Map & Track Patient Pain with ReliefinSite™

The Geek factor entrapped me right from the nostalgic days of the MS-DOS, QBASIC and 386 Microprocessors and it's only natural for me to love it when Geekdom come to medicine :-)


Recently checked out a Web 2.0 pain-mapping application developed by Reliefinsite.com™ which is a "patented, secure, HIPAA-compliant web-based platform that provides visually-oriented pain assessment and tracking". A basic account is free while the premium, paid account has more nifty features such as multi-pain graphing and a menses tracking tool for females.

The idea is that patients can create their own pain maps and medication intake on a daily input basis using an interactive calendar, which can be shared with a care-provider physician over the Internet. I tried mapping my back pain areas (Yeah, the computer mouse takes it's toll) - was easy to use, cool looking and report generation was a breeze too.

I wondered if a cool multimedia display of pain areas was more functionally useful for the physician than the usual textual medical notes, I guess it does give the patient a chance to precisely pinpoint the pain location. But yeah... the other features that certainly will add value are :

1. Complete record of medications and Reminder prompts to patients to make entries after intake - should improve compliance
2. Correlating the intake of pain-killers to patients pain graphs and titrating / adjusting doses
3. Real-time case-based clinical Research ! The data could be mined to compare the effectiveness of drug combinations for a given condition in a patient of specific backgrounds -


The last point I mentioned above is what excites me the most about Health IT and Health 2.0 Revovution - Medicine is essentially an evidence-based science and the ability to harvest real time clinical data and generating knowledge at the click of a mouse will dramatically improve the speed of evidence-based clinical research ! Hopefully all these will one day plug-in to the National Health IT Infrastructure.

Hmmm..reflecting further, such Health 2.0 Tools are shifting the concious awareness of health maintenance into the hands of the patient or the consumer, a vital partner to the envisioned consumer-driven health care era that the United States is trying to move into.

Now, if only pain data input could also be made real time from the body to the computer via USB ;-)


ReliefinSite™.com


Also Read:

- Pain Medicine Specialist Physician Salaries in USA