Flaredown is a free web and mobile app that helps patients track and visualize their illness, treatments, and symptom triggers so that they can understand how their choices affect their health.
Utilizing metrics created by medical researchers to measure illness severity allows Flaredown to gather data in a research-friendly format that can be used to evaluate treatments in the real world, and find the best new ones to be shared with patients everywhere.
We could do a better job treating chronic illness.
Standard procedure for treating a chronic condition is to check in with a doctor every couple of months for about 15 minutes. In that short period the patient has to try to communicate an immense amount of information about the time since their last appointment, and the doctor has to make decisions that will have a huge impact… read more
Logan Merriam was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease at the age of 15. He spent the next six years working with his doctors to treat the illness, with little success. By then he had tried every medication on the market, and when his disease relapsed his doctor suggested surgical removal of the affected organs.
Unwilling to take that step, and at the end of the line with… read more
Flaredown is a combination of open-ended patient focused tracking combined with disease scoring questionnaires developed by doctors and medical researchers. In this way we provide a bridge between medical data and patient lifestyle data— something we believe needs much more attention. That being said, the correlations and meaning that can be drawn from Flaredown data depends much on the rigor of the patient in how much and how often they track. For a more in depth explanation of data collection and it's scientific relevance, see our data page.
Flaredown will always be free to use.
Flaredown is an assistant in researching your own illness. There is only so much time to discuss your symptoms and the possible causes with your doctor and they can't be there to advise you on every aspect of your lifestyle. Flaredown intends to help the patient collect more and better information about their illness so that, in combination with their doctor, they can make much more informed decisions.
So far the response has been fantastic! Doctors know that chronic illness is a complex puzzle and that while the patient is living with the condition, their self-reporting once a month (or less often) is a process fraught with memory error, bias and unrelated sentiment. Flaredown presents a reliable history that doctors can make informed decisions on.
Flaredown does not give medical advice, but encourages patients to explore the scope of their lifestyle in narrowing down the triggers of their disease. Flaredown is for tracking and noting the effects of a patient's lifestyle, and while we hope this yields a clear picture of symptom triggers, health decisions should always be in combination with a doctor.
Yes, the Flaredown system was built to be flexible and falls into "health tracking" category of applications. We may even have a general health 'catalog' down the line. But we've chosen to concentrate on chronic illness so we can maintain a laser focus on solving that problem.
As a patient, it's really simple: just check in once a day (or less often, depending on your disease) and note the things you think could be causing your disease to worsen. Over time, you'll be building a detailed medical history that your doctor can help you decode and make decisions on.
Most chronic diseases follow a pattern of "triggers" and "flareups". In short, there are lifestyle related causes for the severity of your disease, perhaps food or exercise or stress. The basis of Flaredown is to find what triggers cause your flareups so you can avoid them, or alleviate them through treatments you can verify.
Stress, diet, exercise, vitamins and specific pharmaceuticals will all be typical things to track with Flaredown, but there is a bigger picture as well... We know that chronic disease patients often run into the boundaries of existing medical knowledge and continue searching. There are many areas that medical research has yet to explore or does not have the resource to explore properly. We hope that Flaredown will enable patients to explore these areas (individually and in aggregate) in an organized fashion such that brings real relief to chronic disease and informs medicals researchers of promising avenues to travel.
In the development corner, we use Ruby on Rails combined with Ember JS in hopes of delivering a truly incredible user experience. Data science is currently blossoming in the web world, and we are adamant about weaving data science technology into the fabric Flaredown. Our biggest asset is a keen sense of design and considering it first in all parts of the project. We consider the proper balance of development, data and design a rubric for the success of Flaredown.