The best ideas are often ones that come from a personal need. In the case of WellApps co-founder and CEO Brett Shamosh, it was having ulcerative collitis and needing a way to track his symptoms to give his doctor the most accurate information. He went to an Apple Store to find the right app, but no dice. So he developed his own platform for monitoring his symptoms.
WellApps , based in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, is a seed funded company co-founded by Brett Shamosh, the CEO, Dr. Edward Shin and Paolo Teodorani, the chief technology officer last year.
It is currently looking to raise $500,000 and is halfway to meeting that goal through family, friends and angel investment.
“With the conditions we are targeting, it is important that patients understand what is going on with own bodies and communicate that effectively to their doctor,” Shamosh said.
The company’s GI Monitor allows users to log GI symptoms and can be used on an Android, iPhone, iPad, or on the Web. Bowel movements can be logged by blood urgency levels, notes can be added for any symptom. Pain and stress levels can be logged on a scale of 1-10 and a time is always referenced. Users can also enter meals and select the relevant food from a drop down menu or adding new foods. A digestive rating can be selected from easy to digest meals to difficult to digest. Headaches can be logged on 1-10 scale. Reports are e-mailed to the address registered in a PDF format.
Among the goals of the company, Shamosh said, are to improve patients’ quality of life and improve communication between doctors and patients.
WellApps is focused on chronic diseases without clear biomarkers such as Crohn’s disease and ulceratice colitis. To date, the only application platform is the GI Monitor, for which Shamosh says “The uptake has been phenomenal.” The company sees other applications in addition to the GI Monitor, such as Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia in which patients could track medications, joint pain, numbness and, in the case of Lupus and fibromyalgia, neurological symptoms. With a Depression Monitor, patients could enter sleeping and mood and keep track of their weight.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“How do we integrate what we’re developing into the greater health system so patients can use this and doctors can get reimbursed? That to us is an open question. Right now it is free to use,” Shin said.
The app has a social component in addition to disease management tools. “The main challenge in any of disease management is engagement and that’s a challenge across the sector,” Shamosh said. “The challenge is to put this in the hands of patients … to keep them healthier.”
