About our project
Together is a finalist in the NCI/ONC Crowds Care 4 Cancer Challenge: Supporting Survivors. The contest will be judged on a number of factors, among the most important is “co-design” with patients and care providers. This means we really need your feedback on what we are building. Please either make comments in the comments section or email us directly. We would love to hear from you!
Note: All donations are tax deductible thanks to a partnership with the Cancer101 Foundation.
The Problem We Seek to Solve:
The number of cancer survivors in the United States is currently estimated at 14 million and is expected to increase significantly with the aging of the United States population. Cancer survivors experience a host of long-term and late effects that require coordinated follow-up care after completion of primary treatment for cancer. Despite significant progress in cancer treatment, the complex, often fragmented state of end-of-treatment care may lead to harmful breakdowns in patient-provider communication and follow-up care for cancer survivors.
Enabling better communication, exchange of data, utilization of data, and care coordination can help improve end-of-treatment consultations and care planning for cancer survivors. Innovative new approaches are needed to assist patients and their support networks use information from their providers and care plans to facilitate cancer follow-up care that is comprehensive, coordinated, and of high-quality.
Additionally, the data from cancer survivors is housed in EMR silos across the country. The advances in understanding cancer that could be gleaned from this invaluable data cannot be understated. We need a technology platform that enables analytics technologies to be applied to Survivor data.
Thanks to the support of the ONC/ NCI Crowds Care for Cancer: Supporting Survivors Challenge we will build the Together prototype. To Go Big we need your help though.
After making great progress on our own, now we have won another $5,000 in funding and could win another $25,000. Our plan is to Go Big with this application development. For example, we chose MongoDB rather than mysql. Why? Because we know we need to integrate and assimilate large amounts of data to do this right. We also want to do a clinical trial. To make the robust solution ready for implementation in any Oncologists office or hospital, integrate with every device, and be interoperable with numerous EHRs there is a right way to do things and that is our plan.
To be in every Oncology Care Team member’s hands and on every Cancer Survivor’s cell phone we need your help. Please consider helping us in our mission, Together, we can Go Big!
What is Together
With every cancer diagnosis, a new journey begins. From exploring treatment options, determining a treatment plan and undergoing therapy, to the lifetime of survivorship, being a Survivor is a unique and personal journey. Together is a life companion for Survivors. Using Together, patients can collaboratively explore and develop a Care Plan in partnership with their physician, NCCN guidelines, and leading research. Using Together, patients create a Care Team to unite providers for patient-centered, team based care, that removes communication silos. Together provides each patient with a HIPAA compliant data cloud to store, manage, and share essential health data from medical records to body sensors and genomic data.
Enabling Personalized Medicine with Big Data
We see Big Data as Big Hope. Currently, there are 14 million cancer Survivors whose individualized data exists only in ElMR silos across the country. What if every Survivor could share journey data to help other cancer patients? Together enables each Survivor to advance medicine by sharing journey data in the creation of the largest data set related to cancer diagnosis, therapy, and survivorship. In addition to designing and building a beautiful, open, collaborative care application, we also seek to enable and aggregate the Survivor Big Data Set to enable better analytics than ever to tease out new patterns about treatments and how they improve survivorship. Survivor Big Data will be an invaluable tool for clinicians and researchers to advance the understanding and treatment of cancer.
How Together Works
Together enables Cancer Survivors to lead, optimize, and manage healthcare over their lifetimes.
Together was created by a team including Survivors, physicians, and leading developers and designers using the Medable HIPAA-compliant platform. Our goal was to create a tool that would serve as a life companion for Cancer Survivors by providing a platform for patient-centered team based care, care-planning, data accessibility and sharing, with a toolkit for health management and monitoring.
Together helps Survivors from the moment of diagnosis onwards to optimize, and ease health care with the following core functions:
●Collaborative care planning
●Patient-centered, team-based care
●Data sharing and data interoperability
●Personalized disease surveillance and health information
●Medication tracking
●Symptom tracking
●Health tracking and promotion
Here is our latest design, please tell us what you think
Please review the designs for the various screens and functionality. We would love to hear your thoughts on them. Ideally, we ask that you express your thoughts in the comments tab and we will discuss in an open format. You also can feel welcome to email Dr. Longmire directly here. If you don’t see a feature described, maybe we haven’t thought of it yet, so ask away. The time to co-design in now!
We are a mobile app for the ultimate in convenience to be everywhere you are.
We are designed around an open, collaborative care model where Doctors, Patients, and family members are treated as equals and input or support is enabled and valued.
By capturing sensor and vital statistical data, we are not just a care coordination application, we also help people understand and put numbers to their progress, informing their conversations with the care team and enabling the care team to access the data to improve treatment plans and monitor the effectiveness of ongoing protocols. Every patient is different and having this data enables a care plan adapted to each patient, the goal of what is called “Personalized Medicine.” From great data collection, we can get to even greater care at reduced cost.
We utilize “Blue Button” data downloads that allow patients to get their data.
Once again, we look forward to your feedback. Please check the “Updates” tab for new screen designs and let’s here your thoughts in the comments.
How do we know this will work?
The evidence that a solution such as we describe will be effective is strong. Activating patient engagement in care has been robustly associated with improved preventive health behaviors, treatment adherence, and fewer problems with care coordination. Patient activation may be achieved by improving patient knowledge, skills, and confidence in their ability to manage their health and navigate the healthcare system. Specifically, enabling better communication, exchange of data, and care coordination during the transition from specialty to primary care at the end of treatment, including the development of a customized survivorship care plan may help improve cancer survivor outcomes.
How We Help Patients:
Together provides seamless healthcare for Survivors. From diagnosis to the years beyond, Together enables patients to collaboratively develop a Care Plan, access, manage, and share health information, track and share wellness with Misfit Shine and JawBoneUp integration, and receive personalized medicine with 23andMe integration. Together enables Survivors to help others by sharing Journey Data with the Together Go Big Data platform in the creation of the first and largest Survivor Big Database.
How We Help Doctors and the Professional Care Team:
Together Care provides physicians with a treatment planning technology and patient management tool that takes the friction out of patient care while creating invaluable data to advance medicine. Using Together, physicians leverage NCCN guidelines and leading research to create a personalized treatment plan created collaboratively the patient. Together provides seamless patient education, engagement, and team-based connectivity. Together is serious about Big Data – our mission is to create the most robust database about cancer, cancer therapy, and survivorship that can be leveraged for clinical care and research.
How We Help Hospitals, Clinics, and Large Group Practices
Together is built on the Medable Platform, an enterprise healthcare platform that is HIPAA-compliant with HL7 compatibility. Medable has been built by leaders in enterprise healthcare to be the leading, most versatile, and easiest to implement and integrate cloud platform.
Medable offers Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (Saas) to the hospital enterprise and is architected for Health Information Exchange.
Together provides Clinical Partners an essential tool for cancer care planning that attracts and engages patients and longitudinally provides a platform for Meaningful Use and Health Information Exchange.
How We Help Our Partners:
For our Sensor partners, we are creating an API to integrate into and will integrate with select APIs that exist to capture data.
For our Non-profit Commercial Partners (i.e., Cancer 101, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, LIVESTRONG, the American Cancer Society, Leukemia and Lymphoma Society), we offer an invaluable tool that will revolutionize the lives that you care about most.
For Cancer Treatment Centers we offer a way to stay involved with your patients and improve outcomes by giving your care providors and coordinators a valuable new communications tool.
How We Will Spend Your Contributions:
We will spend these funds on a clinical trial to be conducted in partnership with one of our Clinical Partners. The study will enroll 50 newly diagnosed cancer patients and provides each Together and a MisFit Shine. Patients will use Together to lead the development of the Care Plan prior to treatment and throughout treatment and in the first year of Survivorship to coordinate care, share data, and track health status. Outcomes will include patient satisfaction, ease of communication between providers, and timing of detection of change in health status. These data will be published and shared with all backers.
Meet our Partners, See the Rewards!
We have partnered with three great organizations and people already, thanks in part to becoming a finalist in this challenge and going live on MedStartr. These partners embody our ideas and our mission. We hope you love them as much as we do! Collect all three!
Shine Together!
Sonny Vu, the CEO of Misfit Wearables is the man behind the Misfit Shine, a wearable sensor that sends your fitness data to your smart phone. The Shine device is as useful as it is well-designed and raised over $800,000 in an Indiegogo campaign! Michele and Sonny met in October and now they have agreed to integrate the Shine data into the Together application to share healthy data with the doctors and do the pilot study. Sonny has enabled us to offer integrated Shine devices for our campaign, so you can get the Shine here at a great price AND integrated with our application. If applicable, you can even be part of our clinical study! The Shine is beautiful and I think we look more beautiful Together, don’t you?
MXM Jewelery and the Wearable Art you will Love!
We have partnered with MXM Jewelery to produce a wearable piece of art, our iconic symbol representing the power of big data to advance cancer care and help people live Healthily Ever After. We hope you love it as much as we do and will want to don this beautiful lapel pin or necklace to show your support for cancer survivors everywhere.
It looks even better in color!
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Most cell biologists and cancer researchers use “Cell Lines” every day. These are generally derived from cancer cells due to their hard-to-kill nature. This makes them easy to grow and very useful, in a limited way, for research on many aspects of cell function. One of the more common ones is called the HeLa cell line was derived from a woman named Henrietta Lacks, a cancer patient. The cell lines are called “Immortal” because they just keep dividing when normal cells stop. Author Rebecca Skloot wrote Henrietta’s story in a best selling book in 2010. Dr. Longmire worked with HeLa cells (as did founder of MedStartr Alex Fair) when she was doing a study on ovarian cancer and was inspired to reach out to Rebecca. Now, thanks to that relationship, Rebecca has made her book available as a reward on Michelle’s MedStartr project. This exemplifies how patients can help enormously in science and is a tribute to Henrietta Lacks and Patients everywhere that can help advance science and care, and inform our design.
Who We Are:
Together is created by Medable Inc. We are a team of physicians, developers, and designers dedicated to revolutionizing healthcare with tools for machine learning and big data utilization. The Medable platform is a HIPAA compliant platform for sharing medical images and data, designed to act as a host for mobile applications. With API and SDK as well as a world-class design and development team, Medable is ready and able to help any company build out an amazing mobile health solution for a fraction of the typical cost. We have the infrastructure, you just bring the content expertise and your vision and we are happy to help you build upon the foundation we have created. The first application we have released using the platform is called DermTap and can be seen here..
Our Co-Founders
Chief Medical Officer: Michelle Longmire MD, (LinkedIn) Twitter
Michelle is a resident physician at Stanford and is dedicated to empowering patients with ownership of health data and enabling physicians and researchers to utilize big data to advance medicine. Michelle has authored numerous peer-reviewed articles in science and medicine and is working to bridge the gap between the lab bench and bedside with advances in health technology.
Chief Technology Officer: Timothy Smith, (LinkedIn)
Tim founded and grew an enterprise cloud development company from 2 people to now over 25. As CTO, Tim has lead ClosedWon.com from an idea to a leading healthcare enterprise development company. With Tim’s technical guidance, ClosedWon has built cloud enterprise solutions for the largest hospital networks in the United States.
Engineering Lead: James Sas, (LinkedIn)
Team Members and Founding Associates
Fernando Waigandt
Ilenia Notarangelo
Luca Gonnelli
Enabling Infinite Innovations – our API and SDK stategy
We want to enable a host of HIPAA compliant applications and devices to utilize our platform. If you share our vision and want to accelerate your development cycle, please take either our DIY SDK for Medical Devices and Developers for only $99 or for $999 get a package of 9 support hours to help you get going fast. We will even help you design beautifully and give you access to our a few specialized libraries where applicable. We have created the Together App for cancer care, but look forward to developing or partnering with teams focused on all diseases that can be helped with better care coordination, awesome analytics, and good handling of big data. Of particular interest are Diabetes, CHF, Eldercare, homecare, and hospital readmissions solutions. Rare / Orphan disease solutions welcome too.
For App developers, our data and revenue strategy is simple. If you are successful then we participate in your success with a small revenue share and get to help you mine the data for better care. If there are publications we can help with, we want to be part of them too. In exchange we will cut years off your dev cycle and reduce your dev costs by orders of magnitude.
For devices that want to integrate it is even simpler. We won’t charge a thing for usage and we just want to be able to integrate the data for presentation to patients and providers. Similarly, we want to also be able to help analyze the aggregated de-identified data as well and produce better care paradigms as a result, publish papers, improve protocols, yada yada yada. If you have questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.
Thank you for considering assisting us in our mission and believing in our vision. We look forward to hearing from you and working with you in the near future.
Sincerely Yours,
Michelle, Tim, James, Fernando, Ilenia, and Luca
How to Find Us:
Right here! Use that comment option we want a BIG Open Transparent conversation!
Go BIG by tweeting at us too:
Twitter: @TogetherGoBig
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Have a question?
If the info above does not help, you can ask the project creator directly.
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