IPad App To Help Improve Medical Data Collection

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Intake interviews — the long series of forms and questions that patients must fill out and answer prior to receiving medical care — are critical for accurate diagnosis and treatment. However, they’re boring and can be confusing, which decreases the rate at which patients respond accurately and completely. The company Tonic Health is trying to revolutionize data collection with a patient-friendly iPad app called Tonic that promises to make the process of an intake interview fun and interactive — game-like, even — for patients.

Tonic iPad app


The app is useful to a variety of applications in patient care, including screening forms for risk factors, tracking patients in clinical trials, and conducting patient satisfaction surveys. From the Tonic Health website:

…there are some partial solutions that exist to combat [poor response rates, low patient engagement, and lost data], but many aren’t regulatorily compliant and tend to be just screen-based versions of a printed, radio-button survey. None are truly patient-centric. None put the patient’s needs first, organizing the information in the way a patient finds it easiest, using images to ask questions, providing multiple platforms, creating patient buy-in and engagement. And none tie back to the physician or researcher, giving them clear, easy to read data that helps personalize their patient care. So we built a medical data collection platform that [addresses the needs of clinicians and researchers].

Tonic has rethought the entire data collection process, redesigning it to be simple, interactive, intuitive and fun. Check it out below.

While the software is new, it’s been receiving rave reviews from health-tech magazines and websites, including Entrepreneur Magazine, who named Tonic Health one of the 100 most brilliant companies for revolutionizing health information technology.

Source: Tonic Health

About the Author

Walter Jessen, Ph.D. is a Data Scientist, Digital Biologist, and Knowledge Engineer. His primary focus is to build and support expert systems, including AI (artificial intelligence) and user-generated platforms, and to identify and develop methods to capture, organize, integrate, and make accessible company knowledge. His research interests include disease biology modeling and biomarker identification. He is also a Principal at Highlight Health Media, which publishes Highlight HEALTH, and lead writer at Highlight HEALTH.