Dr. Ricky Bloomfield speaks at AMIA 2016 in Chicago.
More than a year and a half after its release in March 2015, Apple’s ResearchKit is maturing. And the Android answer to ResearchKit, known as ResearchStack, is catching up.
What the two platforms are doing are opening up components of clinical trial recruitment, data collection and participant retention to wide audiences of people with specific healthcare conditions, attendees of the 2016 American Medical Informatics Association Annual Symposium in Chicago heard Monday.
“Clinical trials can be democratized,” according session moderator Dr. Kenneth Mandl, director of the Computational Health Informatics Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. “[ResearchKit] is enrolling patients in the wild so you can get a trial started simply.”
Mandl noted that the one of the launch apps for ResearchKit, Parkinson mPower, was part of a study that accrued a potential research panel of 9,500 patients.
Duke University Medical Center has automated its whole process of informed consent for clinical trials with a module built into several ResearchKit apps.
“It’s broken apart this dense legalize and made it easier to digest because users can go at their own speed,” said Dr. Ricky Bloomfield, who recently left his job as director of mobile strategy at Duke to take a position with Apple’s health team. With each section of the consent form rendered as a separate page on iPhones, users can click to learn more about each provision before signing.
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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.
“We’re totally sold about what this app can do in terms of reaching huge populations,” said Bloomfield, who made it clear he was speaking for Duke, not Apple, during and after his presentation.
Similarly, Deborah Estrin professor of computer science at Cornell Tech in New York City, said she has been focused on “modularizing” tasks with both ResearchKit and ResearchStack. “As we do these, we do them for both platforms,” said Estrin.
She founded the Health Tech Hub and directs the Small Data Lab at Cornell Tech, which develops new personal data application programming interfaces and apps to help individuals to mine the small amounts of data they generate every day.
She also co-founded the nonprofit Open mHealth. That organization supported the launch of the first ResearchStack app, Mole Mapper, which Oregon Health & Science University developed to further its melanoma research.
It can be harder to develop apps for Android because that operating system runs on so many different devices, while Apple iOS is exclusive to the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. But Estrin has noticed the gap closing.
“As the Android ecosystem has evolved, the APIs are more stable,” Estrin said.
ResearchStack enables cross-platform studies, according to Estrin, and that’s exactly what Boston Children’s has begun to do. That organization has updated the frameworks of its C Tracker app for hepatitis C patients to work with both ResearchKit and ResearchStack, noted lead C Tracker software developer Dr. Pascal Pfiffner, a postdoctoral fellow in the hospital’s Computational Health Informatics Program.
But ResearchKit and ResearchStack still have limitations. Neither provides a data format, so surveys have to be programmed in their native code. “For us, the natural response was to use FHIR,” Pfiffner said, referring to the fledgling Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources standard.
Eventually, FHIR will allow Boston Children’s to connect its research apps to the hospital’s electronic health record, he noted.
Photo: Neil Versel/MedCity News
