Medable, a Palo Alto-based healthcare app and analytics platform, today announced the launch of Axon, a SmartStudy system that enables health experts–researchers, physicians, and others–to build ResearchKit apps without a developer in a matter of hours. By leveraging ResearchKit’s platform, Axon unlocks the potential of health professionals to directly collect patient data at massive scale through dedicated mobile apps reducing development time from six months to one day.
While there are a lot of wellness apps on the market, researchers (who are held to regulatory standards) haven’t always been able to create studies and apps that meet higher safety-security-privacy requirements. Mobile technology has created a lot of potential in healthcare research, but researchers have struggled to create mobile health studies and apps because of funding requirements, complex development cycles, and data security and accessibility issues.
Most studies cost $200,000 in investment and a six-month development cycle. The various roadblocks have stifled clinically-driven health studies and apps from being developed. Mobile has the potential to breakdown geographic barriers and enable unprecedented global health studies, but there are significant challenges.
How It Works
Axon provides an easy to use, point and click interface that connects ResearchKit — Apple’s open source user interface for mobile clinical studies — and additional capabilities, with Medable’s HIPAA compliant platform to rapidly create and launch clinical study apps, without writing any code and easily submit to the App Store or Google Play. Axon enables disease prediction models to be generated from study data, paving the way for algorithmic and personalized medicine — enabling health professionals to become true innovators.
“When you look at what we really know about health and disease, it’s limited. Mobile-enabled data collection has the potential to dramatically expand our understanding of health and disease, and it starts by allowing health professionals to leverage mobile to conduct studies at massive scale, without traditional geographic barriers, ushering in a new era of patient-generated data,” said Dr. Michelle Longmire, CEO and co-founder, Medable in a statement. “Axon makes ResearchKit and the power of mobile immediately accessible to not only health professionals, but to everyone around the world by removing costly development barriers and by addressing data security and regulatory requirements. As a physician, I think Axon is truly transformative. Wide adoption of mobile in clinical studies will dramatically accelerate our understanding of health and disease through studies with larger numbers that are more representative of patient demographics and new types of health data.”
“We are at the beginning of a major transformation in how we study human health and what we use to conduct medical research,” said Dr. Longmire. “The iPhone and mHealth applications will become integral to this process in the near future, and researchers leveraging Axon are leading the way in this critical transformation.”
During the past year, Medable worked with researchers across the world to develop mobile apps to study health and disease. Medable recognized the potential for mobile to enable a new era of health applications with patient-physician connectivity, the collection of patient-generated data at scale and Apple’s ResearchKit as a means to engage massive study participation and to collect new kinds of patient data from mobile devices.
