What is READY?
Capturing patient-reported outcomes to track musculoskeletal and rheumatic conditions can help physicians provide better clinical care. RhEumAtic Disease ActivitY (READY) is an iPad application that can be used by both the patient and clinician to collect data on rheumatic conditions, developed by College of Medicine Research Information Technology in partnership with principal investigator Dr. Jeffrey Curtis.
RIT's Approach to READY
The READY app serves both clinicians and patients, in clinics at The Ohio State University and beyond. Because clinical workflows are varied, RIT worked with researchers to understand how the app would be used, before making enhancements for flexibility, speed and interactive data visualizations.
Flexible workflows
The READY app allows clinicians to calculate ten different scores summarizing rheumatic conditions, but not every clinician using READY uses every score when seeing patients. To make the app flexible, RIT created an interface where each clinician could customize and save the scores they wanted to calculate, reducing the amount of data patients were asked to report and saving time during clinical care.
Fast performance
Depending on how a physician has the app configured, READY may need to calculate up to ten different scores simultaneously. RIT optimized the app to reduce the time needed for those calculations, moving the logic of the program to the backend and providing a seamless user experience for both clinicians and patients.
Data visualization
In order to see how medications affected a patient, researchers needed to compare patient-reported outcome data month to month and over the course of a year. RIT used an existing framework to jump-start development on the app, then added customizations to chart patient trends over time. The READY app also includes interactive visualizations for patients to report their pain, simply by tapping the joint on an illustration of the human body.
Final Deliverable
RIT released the final version of READY to Apple's App Store for researchers at multiple sites to download. In addition to being used in research at Ohio State, READY is currently being used in clinical care at the University of Alabama-Birmingham.