Earlier this week, Chicago-based Pathize Health unveiled its latest app that helps patients living with long Covid better manage their fatigue by collecting real-time data. This is achieved through connectivity to the Apple Watch, allowing patients to extend data into key spaces. such as energy management, activity logging, and medication compliance.
Like many post-infectious syndromes such as MS, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome, long Covid is a disease that is misunderstood by today’s doctors and leaves patients worried and alone.
The term is used to describe long-lasting symptoms that persist long after the Covid infection has disappeared and include, but are limited to, excessive fatigue, shortness of breath, muscle aches, and loss of smell.
That doctors are so ignorant about long Covid is not surprising. After all, the virus itself only became known a few years ago, and like the acute form of the disease, long Covid has also been marred by a politicization that has made the already murky waters even murkier. turbid.
Last week, Britain’s national inquiry into the pandemic found that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was running the country at the time and was one of the first world leaders to test positive, had referred to lengthy profanities about Covid in an October 2020 government document, adding further an observation that “this is Gulf War syndrome”.
A fast forward 3 years and a long Covid, officially known as post-acute Covid sequelae, is widely recognised in the medical profession. It has its own International Classification of Diseases code. In addition, a 2020 Harvard economist, David Cutler, reported that 12-17 100% of Covid patients were living with a long-term illness, with a potential loss of wages in the U. S. hard labor market. UU. de $1 trillion in five years.
Pathize Health is the brainchild of co-founders Alex Bahram and Mason Secky-Koebel, who are the Chicago-based company’s chief executive officers and chief technology officer, respectively. Bahram, now 24, has suffered from chronic fatigue after beginning to experience respiratory disorders at the age of 16. After two years of insomnia and exhausting fatigue, he was finally diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, which causes abnormal heart rate fluctuations, dizziness and fatigue. This was followed by an additional diagnosis of myalgic encephalomyelitis.
Now back to about 90% of his previous role after years of trying other drugs and energy management regimens, Bahram needs to help jumpstart the process of understanding and managing fatigue for patients living with situations like long Covid through physical support. Powerful data. Detailed data on the day’s energy expenditure and how other activities influence it.
“One of the things I’ve been taught in living with my illness is that there are certain facets of control that only inform you through blood, sweat and tears until you spend enough time reading well and allow you to push things forward. and when you want to slow down, as well as what your triggers are,” says Bahran.
“What we’re hoping to do with Pathize is take all of this data and turn it into something that can be learned and translated. It’s almost like creating a new manual on how patients live their lives and helping other people reduce the time it takes to track them down. your manual, because everyone is unique.
Alex Bahram (right) and Mason Secky-Koebel, co-founders of Pathize Health
Ultimately, it was the onset of long Covid that brought scalability to this business of managing post-viral situations involving symptoms of what’s known as post-exertional malaise, and the early-stage company received venture capital investment from Drive Capital.
Currently only available on iOS alongside Apple Watch, the main metric recorded through Pathize is center frequency, as it provides an applicable indicator to predict occasions such as power outages. In the case of Pathize, unlike that of fitness trackers, the anaerobic baseline is specially adjusted for other people living with chronic fatigue situations and users can visualize how much time they spend above this baseline during the day, as well as the resulting activities: force spikes or blackouts.
Naturally, this type of data is favorable for stimulation and self-control, but an undeniable added advantage is the ability to share graphically generated data from knowledge with treating physicians to give them unprecedented insight into how energy-limiting situations affect their patients. day-to-day life. Lives.
“Long Covid is a difficult disease for patients and doctors to manage. Since the symptoms of long Covid can vary in nature and severity, it would be helpful to have a way for patients to track their symptoms and identify patterns. In addition, keep in mind that “interventions could possibly have helped or could not help in the control of attention. Preparing this data for any medical appointment would allow for more productive visits,” says Dr. Schulz. Rasika Karnik, medical director of the COVID Recovery Clinic at the University of Chicago.
Bahram explains further: “We need to help meet patients and clinicians where they are by creating teams that allow for the sharing of very specific patient data to actually tell those clinical journeys.
In the long term, Pathize is expected to expand to an even more anticipated size that will allow patients to anticipate long-term power outages well in advance and identify optimal periods to be able to exceed their benchmark while minimizing the threat of falls. . . . It would possibly also be conceivable to incorporate software know-how into electronic medical records.
Although, no doubt, due to its relative novelty, the long Covid landscape will likely remain somewhat murky for some time; Pathize, however, may help shed more light on Americans navigating choppy, dark and, for now, commonly uncharted waters.