Pain is a subjective symptom that is often hard to correctly diagnose and treat on long-term basis. It’s the focus of ReliefInsite– an online web diary for patients with chronic pain. The idea is first to provide a simple platform to record and store pain-related data and provide easy-to-interpret analysis to patients. Secondly, this enables a longitudinal insight for providers into the key medical details that can help their on-going pain treatment.
The functionality includes a neat body map (screenshot below), notes and basic reporting. The business model includes a premium service (starting at $6.95 for 1 month) that exapnds the list of features to symptoms, reminders, advanced reports etc.
The concept falls in the realm of ‘disease management‘ solutions and is shows what future Healthcare IT solutions are going to be: specific and customized. An aggregation of tools like ReliefInsite can jumpstart a real PHR trend, one that is sustainable. Better still, this begs to be an application on the upcoming PHR platforms like Google Health and/or Microsoft Healthvault.
Update: On Feb 16, 2010 Relief In Site was acquired by PatientsLikeMe. It’s makes a lot of sense, in my view.