Rheumatology Network sat down with W Benjamin Nowell, PhD, and David Curtis to chat about the the recent press release that CreakyJoints published addressing updates to their ArthritisPower interface in order to improve the user’s experience, including incorporating patient perspectives. We discuss how the changes will help both patients and rheumatologists alike, recent research, and what we have to look forward to in the near future.
Nowell is Director of Patient-Centered Research at the Global Healthy Living Foundation and principal investigator of ArthritisPower. David is the Director of Technology and Data Service at the Global Healthy Living Foundation.
Read a snippet of our conversation below:
Rheumatology Network: For those who may not be aware, can you give me a bit of background on ArthritisPower?
David Curtis: ArthritisPower is the name of our research registry, as well as our mobile app that we have developed. It's available for iPhone and Android and on the web. It's an app that we designed to collect electronic patient reported outcome data from patients, both for research within our research registry, but also for patient's own utility. We designed the app to be a tool that patients can use to track their symptoms and their treatments, and see if they can see any changes that are happening over time. They can take that information, share it with doctors, share it with their caregivers, and make better treatment decisions.
RN: Why did ArthritisPower recently update their interface?
DC: We're always looking to improve the platform; we improved certain features from version 1 to version 2. And then for version 3, we went through a design process and we took the insights from patients. Like everything we do at the Global Healthy Living Foundation, we try to make patients at the center. And for this process, we interviewed patients in a structured way, both for what was working for version 2 of ArthritisPower, and what patients were using for other apps that they're using to help track the symptoms of their condition. We synthesized all of that data and we found we have a lot of insights, a lot of things that we can improve and features that we can add. And so, we took that data, and we crafted it into a survey that we then deployed to the ArthritisPower community to see if those insights those learnings from those interviews were generalizable to the rest of the population. We found that we had opportunity to make improvements, make the app better, and make it more patient-friendly.
