PATIENT RISK MANAGEMENT PLATFORM, WAVE HEALTH, DELIVERS RARE 93% PATIENT COMPLIANCE AND 98% HCP PERCEIVED USEFULNESS

  • Presented at the 2024 ASCO Genitourinary Cancers Symposium, PRO-WAVE1 Research Results Showcase Opportunity to Operationalize the Patient-Provider Connection to Better Manage Cancer Care

  • Rich Data Includes Exceptional HCP Report of Overall Platform Impact, Combined with High Patient App Acceptance, Perceived Value, and Patients Reporting Feeling Less Anxious About Their Treatment Experience


San Francisco, CA – Treatment Technologies & Insights (TTI), a digital health insights and real world data company that developed the Wave Health platform, including the #1 ranked ePRO app1, today announced significant results of an eight-hospital, three-month study in Spain focused on prostate cancer patients (mHSPC, mCRPC, nmPC) undergoing systemic therapy. 

In the PRO-WAVE1 study, patients engaged with the Wave Health App over a 13-week period: Each week, patients completed a validated weekly symptom review (WSR) assessing 16 Prostate cancer-specific symptoms, including severity and/or frequency of each symptom.  A report summary of the patients’ WSR was generated for care team view in the Wave Health Connect platform – specifically to conduct weekly check ins on patients, including verifying patient completion; evaluating report content; indicating plans for follow up with each patient; and rating their perceived value of the platform. 

Care teams, including nurse coordinators and treating physicians, recognized the platform as a significant asset in patient care.  The study also reported exceptionally high compliance rates, app acceptability, and perceived value among patients.  Moreover, demographic information collected revealed a significant portion of study patients were aged 70 years or older (48%), reported a maximum educational background of high school or below (52%), and initially rated themselves with low tech confidence in their ability to use app technology (29%). Key findings accepted for poster presentation at the 2024 ASCO GU Symposium included:

CARE TEAM

  • 98% of HCPs rated the platform as useful – with the majority willing to recommend it to their peers and future patients.
  • 90% perceived platform impact on the quality of communication with patients
  • 85% perceived platform impact on addressing the number of emerging patient issues

PATIENTS

  • 93% overall patient compliance – with 82% of patients exhibiting perfect or high compliance.
  • 93% patient satisfaction with the platform – with 100% of respondents feeling the information provided in the app was relevant to their personal circumstance.
  • 84% patient acceptance of the app – with 67% of patients using it all 13 weeks of the study.
  • Positive relationship observed between app usage and emotional wellbeing (EWB) – with the top 25% of active users experiencing astatistically significant increase in mean EWB subscores.

While the study did not focus on interventional opportunities, it uncovered multiple progressing adverse events, from Thrombosis to bladder and mental health issues.  The use of the WSR check-in process highlighted these arising issues promptly, enabled care providers to address and mitigate these potential adverse events proactively.

TTI CEO, Matt Lashey said: “The results showcase a powerful opportunity to empower patients and HCPs with actionable insights.  The majority of patients felt the app helped them update their medical team; This is only achievable with a tool that is extremely accessible and intuitive.  And for care teams, the data showcases a pathway to better manage treatment journeys in terms of overall workload and proactively handling adverse events – which drives the majority of cost and time.” 

Lashey added: “Beyond better communications and identifying risks, it was exciting to also see the impact on quality of life, whereby the patients who used the app the most, on average, experienced an improvement in emotional wellbeing over the course of the study. There is also very rich secondary data that provides opportunities for corollary analysis – for example, comparing the distribution of patient reported symptom frequency and severity across different therapies.”

Dr. Estefania Linares, a lead investigator at the Hospital Universitario La Paz, added: “The platform is very practical and would benefit overpopulated hospitals, rural hospitals, and tele-consultations. It has shown to be a powerful platform in the clinical trial settings and maybe the most useful in departments where you’re not able to see patients frequently because of distance or the overload of patients.”

Dr. Ignacio Durán, the study primary investigator, based at Hospital Universitario Marqués de Valdecilla, IDIVAL.Santander, commented, “This study demonstrates that the Wave app and platform is very relevant for patients. It is designed to give them an extra layer of safety and care that very likely will translate into better quality of life and potentially longer survival.  We need to move forward and test this app in larger populations of patients to confirm these very promising results.”

The full abstract submitted, and poster presented at ASCO GU can be found here: https://meetings.asco.org/abstracts-presentations/230198

WAVE HEALTH

Wave Health is comprised of a leading patient app, analytics engine, and HCP Portal that takes in a diverse and unique data set to supplement clinical data with critical context and generates actionable insights to improve health and reduce costs. 

Born from a personal cancer experience, TTI built the Wave Health Platform to transform the management and understanding of chronic conditions – outside clinical settings, and is now being used by large pharma, ACOs, and government health agencies around the world to support decentralized clinical trials (DCTs), active oncology surveillance programs, enhance patient engagement, and improve adherence.

PARTICIPATING STUDY HOSPITALS

Hospital participants in the PRO-WAVE1 study included: Hospital Universitario Marques de Valdecilla; Complejo Hospitalario de Navarra; Oncológico de Donostia; Fundació Puigvert Barcelona; Hospital Universitario La Paz; Hospital Universitario Virgen del Rocío; Hospital de la Sta. Creu i Sant Pau; and Hospital Universitarios Cruces.

1 Evaluation of Mobile Health Applications to Track Patient-Reported Outcomes for Oncology Patients: A Systematic Review (Jan 2021).

Wave Health: Using Data & Technology to Improve Oncology Patient Care

By Matt Lashey, MBA, & Alex Whitehead, BS

Originally posted in NCODA’s Inspire Magazine (Spring 2023) —

It takes a village to overcome cancer. While oncology patients have always relied on networks of caregivers, oncologists, nurses, pharmacists, and the manufacturers of their medications, how these groups work together to improve outcomes is becoming increasingly complex.

The National Comprehensive Cancer Network’s Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology have established a ballooning number of clinical decision pathways a 370% absolute increase — between 1996 and 2019.1

To cohesively navigate this evolving landscape, care networks require high-quality patient-level clinical data and the technologies to sufficiently capture it. Efficient and reliable capture of patient data is needed to inform value-based care, quality initiatives, and to ultimately benefit oncological care.2

The Roles and Expectations of Oncology Pharmacists

Oncology pharmacists play a critical role in patient education during the early days of a cancer diagnosis. Patients are often overwhelmed by the amount of new information being provided by their oncologists at the time of diagnosis. It is typically a few days later, when patients receive or pick-up their medication, that patients are reminded of persisting questions regarding their treatment and their disease. A specialty pharmacy touchpoint is one of the few instances in U.S. healthcare where a licensed healthcare professional with this specialized knowledge is both free and accessible to patients when they need it most.

Being “on the frontlines” of patient care, oncology pharmacists are also uniquely positioned to use technology to improve outcomes and to collect important data. Studies have shown that pharmacists are integral to improving care, reducing costs and limiting drug complications for patients with cancer.3

With an increasing number of new cancer treatments launching each year,4 rising expectations of oncology pharmacists will continue from all sides of the healthcare matrix.

FROM PATIENTS: Patients will look to oncology pharmacists for clinical support with 1. side effect education as they start onboard to their new, complex medications, and 2. guidance on when to contact their oncologist regarding their medication. This assistance will help patients and their care teams understand whether to adjust dosing, treatment schedules or switch medications entirely.

FROM CARE PROVIDERS: Oncologists will look to oncology pharmacists for support with 1. improving patient engagement and care plan adherence, and 2. summarizing patient health outcomes between provider visits (e.g., nonadherence treatment-resistance, adverse events. This assistance will help facilitate harmonious patient care across the care network, and ultimately optimize outcomes.

FROM PAYERS AND MANUFACTURERS: Pavers and manufacturers will look to oncology pharmacists for support with facilitating patient access to medication through all stages of the treatment journey for .1 medication approval and initiation, 2. adherence over time, and 3. prescription renewal reporting or reporting for downstream business purposes (e.g., value-based contracting). Assistance here will ensure the right patients are receiving the right medication at the right time.

Oncology pharmacists are well-positioned to meet the expectations — if equipped with the required data and the technology to collect it.

Mail-Order Pharmacies & Challenges of Meeting Expectation

Given vertical integration across the industry’s largest Pharmacy Benefit Managers, health plans and specialty pharmacies, many patients currently receive their oral oncology medications through mail-order pharmacies.5 These entities extend off-the-shelf materials and one-on-one clinical support, but often require patients to navigate busy websites in order to find and utilize these resources. This creates an opportunity for oncology pharmacists to take a more active role in patient care, but there are gaps in information and capabilities.

INCOMPLETE PICTURE OF PATIENTS AND THEIR EXPERIENCES: When a mail-order pharmacy receives a prescription, there is little that is known about the patient. Since prescriptions do not come with visibility into the patient’s electronic medical record, their diagnostic and demographic information is largely unknown. Pharmacists collect some of this information during scheduled touchpoints, but several factors make it challenging to get complete data (e.g., language barriers, patients not picking up phone).

Patient outcomes data is also incomplete. Pharmacists understand whether a patient has refilled a prescription, but outside of what is collected via scheduled touchpoints, or what is collected via text or call-based patient-reported outcomes (ePRO) instruments, not much is known about the patient’s experiences — the critical missing context for the patient outcomes.

LIMITED VARIETY IN WORKFLOWS AND CARE PLANS: After receiving their initial. prescription, patients are typically put onto similar care plans and are provided standard educational resources.

For example, many oral oncolytic patients follow identical touchpoint schedules (e.g., phone calls at days 14, 30, 90, 180) where pharmacists ask a set of standard questions. Pharmacists then refer patients to the same off-the shelf content to help with medication and disease management. Care plans are not often set or adjusted based on individualized patient needs.

CHALLENGES IN MONITORING AND PREDICTING NEGATIVE OUTCOMES: Monitoring the evolution of a patient’s symptoms and side effects is also a challenge. Even for patients who consistently
update their pharmacists or complete PRO instruments, there is no single resource that succinctly. summarizes data across sources to inform quick care decisions.

Lesser so, there is little being done to predict negative outcomes based on a patients treatment and disease progression.

How a Patient’s Experience of These Gaps Led to the Solution

These gaps were experienced from the patient perspective by Treatment Technologies &Insights (TTI) cofounders Matt Lashey and Ric Grenell. Following a non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, Grenell leaned on his pharmacists’ deep disease and treatment knowledge for help with managing side effects and with updating his oncologist. As Grenell’s partner and primary caregiver, Lashey had an appreciation of the support of pharmacists, but grew frustrated by gaps in care exacerbated by an absence of technology.

Born out of that experience, Wave Health was created. This ePRO smartphone app uses data science to educate patients and their care networks about their response to treatment and disease. Based on patient logs, data analysis finds statistically significant correlations between what patients are doing (e.g., medications, activities) and how they are feeling (e.g., condition, mood, and side effects).

TTI was founded to help deliver this technology to care organizations and their patients. Since then, to meet the needs of today’s mail-order pharmacies, TTI has evolved Wave Health from a stand-alone app to a three-component platform:

  • An industry-leading patient app6 for comprehensive logging, ePRO short form completion, and delivery of correlation insights and relevant content.
  • A care portal for pharmacists to review and act on succinct patient-level summaries of symptom evolution and ePRO short-form responses.
  • Comprehensive and standardized data reporting, visualization, and predictive modeling to inform oncological care and downstream organization strategy.

How Wave Health is Filling These Gaps Today

Today, oncology pharmacists are using the Wave Health Platform to close gaps in patient care, to meet the growing expectations of care networks, and to drive better health outcomes.

PROVIDING A COMPLETE PICTURE OF PATIENTS & THEIR EXPERIENCES: The Wave Health App collects an abundance of meaningful data given its distinctive ability to keep patients engaged. Patients find that providing the app with more data leads to more relevant correlation insights and content back to them.

The outputs of this engagement are presented in the Wave Health Care Portal, where pharmacists access patients’ demographic and diagnostic profiles and multi-leveled views of experiences to augment care decisions.

PROVIDING MORE VARIETY IN CARE PLANS: To help oncology pharmacists, Wave Health’s Care Portal automates patient segmentations based on how patients are logging and responding to ePRO instruments. This enables oncology pharmacists to design and implement segment-specific or individual-specific workflow, and ultimately, provide stronger, more relevant care.

To help patients, the Wave Health App delivers insights and individualized care management content based on that individual’s specific logging behavior. This way, patients avoid navigating through cookie-cutter content, and instead, receive the right information at the right time.

PROVIDING AN ABILITY TO MONITOR & PREDICT NEGATIVE OUTCOMES: The Wave Health Care Portal allows pharmacists to easily monitor the evolution of patients throughout their treatment journey. This facilitates higher-quality patient conversations and individualized care decisions.

However, given busy schedules, oncology pharmacists are unable to monitor all patients all of the time for risks of negative outcomes (e.g., medication nonadherence). To address this, TTI is developing predictive algorithms that identify patients at-risk of nonadherence, allowing pharmacists to enable relevant care services to patients when needed.

With the right tools, oncology pharmacists will close critical gaps in patient care and will collect the patient data needed for care networks to navigate an increasingly complex oncology care landscape.

We would like to thank Yasmin Saafan, PharmD, BCPS, for her contributions to this article.

Matt Lashey, MBA, is the creator of Wave Health and is cofounder & CEO of TTI. In his free time, Lashey likes to go hiking and to cook for friends and family. Alex Whitehead, BS, previously led Strategy & Product for Treatment Technologies & Insights (TTI). In his free time, Whitehead enjoys being active outdoors, traveling and attending concerts in his home city of Los Angeles.

REFERENCES

1. Kann BH. Changes in Length and Complexity of Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology, 1996-2019. Jama Network. http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2762702. Published 2020. Accessed January. 5, 2023.

2. Hernandez-Boussard T, Blayney DW, Brooks JD. Leveraging Digital Data to inform and improve quality cancer care. Cancer epidemiology, biomarkers & prevention: a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, cosponsored by the American Society of Preventive Oncology. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7195903/. Published April 2020. Accessed January. 5, 2023.

3. Justin G. Impact of clinical pharmacists in outpatient oncology practice: A Review. American journal of health-system pharmacy: AJHP: official journal of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. http://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28947527/. Published 2017. Accessed January 5, 2023.

4. Raper, A Beardsley HJ, Christie M, Team E. Specialty medications: Hope for patients, Hurdle for Healthcare. CoverMyMeds Insights. http://insights.covermymeds.com/healthcare-technology/specialty-therapy/specialty-medications-hope-for-patients-hurdle-for-healthcare. Published 2021. Accessed January 5, 2023.

5. Fein AJ. The top 15 U.S. pharmacies of 2021: Market shares and revenues at the biggest companies. Drug Channels. http://www.drugchannels.net/2022/03/the-top-15-us-pharmacies-of-2021-market.html. Published March 8, 2022. Accessed January 5, 2023.

6. Lu DJ, Girgis M, David JM, Chung EM, Atkins KM, Kamrava M. Evaluation of Mobile Health applications to track patient-reported outcomes for oncology patients: A systematic review. Advances in PMC7547022/. Published 2021. Accessed January 5, 2023.

New Data from Immunotherapy Quality of Life Study Accepted for Two Abstracts at 2023 ASCO

— Treatment Technologies & Insights’ (TTI) ePRO app solution, Wave Health, enabled innovative approach to capture real-world symptoms and side effects —

SEATTLE, WA and EL SEGUNDO, CA, May 31, 2023 – The Wave Health digital health platform, used to collect patient symptom and quality of life information in an innovative research study, comprises two abstracts accepted to the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting. The study used TTI’s electronic patient reported outcomes (ePRO) platform to measure a variety of symptoms and aspects of health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in the “ImmunoWave” study, conducted at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. 

Dr. Hall, Assistant Professor at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and University of Washington School of Medicine, who led the study said, “Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) have transformed the care of many cancers and are among the most commonly prescribed cancer medications in the United States. Relatively little is known about the symptom and life experience of patients who have received this type of treatment in the past. The use of a patient-friendly ePRO system in this study enabled us to frequently and conveniently assess symptoms and quality of life in a group of patients who are not frequently coming in for infusions and visits.”

The study assessed for the presence of eleven symptoms and overall quality of life in a group of participants with prior exposure to ICI therapy or ongoing long-term ICI treatment. Participants in the study completed weekly symptom and HRQoL assessments using Wave Health. The two abstracts submitted to the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting include:

Study participants completed the majority of the assessments, providing crucial evidence of the feasibility of this technology to measure symptoms and HRQoL in this population. Participants reported frequent, persistent, and often severe symptoms, most notably fatigue, mental health symptoms and musculoskeletal symptoms. The study also identified which symptoms appeared to correlate most with diminished quality of life. For example, symptoms of depression, joint pains, and shortness of breath were associated with decreased physical functions on HRQoL measures.

“This study demonstrated that ePRO assessment is feasible in the population of cancer patients who are receiving or have completed ICI therapy. We have been able to collect much richer data using this approach than if we had relied on patients completing pen-and-paper questionnaires when they presented for clinic visits. This study lays the groundwork for future important studies of patient experience during and after ICI treatment,” said Dr. Hall.

TTI CEO and Wave Health creator, Matt Lashey, added: “These early learnings have already informed multiple new projects underway in Europe centered on both early and later stage cancer patients. In addition to the app, we now have a connected ePRO portal, Wave Health Connect, to elevate shared decision making and drive the ability to triage emerging adverse events.”

For the “ImmunoWave” study, in addition to weekly ePRO monitoring resulting in high questionnaire completion rates, study participant feedback on the Wave Health app tool was very positive.  Specifically, of those patients who completed the study off-boarding survey: 90% said they would “recommend the app to a friend going through similar circumstances;” and 80% said using the Wave Health app “helped them understand better how to live with their condition.”  Correspondingly, less than 5% of participants who completed the study off-boarding questionnaire, did not find the app “easy to use.” 

Treatment Technologies & Insights/Wave Health

TTI is a digital health insights and real world data (RWD) company, powered by the best-in-class electronic patient reported outcome (ePRO) ecosystem, Wave Health.  Born from a personal cancer experience, Wave Health transforms the understanding and management of chronic conditions – outside the clinical setting.  Wave Health App empowers patients to become more active partners with their care teams by helping them track and communicate their symptoms and experiences; the Wave Connect PRO Portal enables care teams to digitally augment care, with a lens into the patient journey at home; and Wave Health RWD supplements clinical data with critical context and individual variables.

Wave Health’s Alex Whitehead Featured on Asembia 2022 Conference Panel

Editor’s Note: CoverMyMeds is publishing recaps of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday Asembia 2022 sessions

Over 6,000 attendees are gathered this week in Las Vegas for Asembia 2022, a specialty pharmacy summit. We attended Wednesday’s sessions, which were focused on incoming tools and trends specialty pharmacists can use to help patients get the medications they need — from more affordable and available biosimilars to equitable adherence strategies.

Session: “Pharmacist Evolution: A New, More Active Role from Patient-Reported Outcomes to Developing Insights”

Presenters: Alexandra Broadus, senior director, Specialty Health Solutions, Walgreens; Melanie Radi, manager, Clinical Programs, AllianceRx Walgreens Prime; Alex Whitehead, senior director, strategy and partnerships, Treatment Technologies & Insights (TTI); Jeff Bourret, senior director, North America Medical Affairs, Inflammation & Immunology, Pfizer

Patient-reported outcomes data is essential for individualized care — full stop.ALEX WHITEHEADSenior Director, Strategy and Partnerships, Treatment Technologies & Insights (TTI)

Summary: What was discussed

Patient reported outcomes (PRO) are anything a patient directly says that’s not influenced by a clinician or other care team member. With the push to collect more real-world data, accelerated by the introduction of the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016, the industry is looking to PRO to influence public health and individualized care plans.

However, the individualization of PRO makes collecting and standardizing this data tricky. This panel of pharmacy experts examined ways specialty pharmacy can use PROs to address shifting adherence and outcomes barriers on an individual level.

Alex Whitehead, senior director of strategy and partnerships for Treatment Technologies & Insights, discussed a specialty pharmacy app that allowed patients to self-report daily symptoms, side effects and generally how they were feeling as they initiated a new medication. The app then reflected trends to the patient that could indicate triggers for symptoms. It also deep linked to educational information about symptom management. While patients are usually very active in the first week or two, they often fall off using it due to the strain of keeping up with multiple comorbidities or simply the business of life, said Melanie Radi, manager of clinical programs at AllianceRx Walgreens Prime. Such is the case for many self-reporting adherence applications.

That’s where integration with pharmacy workflows can help. Care team members could then step in when they see a patient having difficulties adhering to medications or experiencing unpleasant side effects. This can also provide an opportunity to connect with patients who may need an alternative communication method, such as a phone call where they can talk through challenges related to their condition or medication. Further benefit comes from specialty pharmacists having easy pathways to connect with care teams when they feel a drug may not be working or further clinical intervention is needed.

Key takeaways: What’s most important

Whitehead said it best. “Patient-reported outcomes data is essential for individualized care — full stop,” he said. While social determinants of health and symptom data gathering are important, taking individualized action for the patient at hand is most important to driving positive outcomes and keeping costs down for all stakeholders.

“Information gathered based on patients’ everyday behaviors might lead to different actions for different care plans,” Whitehead said. “They may be able to ask how many minutes a day someone’s doing yoga, are they praying if they’re religious or keeping in touch with their mother, for example.” Panelists emphasized the continued need for information and interventions to be offered in mediums beyond digital. Paper educational materials in multiple languages, phone calls and even locating care team members in pharmacy deserts could help access greater sets of patients who may often be forgotten or left behind, said Jeff Bourret, senior director of North America Medical Affairs, inflammation and immunology at Pfizer.

Industry call to action

Many patients want to be an active participant in their care. The industry can and should look for opportunities to partner with the patient throughout their care for an improved experience, outcomes and better adherence. Biopharma companies are often specialty pharmacy’s closest partners in developing PRO solutions, helping to define the patient journey to co-create an experience for the patient.

Specialty pharmacies who are willing to partner in creating solutions to gather and act on patient data can further let providers know what they’re learning about the patient to improve their care.

https://insights.covermymeds.com/healthcare-industry/specialty-therapy/asembia-2022-specialty-patient-access-centricity-and-adherence

Asembia 2022 – Pharmacists Have a New, Active Role in Patient-Reported Outcomes

May 4, 2022 Aislinn Antrim, Associate Editor – Pharmacy Times

Pharmacists can play a more active role in educating patients on tools and resources available to them, enrolling patients in programs, gathering subjective and objective data.

Pharmacists are increasingly playing an active role in the collection of patient-reported outcomes and the use of real-world evidence, according to a session at the Asembia 2022 Specialty Pharmacy Summit.

Real-world data are information related to patients’ health status or the delivery of health care, according to presenter Alexandra Broadus, PharmD, senior director of specialty health solutions at Walgreens. These data are routinely collected from a variety of sources and go hand-in-hand with real-world evidence, which is clinical evidence about the use and potential benefits or risks of a medical product derived from real-world data.

The importance of real-world data is reflected in policies and laws, including the 21st Century Cures Act that was signed into law in 2016. Designed to accelerate product development and get innovations to patients more quickly, the act uses real-world data and created a framework for evaluating the use of real-world evidence to support the approval of a new indication for a drug that has already been approved.

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are an important piece of real-world data, Broadus said. PROs are any report of the status of a patient’s health condition that comes directly from the patient. These outcomes can be measured in absolute terms, such as severity of a symptom, or as a change from a previous measure.

After introducing the role of PROs in clinical research and innovations, the panelists discussed some examples within their own organizations of how pharmacists are involved in gathering insights. Pharmacists can play a more active role in several ways, including by educating patients on tools and resources available to them, enrolling patients in programs, gathering subjective and objective data, and taking action in near real time based on PROs via digital solutions.

Alex Whitehead, senior director of strategy and operations at Treatment Technologies and Insights (TTI), discussed a partnership program between TTI and Walgreens to better engage, monitor, and improve outcomes for patients taking oral oncolytic medications. The technological piece of the partnership involves connecting a platform with artificial intelligence-driven patient apps and a corresponding pharmacist care portal.

Through this partnership, Whitehead said synthesized reports are available to health providers and pharmacists to summarize patients’ experiences. An app also allows patients to report things that make them feel better or worse on a day-to-day basis, better enabling providers to respond quickly to patient challenges.

Pharmacists’ roles in this program include offering it to patients at applicable touchpoints, reviewing patient engagement and reports before scheduled interactions with the patient, and conducting informed consults.

Panelist Melanie Radi, PharmD, manager of clinical programs and specialty clinical services at AllianceRx Walgreens Prime, further discussed pharmacists’ roles in collecting and interpreting PRO data. The Connected Care Program is a PRO algorithm-driven clinical program, and she noted that all PROs and counseling provided to patients are documented in the patient profile.

As part of the program, pharmacists will conduct an initial call with the patient to discuss personal information, an initial assessment, the prescription order, and the patient’s communication preferences. Refill calls are also conducted as proactive outreach, and cover adverse effects, potential adherence issues, and changes to the patient’s symptoms or condition.

All of the panelists agreed that including PROs in addition to more objective, clinical data points can have significant benefits. Importantly, Radi said PROs help to individualize care, which is vital in the patient journey and helps patients feel heard and understood.

“It empowers those patients, I think, to really take control of their care and to be an advocate for themselves, knowing they have the support of their specialty pharmacist as they go through this journey,” Radi said.

REFERENCE

Broadus A, Radi M, Bourret J, Whitehead A. Pharmacist Evolution: Introducing a New, More Active Role from Patient Reported Outcomes to Developing Insights. May 4, 2022. Presented at Asembia 2022 Specialty Pharmacy Summit.

https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/pharmacists-have-a-new-active-role-in-patient-reported-outcomes

Health App That Tracks Response to Diseases Rated No. 1 by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center – Epoch Times

December 15, 2021 – By Drew Van Voorhis – Epoch Times

A unique health app that allows patients to track how treatments, medications, and diets affect different medical conditions using artificial intelligence was recently rated number one by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in a study involving over 1,100 different health applications.

The app, called Wave Health, allows patients with illnesses including cancer, migraines, chronic pain, and about 250 other chronic illnesses to feel more in control over their disease by helping them discover what could make them feel better or worse on a daily basis.

Wave received the number one rating in both the highest overall score, but also the highest for individual scores for engagement and aesthetics dimensions.

“[Being rated number one] was validating for us, but in a very different way because we were born out of a personal experience that led to a personal mission to help patients,” Matt Lashey, cofounder of Wave Health, told The Epoch Times.

The app was created by Lashey and his partner Ric Grenell, former Acting Director of U.S. National Intelligence after Grenell was diagnosed with cancer in 2013.

“When you’re diagnosed with cancer, you think, ‘I’ve got cancer, so I’m going to feel crappy,’ Grenell told The Epoch Times. “And when you start to feel terrible, you chalk it up to the cancer and you don’t know any different.”

Grenell found that through analyzing his daily symptoms through data trends, he could pinpoint what medications were working, and what was not.

Grenell and Lashey created the app to help patients who are dealing with a negative health diagnosis navigate an overwhelming amount of information, and give insight into the crucial decisions that need to be made.

“There’s a whole bunch of apps out there that do symptom tracking, and then they just summarize the symptoms into a report,” Grenell said. “What [Wave Health] does … is it creates this system that then gives you artificial intelligence that takes your information and then gives you actionable insights.”

Wave Health allows a patient to put in a percentage scale of how they feel at any given moment and tracks sleep, condition changes, mood, hydration, exercise, social interaction, and meals. It also measures blood pressure, heart rate, and other vitals.

The app’s artificial intelligence then gives health reports and insights that show important trends for both the user and their doctors.

The app has a back-end monitoring platform that can allow physicians to monitor their patients in real-time.

“We’ve actually had a lot more attention from providers who are much more focused on telehealth solutions, or solutions that would help them to keep in better touch and a closer eye on their patients between visits, to help prevent emerging risks and the resulting hospitalizations,” Lashey said.

Wave Health has also been a game-changer during the pandemic, Grenell said, given that there has been a greater emphasis on providers protecting chronic patients from the risk of exposure in emergency room settings.

“If you’re chronically sick, and you start using this, the insights that are generated are going to motivate you to improve your own health,” Grenell said.

Grenell added that he’s excited to continue developing the app into different languages to help others around the world.

LINK: https://www.theepochtimes.com/health-app-that-tracks-response-to-diseases-rated-no-1-by-cedars-sinai-medical-center_4159309.html?welcomeuser=1

Health app monitors cancer symptoms and treatments in Hebrew and Arabic – The Jerusalem Post

The free Wave Health app is now available in nine languages.

December 13, 2021 – 20:44

By: ROSSELLA TERCATIN

Wave Health, a free mobile application by Treatment Technologies & Insights (TTI) that allows users to monitor their disease symptoms, treatments, medication side-effects and more, just became available in Hebrew and Arabic, founding partner Richard Grenell announced Sunday.With the latest addition, the app is currently available in nine languages.

Grenell started to conceive of the Wave Health project when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma – a type of blood cancer – in 2013.

All of a sudden he found himself in a situation where he needed to handle a lot of medical information: his symptoms, the medications he needed to take, their side-effects, treatments and their side-effects and so on. Being able to keep track of all of this data – and when relevant, convey it to his physicians – could make a big difference in the success of the therapy.

The experience prompted Grenell to establish TTI. With the help of his partners, he was able to monitor the course of his disease and treatment, feel in control of what was happening and have a better dialogue with his doctors.

Inspired by his journey, in 2017 the company released chemoWave, an app for cancer patients and their families.Eventually, TTI released Wave Health, which focuses on supporting patients will chronic diseases.

Earlier this year, the app was rated the number-one highest-quality Health application to track patient-reported outcomes for oncology patients by the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.“

The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced significant challenges in ensuring oncology patients understand their symptoms and receive the best possible care,” said Matt Lashey, TTI CEO and the creator of Wave App. “We take great pride in empowering patients to take an active role in their treatment and to effectively communicate with their care teams, especially in a remote world.”

For the future, the company is working on creating several apps tailored for specific diseases and treatments, including diabetes, kidney problems, dialysis, fertility treatments and others.

LINK: https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/health-app-monitors-cancer-symptoms-and-treatments-in-hebrew-and-arabic-688632

Health App Tracks Disease Symptoms, Medications, Side Effects, More – Newsmax Health

Health App Tracks Disease Symptoms, Medications, Side Effects, More

Friday, December 10, 2021 03:35 PM –

By: Lynn Allison

There’s an exciting health app that you can download for free that helps monitor your symptoms, keep track of medications, and identify side effects for a wide variety of medical conditions including cancer, chronic pain, migraines, and even anxiety and depression. Called Wave Health, it is available for both iPhone and Android devices. The mobile app was rated #1 by Cedars Sinai Hospital for tracking patient-reported outcomes, or PROs, for oncology patients.

Necessity is often called the mother of invention, and this certainly was the case for the development of the Wave Health app. When Ric Grenell, former acting director of national intelligence and former U.S. ambassador to Germany, battled non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he was thrown into a nightmare of chemotherapy and its accompanying side effects. Grenell’s partner, Matt Lashey, helped track Grenell’s symptoms and therapies so they could remember which treatments and medications made him feel better or worse. The couple used the data to accurately communicate this information to Grenell’s physicians.

Fortunately, Grenell’s cancer went into remission. Lashey, whose background is in market research and data analysis, designed an app for tracking treatments and symptoms and together they co-founded Treatment Technology & Insights (TTI), a Los Angeles-based company, to share their discovery with others. In the beginning, the app was dedicated to cancer treatments alone, but now includes over 250 diseases that can be monitored with a few taps on a smartphone and the help of artificial intelligence.

“My first dream is to empower patients, to give them hope and help them play a productive role in their care,” Lashey tells Newsmax, adding that he is now excited for its application in the future. “By analyzing the aggregate data, we can start to identify certain patient characteristics and trends that will impact innovation and the development of new treatments.”

The app also measures blood pressure, heart rate and other vitals, making it an all-in-one, comprehensive patient tracker, says Jaren Grenell, Ric’s nephew, and creative director of TTI. It also syncs with wearables.

‘We are global, and the app is available in virtually every country including the Middle East,” Jaren Grenell tells Newsmax. “We have just made it available in Arabic and Hebrew. There are not many tools available for patients to track their health while facing chronic illness and cancer.”

Another key feature of Wave Health is enhanced communication for patients. “We send users weekly health reports with a breakdown of important trends and data points,” says Grenell. “It’s sent to them weekly, but also has a 28-day trends report that many patients take to their doctors’ appointments to better understand what’s going on with symptoms and overall help.”

Grenell explains that a patient can share updates with their healthcare provider directly from the app or can update the service and subscribe to Wave Pro, which is a more comprehensive, report-generating version of the app available for a modest, monthly fee.

“We’re currently offering 30 days free, and you can cancel anytime,” says Grenell. To find out more about the Wave Health app, take a tour of their website.

For Rosalind Williams, a breast cancer patient in Seattle, the app helped her battle grueling chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation.  She told Newsmax that tracking her symptoms helps identify issues and communicate them with experts who know how to deal with them.

“Along with family and prayer, the app is helping me go through the process,” she said.

LINK: https://www.newsmax.com/health/health-news/app-health-wave-cancer/2021/12/10/id/1048207/

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Wave Health App Now Available In Arabic and Hebrew Languages

Free Patient Health App Now Available In Arabic And Hebrew Languages

-Wave Health Is Empowering Patients To Track And Record Their Treatment Experience In 175 Countries-

-Treatment Technologies & Insights, Inc. (TTI) Helps People Facing 240+ Chronic Medical Conditions Get Health Insights From Custom-built Artificial Intelligence Platform-

LOS ANGELES, CA (December 10, 2021) – Wave Health App, a mobile app rated #1 by Cedars Sinai Hospital, today launched its patient technology in Arabic and Hebrew languages. The free health app helps patients track their symptoms, log how they’re feeling, and record important treatment activities to get personal health insights into what helps them feel better or worse, and what activities are tied to negative side effects they experience.

The app is now launched throughout the Middle East and is currently available for free on all iPhone or Android devices in 175 countries. Wave Health has already been previously available in English, German, Spanish, and French, with plans to launch in other languages in the near future.

“We decided to develop the app in Arabic and Hebrew languages, which was a challenge, as it’s an entirely different layout from every other language we have released thus far. So, we consulted with a few doctors in Egypt during the translation phase to make sure we got it right,” says TTI’s Technical Lead, Armando Monroy.

In a recent systematic review out of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (CSMC), Wave was rated as the #1 highest quality mHealth application to track patient-reported outcomes (PROs) for oncology patients.

Wave was updated in 2019 to serve more than cancer patients, as the health app is growing rapidly and reaching more people with complex medical conditions, such as Chronic Pain, Migraines, Ehlers Danlos, Fibromyalgia, Hypertension, and the most impactful growth has been in the Mental Health space, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic. Anxiety and Depression remain the fastest growing conditions over the past 18 months.

Wave has a growing and motivated patient community with several thousand active users across 240+ chronic conditions. Wave users log into the app, on average, 5.5 times per day to actively track their entire treatment experience, including updating their symptoms daily, while logging their mood, sleep, hydration, mindfulness, physical exercise, and much more.

Recent results from a user survey obtained on December 9, 2021, amongst 431 Wave users, showed that 94% of users reported that Wave has been a helpful aspect of their treatment journey. Amongst those users, more specifically, 80% reported they feel more “in control” of managing their symptoms.

Wave Health is a free mobile health app from Treatment Technologies & Insights (TTI), a digital health company that creates patient-centered mobile apps and develops physician portals and research platforms to help improve healthcare outcomes for cancer and chronic illness patients.

Wave App’s technology offers a holistic, real-time record & analysis of patient experiences, designed to engage patients in managing treatment side effects, provide doctors with better information for more confident decision-making, and ultimately improve health protocols that lead to better outcomes in the future.

TTI entered the Patient Reported Outcomes (PRO) space in 2017 through their launch of chemoWave, a free health app for cancer patients with the same insights and activity tracking capabilities as Wave App. chemoWave is also available across all iPhone or Android mobile platforms.

Read more about the personal story that led to the creation of chemoWave in the American Journal of Managed Care.

Download Wave App FREE for Android here

Download Wave App FREE for Apple iOS here

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Contact:          Jaren Grenell

Jaren@tti.care

Treatment Technologies & Insights Launches Immunotherapy Study At Seattle Cancer Care Alliance

— Patient Reported Outcome pilot to examine the symptom experience of long-term Immunotherapy patients to better understand chronic effects of treatment —

— With drug approvals increasing every year, and clinical trials over-representing patients with better health and fewer comorbidities, critical pilot to examine real-world patient experiences —

LOS ANGELES, October 26, 2021 – Nearly half of all adult advanced-cancer patients are candidates for treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs).  Immunotherapy triggers the body’s immune system to fight cancer cells but can also precipitate a host of side effects ranging from mild to life threatening, driving a wide variety of symptoms that can adversely impact patient quality of life and day-to-day functioning.

Wave Health app, ranked the #1 rated PRO application for oncology patients in 2020 by Cedars-Sinai, today announced a pioneering new study to enable an innovative approach to monitor real-world immunotherapy symptoms and side effects that could shorten the cycle for patients and physicians to understand how it really feels to be on their medications.

“In the past 10 years, there have been approximately 40 new drug approvals every year. Unfortunately, there is often limited data on side effects, tolerability and quality of life at the time of approval,” said Treatment Technologies & Insights CEO Matt Lashey.  “TTI’s technology changes that by transforming reported data into actionable intelligence.”

TTI lead engineer Armando Monroy added: “The study’s app provides an AI-driven ePRO solution within the infrastructure of Wave Health’s current system.  Specifically, the technology allows SCCA participants, using either iPhone or Android versions of the app, to securely track and share profile information, symptom occurrences and other relevant activity and experience information – to generate personal insight for treatment understanding and ultimately care team management.” 

For the 3-month study, with a rolling enrollment of approximately 50 patients, app users complete symptom assessments using the National Cancer Institute’s “Patient Reported Outcomes version of the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events” (PRO-CTCAE).  These instruments measure symptom toxicity in clinical trials and consist of 78 discrete symptoms.  The appasks subjects to report on a subset of these symptoms of specific interest to the SCCA study.

Additionally, TTI has implemented a new HRQoL weekly series of surveys using the PROMIS-29-item questionnaire to assess health-related quality of life across various domains of interest to the study. Monroy explains: “Subjects are asked additional PROMIS short form items as a follow up to the subset of PRO-CTCAEs they earlier reported as having experienced at a ‘moderate,’ ‘severe’ or ‘very severe’ level in the last 7 days.  This lays tremendous new groundwork for future interventional studies on adverse event prevention and management by demonstrating patient-level impact.”

Treatment Technologies & Insights, parent company of Wave Health, is a digital health company offering cloud-based services to systematically monitor, manage and learn from patient reported outcomes – occurring outside the clinical setting.  TTI’s mission is to transform healthcare by equipping every patient and healthcare ecosystem with life-changing patient intelligence. 

Through unique patient engagement and AI-driven insights, TTI’s patient-centric solutions, including apps, a provider-facing care portal, and research databases, help elevate patient health literacy, decrease population health disparities and create opportunity for intervention to benefit patients, caregivers, providers, payors, and pharmaceutical companies.  TTI started first in cancer, from a personal experience, and now serves all chronic conditions. 

Download Wave Health App FREE for Android here

Download Wave Health App FREE for iOS here

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SOURCE: Treatment Technologies & Insights, Inc.