News
& Blog

We are happy to announce that we’ve launched our project with C3N — the Collaborative Chronic Care Network.

The Ginger.io / C3N collaborative mHealth study will connect patients, clinicians and researchers, and test a new model for chronic care. Our goal is to use smartphones to help doctors passively capture the experiences of adolescents who are managing their inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). We hope to create a tool that can help patients anticipate when their symptoms might flare up and take action to prevent further pain.

We interviewed Dr. Michael Seid, the principal investigator of the study, about the joint project. Dr. Seid believes that “mobile phones and passive sensors will revolutionize health management and support for chronic patients”. More here:

Space is limited. Sign-up here today!

Electronic health records (EHR) are a fantastic tool for physicians. They simplify patient care by keeping track of things like proper medication dosage or changing lab values. While EHRs free physicians from the constraint of paper, they cannot escape certain structural weaknesses within the US health care system. If there isn’t a clinical incentive tied to billing to record certain data, it usually lacks EHR support. Case in point: current requirements require physicians to record a certain number of bullet points about a patient’s history and physical exam.

The best example of this lack of support was discussed in my last blog post (Capturing Patient Reported Outcomes to Improve Quality of Life). There is no codification for “reduced quality of life” or clinical infrastructure to track these subjective measures. But these observations of daily living (ODLs) have gained traction in recent studies, making it hard to argue that any single physiological variable is more relevant for a patient’s life.

A recently published article in Health Affairs raises a call to action to treat patient-reported measures with as much seriousness as blood pressure or glucose levels in EHRs. The authors point out excellent examples of widely used psychosocial surveys that track crucially important behaviors for health such as depression (the PHQ-9) and alcohol use (AUDIT).

Patient’s scores on these surveys can be tracked over time and have been shown in some studies to correlate well with severity of illness. The problem is that besides a few notable exceptions that the article cites, no EHR systems provide support for recording and tracking any psychosocial variables over time, even ones as well validated as the PHQ-9.

There are many reasons why this is true, but two major ideas stand out to me. First there is a cultural aversion in medicine to trusting “soft”, or qualitative data, though we rely heavily on it. Second, and possibly more important in getting this system off the ground, there is no billing infrastructure to reimburse delivering a survey the same way we get reimbursed for gathering a lab test.

We cannot forget that while digital records provide ease of access, it is not a free service. Much like when you do a Google search, someone somewhere has to pay for it.

How can we change the system to make a difference? I think the authors of this article make a first step by calling out the huge gap in implementation of psychosocial measures in EHR systems. The next step may be empowering patients to feel comfortable sharing their subjective quality of life, mood and behaviors with doctors. It is vital they understand the importance of measuring these qualitative aspects of their life.

The digital health revolution puts some of this power in the patient’s hands and enables physicians to track any variables that patients find important over time. There is still a great deal of work to be done, but the possibilities to improve patient care are incredibly exciting.

Traditionally, when you visit a doctor’s office and report an injury or a sickness, you provide a momentary snapshot of your health. Or at least, what you remember or feel while in the office. But the digital health movement will change that.

“Now, more doctors are inquiring about their patients’ pain, difficulty accomplishing everyday activities, embarrassment about a condition and other issues that physicians traditionally haven’t considered,” says Laura Landro, author of a recent Wall Street Journal article.

As a physician, I find the most striking aspect of the article is that this idea should be news at all. The intangible aspects of our daily life are linked to our happiness. As a physician, I believe  measurement of patient-reported observations like quality of life should be incorporated into our clinical decisions.

Thankfully, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are rapidly expanding a program called PROMIS (Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System) to create a national standard for measuring the intangibles, our daily quality of life. While these efforts are a strong first step, current approaches still suffer from poor survey completion rates and biases.

Measuring what matters to patients can help health care in the US focus on what actually matters: improving quality of life for patients. But it’s hard to learn how to improve anything without learning to measure it first. We’re trying to change that here at Ginger.io.

Imagine what it would be like walk into a doctor’s office where you both have a better idea of how you’re feeling. We hope that we can add a layer of depth to this movement by providing information on an objective, continuous, and near real-time scale.

Exciting news! Ginger.io was recently featured in a video in the Technology Quarterly of The Economist (March 1st edition).  The article describes the Quantified Self (QS) movement, and the various approaches to self-tracking being developed by emerging health tech startups.

We are honored to have been highlighted amongst some other great QS startups. We had a great time filming the Ginger.io story. We thank all of you who have sent us e-mail inquiries in response, and look forward to hearing from more of you!

Read the full story here.

If you are interested in testing or participating in the Ginger.io pilot program please tell us more!

We are excited to announce that Pipette will be joining Ginger.io, and delighted to welcome Ryan Panchadsaram and Jimmy Do to our team. The Pipette team understands the problem of patient-reported outcomes for readmissions in healthcare. By combining their expertise with our passive sensing technology, we can improve our models of patient behavior.

The two recently completed the Rock Health program, a seed accelerator for healthcare startups. We can’t wait for them to join us to achieve our vision together.

Read the full story here! Extra credit if you guess the “Easter Egg” above.

SXSW Study
We’re conducting a SXSW-wide study on how your behavior impacts your social and mental health. We’ve got 50 spots open for this study. Answer three questions and we’ll notify you if you’re accepted. Visit ginger.io/research to learn more.

Data / Privacy Panel
Better yet, attend How STD’s Can Be Good For Your Health (March 11 at 11:00a-12:00p) with our friends from Edelman, the National Library of Medicine, the Health Privacy Project, and Johns Hopkins. We’ll unveil some fascinating stats from an internal study with our very own, Anmol Madan. Trust us, you won’t want to miss this!

Digital Health Panel
Come hear our very own, Ryan Panchadsaram (@rypan) and our friends from Rock Health, HealthTap, and others at the Future of Digital Health panel (March 12 at 11:00a-12:00p).

Health Accelerator
And finally, we’ll be presenting at the SXSW Accelerator (March 12 at 3:30-4:30pm). Watch as we pitch our new Behavioral Analytics Platform, and come cheer us on.

We’re rolling in strong. Anmol (@anmol_madan), Brett (@brettstil), Ryan (@rypan), and Karan (@kvsingh) will be at SXSW Interactive from March 9 – 13 this year! Ping @ginger_io if you’ll be in town — we’d love to meet.

Austin, here we come!

Thanks to all of you, Ginger.io had an incredible 2011. Boston TechStars brought us new friends, fans and support, and we hope to keep that momentum going in the new year. We can’t thank you enough, and we’ll continue developing our behavior platform to improve health for researchers, providers, and patients. Here are some highlights from 2011.

In the News
Ginger.io received an generous amount of media attention in 2011, thanks to our new friends at Bloomberg Businessweek, FastCompany, Smarter Planet, Xconomy and others. Medical professionals and patients are serious about using new technology for better health care, and this coverage has helped us spread the word.

We won first place in the Data Design Diabetes competition, a nationwide challenge which rewards innovations in managing diabetes. We are now partnering with providers in deploying an intelligent caregiver alerting system.

Our Partners
After Demo Day at Techstars, we raised $1.7 million in seed financing. We are using the funding to ramp up engineering and product development in 2012. Special thanks to True Ventures, Mitch Kapor and others in Boston, New York and San Francisco for helping us grow our technology platform.

Company Growth
We’ve got some incredible new people on our team, and would like to welcome them officially:

• Dr. Sai Moturu (Data Scientist): former researcher from the MIT Media Lab with deep experience modelling human behavior
• Lara Sinicropi-Yao (Account Manager): former clinical trial manager at Mass General Hospital and Sanofi Aventis, focused on cancer and mental health research
• Sabih Mir (User Experience Designer): 10+ years experience in design working to build compelling enterprise and consumer web platforms
• Mahesh Sharma (Mobile Engineer): formerly from Microsoft and current mobile stig
• Brett Stilwell (Software Engineer): deep ties to the Boston Django community with experience in Python, Javascript, jQuery

What Comes Next?
In January, we launched the Ginger.io Behavior Platform in closed beta, and look forward to developing it with our new enterprise partners, individual researchers, and clinicians. While we were sad to leave our friends at Techstars / Dogpatch Labs Cambridge, we are excited to become a part of the Cambridge Innovation Center. Our new office is at the CIC in Kendall square (1 Broadway, 7th Floor).

If 2012 is anything like this past year, we are in for quite a ride. Again, we would like to thank all of our friends, family, and supporters. We could not have succeeded without you!

Best of luck in 2012 from the the Ginger.io Team!

We’re very pleased to share that we have been named the winner of the Sanofi-Aventis Data, Design, Diabetes Innovation Challenge. The announcement coincides with World Diabetes Day, which aims to raise awareness around diabetes in order to stem the tide of this devastating epidemic.

We are honored to receive this award, and would like to take this opportunity to thank sanofi-aventis for their leadership in catalyzing innovation to improve the lives of those with diabetes. We would also like to recognize Chewable and all of the other DDD Challenge participants for pioneering innovative new technologies, products and services we wholeheartedly believe will make a difference.

We’re also humbled by the magnitude of the challenge collectively faced by all who strive to combat this deadly epidemic. It is our hope and our aim to develop innovative solutions that will serve as one piece of a broader puzzle, and we anticipate working hand-in-hand with myriad collaborators in this pursuit.

We have and will continue to work hard to develop technological solutions to improve care and quality of life for persons with diabetes, and are grateful for this award that will substantially accelerate our ability to do so.

Much love to the community for your support!

Here at Ginger.io we are all about big data – data that can provide meaningful insights about health symptoms and outcomes. Sai Moturu, our newest team member, joins us as an expert in data science to help us determine those valuable insights that can help you lead a healthier life.

Sai received his PhD in Computer Science from Arizona State University and recently completed a two-year postdoctoral stint at the MIT Media Lab focused on examining how our health and wellness are affected by behavioral factors, which are in turn influenced by the social and contextual environment. Sai will be joining us regularly on this blog to share interesting analytical findings, to comment on the ‘big data analytics’ space, and to share general Ginger.io data trends.

Ginger Bytes about Sai:

• Is a foodie and loves dark chocolate, seafood and gelato
• Is a cinephile and lists Quentin Tarantino among his favorite filmmakers
• Is not particularly fond of ginger as an ingredient in his food but enjoys an Indo-Chinese dish called Ginger Chicken
• Is surprisingly fond of the Boston weather, from the winter snow to the fall colors to the spring bloom
• Is known to break into a Bollywood dance routine when he is particularly upbeat

This entry was originally posted in the Data Design Diabetes challenge blog.

This week, finalist Ginger.io explains how they use big data and passive monitoring to support people living with diabetes.

At Ginger.io (pronounced “ginger-eye-oh”), we’re all about big data and better health. We are strong believers in passively harnessing digital traces of behavior to develop meaningful insights into your health. For people living with diabetes, our goal is to provide an automated “check engine light,” activating a social support network that can help individuals stay on track.

We’re still early in our development and are traveling up a steep learning curve. Here are some of the lessons we’ve learned so far.

Find Your Passion

We found ours. We have family and friends that deal with diabetes on a daily basis. Early detection and proper treatment are critical in addressing this national public health crisis. As the prevalence of diabetes grows, it has become clear to us that there are few issues which are more important to the health of our country and the world. This passion and frustration with the current state of affairs helps us power through the sleepless nights and inevitable setbacks and push forward to create a better product.

The issue deserves our creative energy. We intend to help people cope with their condition as well as help them care. We believe information equals advantage, and with the right information people can take control of their health.

Follow the data. And your heart.

Join (or Build) a Movement

Healthcare in the U.S. is broken. There has to be a better way to treat those that are ill and keep the rest healthy. Fortunately, many in this country share the sentiment and the movement is growing. We know innovation occurs at the intersection of disciplines and the juncture between healthcare and technology is no exception. More and more people are “hacking medicine”. As recent MIT graduates, it’s in our DNA. By leveraging technology and an interactive approach, we can help drive down costs while improving access to quality care. Through partnership with others who share that vision, we can move the community forward.

Worry less about competition. This is a big space. Focus on solving one problem really well and the rest will flow.

Find Mentors Early

We’ve experienced the importance of great advice in guiding our product development. Fortunately, the Innovation Challenge connected us with some fantastic advisers, including Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie) and Richard Banfield (@freshtilledsoil). They helped us hone in on two key re-design goals from our early concepts, personalization and simplicity. While healthcare has traditionally moved slowly, there is hope. We found champions here in Cambridge, MA and across the country who want to help.

Find early adopters that can get you off the ground quickly, learn from them, and enable them to help champion your cause with others.

Get Outside

As Steve Blank reminds us, “no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” Real, uncut feedback is both daunting and rewarding. And thanks to your support, we’re getting a whole lot of it. For example, as finalists of the DDD challenge, we get a chance to gather feedback from the community in a month-long community uptake exercise. Get involved in your target community and take a walk in their shoes, just like we did when, inspired by the MIT Age Lab, we walked around with pins and needles in our shoes to simulate diabetic neuropathy.

Develop experiments, test your hypotheses, and remind yourself that this is about people.

Aim High

Do something meaningful. We see big opportunities to make an impact at scale through health tech entrepreneurship. Our ability to harness mobile data has applications beyond health, but ultimately we are about understanding our communities and the people living in them. We see implications for massive, passive behavior data to improve public health delivery, from marshaling medical resources to identifying epidemics. And we see a chance to advance the state of clinical research and understanding for how we develop new, more personalized treatments. This mission has helped us recruit new teammates and new resources to accelerate our momentum.

There’s a lot to fix. Do your part. You may be surprised at who’s willing to join you for the ride.

Thanks, Team DDD!

Regardless of your business model, being patient centered should be your true north. The DDD team has given us a fantastic opportunity to maintain this cardinal direction. A big thank you for giving us a chance to take this journey. We’re honored to be part of these early efforts, and have taken big strides in the past few months. Look out for exciting new developments as we continue on our journey.