iCancerHealth Platform from Medocity – from Medocity on Vimeo.
Mobile health business Medocity wants to do away with the idea that cancer patients have to cope on their own once they get out of the hospital. After half a year of beta testing its patient-facing app, iCancerHealth, that is designed to function like a patient-centric hub and a companion app for physicians and care teams — Medocity MD — CEO Raj Agarwal spoke with MedCity News about its plans to launch the Medocity MD app this year. He talked about some of the needs that the cloud-based platform is designed to address and other disease states it is developing apps to support.
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“We reached a new care paradigm not just to track when patients have symptoms, such as nausea, and don’t know what to do. We developed protocols, triggers using evidence-based guidance so patients know what to do when
symptoms happen. [It’s designed] to help them understand the side effects and help them on the emotional and social side.”
The patient facing app was developed for mobile devices on iOS and Android networks, as well as for laptops and desktops, which are available free to patients. To date the Parsippany, New Jersey-based company has raised $3 million, including a $1.6 million financing round last year. Agarwal declined to detail how many investors it has nor would he say whether the backing comes from angel or institutional investors.
If a patient has nausea, for example, that gets picked up on the clinical side as an alert. The care team is prompted to respond to the patient with various alternatives such as medication to relieve the nausea or another action. The data is transmitted to the patient’s electronic health record.
The complexities of cancer type, stage, the patient’s age and sex mean every patients’ needs are different. So having a platform that can create different touch points between patients and their care teams with a way to collect data from each interaction could make a huge difference in developing insights that can be gleaned from the patient experience and clinical perspective. Patients can communicate by audio or video with their care teams or leave a message through the dashboard. They can also connect to a patient community. Other components include educational content, medication management, a medical status diary, and a channel to track their vitals through Bluetooth-enabled devices.
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Agarwal also noted that some of these factors go towards the patient’s emotional state too. If someone is in the early stages of one type of cancer, they might feel more optimistic than someone in the late stages of their disease. That can make all the difference when it comes to things like managing their health. One problem is that patients can get so overwhelmed by their condition that they wait too long to manage symptoms of their disease and side effects of their treatment, and they need to get treated in the emergency room, increasing costs.
One advantage to the platform the company developed, adds Agarwal, is that it provides a level of continuity between medical appointments that a lot of cancer patients lack.
Working as the founder and CEO of a mobile health startup is a lot different from Agarwal’s background as an executive at corporations such as Novartis and Medco, before Express Scripts acquired it. But Agarwal seems to relish the challenge. “I always wanted to do something for patients to improve management of cancer care and take costs out of the system,” he said. “We’re eliminating barriers to patient care.”
Agarwal said the cancer care platform had received significant support from cancer care centers and patient advocacy groups, but he declined to specify a date for the rollout. He added that Medocity is currently in partnership discussion with several cancer centers and patient advocacy groups.
An app supporting congestive heart failure patients is scheduled to be released sometime in the next couple of months and a COPD app is slated for a second quarter launch. Another app to support seniors is in development, but Agarwal declined to provide any details.
One potential downside of the patient-facing platform is also one of its strengths. It does provide a lot of different opportunities for patients to provide information and access care, but it’s difficult to imagine patients using each of the 11 components all the time. Still, having an abundance of support is quite a lot better than not nearly enough.
