and how it is working out for them.
Personal Health Record
The platform is starting to take the shape of a personal health record whereas you can see how your health has been over time through graphs and journal entries you may have provided. We are attempting to leverage statistics to see if we can internally come up with actionable insights that may be beneficial. We are going to be integrating with many trackers to pull data in automatically to see if this is a possibility. Imagine us pulling in data from 23&Me (personal genomics company) to learn about your DNA and overlaying it with your sleeping habits, and other daily activity and finally your medication intake levels and using Predictive modeling to predict outcomes. It will be possible very soon and we hope to get there sooner, there are already many that are doing something similar.
In Conclusion
Going back to the main problems with adherence, we help address all three and are taking the concept much further with providing access to patient research and tools for patients to really measure the effectiveness of their treatment. Consider sharing this article with someone undergoing a treatment so they can see if they want to use a platform like ours or with someone elder that you know would find it beneficial. займ экспресс нижневартовске заем второй займгде взять займ без процентов