Friday, October 27, 2017

Amazing Apps: Trayt

Trayt is for parents, caregivers and physicians who care for people with neurodevelopmental and other brain and behavioral disorders. Its unique and proprietary approach uncovers connections between the brain, body and behavior of these patients, and enables more accurate patient assessment, targeted treatments, and improved outcomes that can significantly reduce healthcare costs across the entire system of care. Trayt is accepting applications from parents who wish to participate in a pilot study.
Based in Silicon Valley, Trayt was founded by people with first-hand experience of the challenges and frustrations of caring for people with these disorders.
“We are all different, yet the conventions of healthcare often mean that we are treated the same. Trayt unearths what’s unique about each of us by tracking and aggregating observations from parents, other caregivers and physicians, and then analyzing this data to identify specific underlying diseases, reveal causal relationships between two or more chronic conditions, and inform the best treatment for that person,” said Malekeh Amini, CEO and founder of Trayt. “We’ve assembled a team of experts, and partnered with leading clinics to optimize our analytic models. Over larger data sets, we hope to predict how a patient will react to a treatment before it’s even prescribed.” 
Feinstein, Trayt’s chief medical officer, sees parents of these kids as valuable allies in ensuring patient-centered outcomes. “As a physician, I have experienced the frustration of parents with the fragmentation of care they receive from a variety of specialists, the failure to integrate the medical with the behavioral aspects of their children’s problems, and the frequent failure of care providers to target for treatment the symptoms that parents identify as the most urgent. Parents should be in the driver’s seat in championing the personalized care of their children. It is our job to support them in doing this, with all the means at our disposal.”
The Trayt system comprises three elements:
  1. Patients and caregivers use the Trayt track-and-map mobile app to record daily treatments and observations. Trayt’s analytic engine uses this data to provide caregivers with tips, pointers and a daily roadmap to improve the long-term health of their child or patient.
  2. clinical decision support portal that gives physicians and therapists real-time access to daily patient data and outcomes to enable early intervention and better diagnostics, improved clinical efficiency, and higher physician revenues.
  3. Down the road, the Trayt platform will enable faster, better, and cheaper data collection during clinical trials, significantly reducing data errors and trial costs for pharmaceutical companies while increasing patient retention and improving trial data quality.
I had a chance to interview Trayt CEO Malekeh Amini to learn more.
 
Q. Why was Trayt created?
A. I wanted to create a tool that provided a roadmap for families to properly care for the children and to improve children’s long-term health. The only way this was possible was to collect comprehensive and comorbid data on patients, create tools to measure outcomes, and share this data across the system of care. I had been in healthcare all my life and I knew this was a pain point for families that nobody seemed to be addressing.
Seeing the poor outcomes resulting from each care provider treating individual symptoms rather than taking a comprehensive view of all aspects of my son’s life and issues reinforced my belief that effective care requires a complete view of the patient, including everything that is unique about that person.

Q. About our research and product design.
A. Our product is based on research conducted by our scientific team led by our Chief Medical Officer Dr. Carl Feinstein at Stanford University. Dr. Feinstein founded the Stanford Autism Center at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and also served as the director of Stanford’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Tray also has scientific and clinical  partnerships with the key academic institutions and leading clinics to improve the content and the analytic engine of the application. We have used validated and evidence-based resources as the foundation for the content, including the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and other research conducted by thought-leading academic institutions.

Q. Why is data collection helpful for families raising a child with autism or ADHD?
A. We knew we needed data of both high quality and quantity to make this app valuable for improving overall treatments. In order to achieve that goal, we needed to be relevant to users and create an app that would keep families and physicians engaged on an on-going basis. Our ultimate goal is to improve our analytical engines and create predictive models for treating patients. We realized quickly that our immediate focus had to be on creating the right user experience and user interaction that would provide the data we need.
Data privacy is our highest priority and concern, and data security is an element of that consideration. A key member of our team is our compliance officer, and has led all efforts concerning data privacy and security, including our cloud infrastructure. We have established dedicated instances on AWS. We ensure encryption at rest and in transit — on aggregate content and at individual record level. Our chief architect for the app comes to us from the security and IoT industry; his expertise is in creating, integrating and managing personal content at scale.

We are early in the process and we don’t have a critical mass of data to show trends that are statistically valid. We have however seen initial results in small populations that are encouraging. Where we have seen interesting trends is in day-to-day care and parent awareness. Once we roll out our pilot program across a larger patient population, we hope to see these trends with more accuracy and publish those results.

Additional Q&As
Q. URLs of where it's sold.
A. For now, the Trayt app will not be in the iTunes App Store, but will be available to parents who participate in the pilot.
Q. How do people apply for the pilot?
A. Please go to trayt.io on or after 10/25 and follow the link to the pilot program enrollment page.
Q. How will they download the app, once selected for participation?
A. Participants will need an iOS device. We will provide access to the app using Apple Test Flight.

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