How I Use GI Monitor

How I Use GI Monitor

Remember the old Hair Club for Men commercials? Well, I am not only the President of WellApps, I’m also a patient. ☺ So I use GI Monitor everyday. The tricky part about developing an application for patients with chronic illnesses is that symptoms vary. We do our best to make GI monitor as flexible as possible (we will have a custom symptom logger in our next release), and we will continue to monitor patient feedback for our development roadmap. As I always tell everyone, our service must serve the patients, first and foremost.

I thought it might be useful to explain how I use GI Monitor. I have left-sided UC and I’m in the middle of a flare that has lasted for about 8 months. I log my stool frequency and attributes as well as my pain on a daily basis. I don’t log my meals or my stress. The reason I choose to log these symptoms regularly (particularly urgency) is because they really determine my “quality of life”. This assessment will, of course, be different for every individual. In addition to logging these symptoms, I am very diligent about keeping my medications and dosages current. The reason for this is because my doctor constantly tweaks my meds to get my condition under control. Over the last 8 months, Prednisone has kept my condition under control. But as I’m sure many of you know, Prednisone comes with its consequences…and I am constantly trying to get off of it. However, every time I reach a certain dosage of Prednisone, the symptoms that are important to my quality of life deteriorate. I always know the exact dosage, timing and how the symptoms worsen because of GI Monitor. From wellapps.com on the My Status tab, I print my reports and bring them to my doctor so he can adjust the meds accordingly. This helps the tweaking process and also keeps me aware of my condition. It is also important that this information is permanently recorded for me so that future flares can be addressed quickly with historical reference. On a personal note, my doc has recently optimized my 6PM and we are hoping that it can take over for the Prednisone soon…so keep your fingers crossed!

My point is that there are many ways to use GI Monitor. Many patients find it useful to log meals and stress to see how these affect their stool frequency and attributes. We are constantly developing ways to make all of this data as useful as possible to patients (charting, various reporting views, etc.). But I can’t stress this last point enough. There is no better way to shape an application’s development roadmap than monitoring user feedback. It doesn’t happen enough in today’s digital world. If this service isn’t useful to patients, it is not useful to the medical community at large. So please continue to send us feedback. We won’t be able to get to all of it immediately, but nothing will go unread and we will do our best to get it all into the queue.

Please feel free to comment on this and let me know how you use GI Monitor.