Janssen Biotech, Inc., one of the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, recently announced the launch of a novel tool called Gut Check™, which is designed to improve disease monitoring in patients suffering from ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease — conditions also referred to as inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD).
IBD is estimated to affect around 1.6 million Americans (1 in every 200), and although considerable progress has been made in treating the disease, the causes of IBD are still unknown and there is no cure currently available.
The Gut Check™ platform is a mobile application designed to improve the communication between patients and their healthcare providers. The application allows IBD patients to track their symptoms, well-being and lifestyle habits every day (Health Tracker), and to share the information with healthcare professionals in real-time and automatically.
The application runs bi-weekly patient-reported outcome surveys (PROMIS), which have been validated by the National Institute of Health (NIH) to help evaluate progress over time. The healthcare professionals can use the Gut Check™ to have access to their patients’ data via a HIPAA-compliant dashboard on their computer or tablet. The application also allows them to do comparisons of patient data, both locally and at a national level.
“From my experience, people living with IBD often underreport their symptoms — they tend to focus on how they have been feeling the past few days versus the past few months,” noted Dr. Ralph McKibbin, gastroenterologist at Blair Gastroenterology Associates, in a press release. “Early intervention is key when it comes to caring for IBD. New platforms like Gut Check™ will help me to more closely monitor my patients in real-time.”
The Gut Check™ application also offers patients educational tips on topics related to IBD, such as exercise and diet; a calendar that helps organizing appointments and local IBD community events; and a GPS system to find a bathroom anytime, anywhere. In addition, patients can share their activity with the program through social media and earn tokens and comparative status ranking according to their engagement.
“Managing IBD is a significant challenge, and improving the efficiency and timeliness of communication between patients and healthcare professionals is critical in providing optimal care,” said Dr. Andrew Greenspan, vice president of medical affairs at Janssen Biotech, Inc. “We created Gut Check™ to enable real-time communication between healthcare professionals [HCPs] and patients, with the ultimate goal of enabling HCPs to more closely monitor disease progression.”
The Gut Check™ is a free application for IBD patients, and the Gut Check™ dashboard (that allows the connection with the patients) is free for healthcare professionals. Gut Check™ can be found in Google Play® and Apple App Store®. For more information about the application, please visit this link.