New Mobile App Designed to Help Lyme Disease Patients Showcased at ‘TOP Health’ Tech Sprint Hosted by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF)
WASHINGTON, D.C. and STAMFORD, CONN (March 4, 2019)
Global Lyme Alliance (GLA), the leading 501(c)(3) dedicated to conquering Lyme and other tick-borne diseases through research, education and awareness, and TrialX Appbakery, a revolutionary digital health platform to build patient-centric data collection apps, presented their new Lyme Symptom Tracker mobile app at the HHS’s ‘“The Opportunity Project (TOP) Health Tech Sprint” on Thursday, February 28, 2019 at The White House.
The goal of the TOP Health Tech Sprint initiative was to create those digital tools that advance data-driven solutions to increase access to experimental treatments and to use the power of the crowd to solve Lyme and tick-borne diseases. GLA and TrialX’s app, Lyme Symptom Tracker, successfully addressed these two challenges. “We were honored to participate in the HHS TOP Health Tech Sprint,” says Sara Tyghter, GLA Director of Education and Outreach and co-facilitator of the app. “There is a critical need to take a patient-centric approach to gather population-level data in order to better understand the traits of Lyme disease.
Furthermore, such amassed patient data is important to share in an open environment that will give scientists and physicians a means to accelerate their research efforts and ultimately help patients.” The Lyme Symptom Tracker is the first app of its kind, designed to help Lyme disease patients easily track their symptoms and share their data with their healthcare providers. The app also integrates with TrialX’s iConnect platform to enable patients to find and connect with a clinical trial investigator near them. There is a vital need to encourage patients to keep a symptom journal (tracker) so that they can easily inform their primary care physician who analyzes and understands their unique symptomatic presentation of Lyme disease.
Using the app, patients can track symptoms through daily and weekly surveys and monitor activity levels via their phone sensors and wearables. “We are inspired by the innovative projects presented at the Tech Sprint,” said Dr. Kristen Honey, Innovator in Residence, HHS Office of the Chief Technology Officer and co-organizer of the “TOP Health” Tech Sprint. “The Global Lyme Alliance and TrialX Lyme Symptom Tracker app transformed government data into a new digital tool for Lyme disease patients. Together, through the TOP Health collaboration, we are harnessing the power of patient anecdotes into data and action.”
Lyme disease is the fastest growing vector-borne illness in the U.S., with an estimated 427,000 new cases each year according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lyme disease is an illness transmitted from the bite of an infected black-legged (deer) tick. Case numbers continue to rise as ticks are now active year-round and are expanding into geographic regions they were previously not known to inhabit. “Working with GLA to reach a wide network of Lyme patients, we hope that the data collected by users of the Lyme Symptom Tracker can provide new insights into the phenotypic manifestations of this poorly understood condition,” remarked Sharib Khan, CEO of TrialX. TrialX used Appbakery, its do-it-yourself platform that enables one to create mobile data tracking apps for both iOS and Android, to build the Lyme Symptom Tracker. GLA provided domain expertise, assisting on the development of app requirements and obtaining user feedback. It will be recommending the live app to patients within its network. The Lyme Symptom Tracker app is currently available on the iOS App Store and Android Play Store.
### ABOUT GLOBAL LYME ALLIANCE
Global Lyme Alliance is the leading 501(c)(3) dedicated to conquering Lyme and other tick-borne diseases through research, education and awareness. GLA has gained national prominence for funding some of the most urgent and promising research in the field, while expanding education and awareness programs for the general public and physicians. We support those around the globe needing information about tick-borne diseases. Learn more at GLA.org. About TrialX TrialX is the patient connection company. By bringing patients and researchers together, TrialX is accelerating clinical research to find cures for millions. Started in 2008 as a clinical trials decision engine integrated with personal health record platforms of Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault, TrialX’s solutions enable clinical trials recruitment, patient-reported data collection and research awareness at leading academic medical centers and large clinical trial sponsors, today. Learn more at trialx.com.
