How We Collect Data

Flaredown collects data using a different set of self-reportable questions for each illness, which researchers have created to quantify the severity of a patient's condition (see the CDAI or Rapid3). The user's answers are weighted and added together to create a single score, which Flaredown graphs over time.

Because Flaredown uses these disease activity indices its data comes in a format that is accessible to research. We believe this will sidestep the "silo" problem common to health data, and allow us to test new treatments and triggers against metrics that are already widely accepted by the medical community.

By tracking their illness, Flaredown users are performing N-of-1 trials to understand the effects of symptom triggers and treatments. It's been demonstrated that aggregating N-of-1 trials is an effective way to study treatment efficacy at the population level:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2963698/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20933365

If a disease activity index doesn't exist for a given condition, Flaredown defaults to a subjective 1-10 scale in which the user simply indicates how severe they feel their illness is that day. We are looking into generalized Patient-Reported Outcome Measures to cover these situations in the future.

Your Privacy

Using Flaredown, you'll be sending us some of your most sensitive medical information and we want you to rest easy knowing that it will indeed stay private. During normal use of Flaredown you're given options regarding your data and how it will be used within Flaredown (in accordance with our Privacy Policy), but we've also got your back on security. Here is an overview of some of the big steps we take to protect against things like misuse, unauthorized access or loss of data. If you have particular questions please send us an email: support@flaredown.com.