HealClick and the UCLA/VA Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CORE) Announce Strategic Partnership to Help Patients
Las Vegas, Nevada (PRWEB) July 16, 2014 -- HealClick co-founder, Joey Tuan, announced today the exciting and strategic partnership between their website https://www.Healclick.com and the UCLA/VA Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CORE). This partnership will allow HealClick the opportunity to use PROMIS (Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System) scales to match patients based on medical similarity. Health outcomes will be assessed for patients who do connect with their matches. CORE uses standardized PROMIS questionnaires to measure breadth and depth of GI symptoms. PROMIS, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health, is an intricate system of highly reliable, precise, and flexible responsive assessment tools, which measure patient-reported health status.
"We are excited to partner with HealClick to advance social media science, focusing on how to use our NIH-sponsored research to improve matching among HealClick users. This partnership represents a rare opportunity to bring academic researchers together with social media developers," said Dr. Brennan Spiegel, CORE Director and UCLA Professor of Medicine and Public Health.
The alliance supports HealClick’s ongoing effort to connect patients based on medical similarity. Both HealClick and CORE are focused on symptom-based models of evaluating patients rather than disease-based models. Through this collaboration, HealClick will use PROMIS scales to compare patients’ GI symptoms across various diseases in a scientifically validated manner and indicate which users have the most similar GI symptom profiles. Most importantly, social interactions and health outcomes will be measured over time for patients that are matched with their most medically similar users.
HealClick’s Research Coordinator, Rachael Korinek explained, “By collaborating with CORE and combining our expertise, we can open the door to research-validated patient matching in our patient community. By helping similar users find each other, we hope to give them the best possible support system throughout their time as patients.”
About HealClick
HealClick.com is a social network and treatment-sharing platform for patients with chronic illness. Patients form teams to track their health changes while offering mutual support throughout the treatment process. The platform specifically focuses on those with autoimmune, comorbid, and rare conditions. Comprehensive and longitudinal health data is produced and stored as users review treatments and track their symptoms. This symptom and treatment tracking generates a personalized health graph that can be used to see trends and patterns in symptoms and treatment responses. Patients can print and bring their personalized health graphs to their physician’s office to provide a detailed illustration of any symptom changes. Patients can also learn what pharmaceutical and alternative treatments have been most effective for users similar to them by utilizing a database of treatment reviews from thousands of patients. For more information on HealClick, please visit https://www.Healclick.com.
About CORE
The Center for Outcomes Research and Education (CORE) is a University-based group of academicians that supports high quality research efforts using a health services model. Members of the Center have published extensively in the fields of healthcare quality measurement, patient reported outcome (PRO) development, healthcare decision-making, and health economics. For more information, please visit http://www.researchcore.org.
Media Contact
Marisa Zeppieri-Caruana
MarisaZeppieri(at)gmail(dot)com
954-394-6312
Marisa Zeppieri-Caruana, HealClick, http://www.HealClick.com, +1 954-394-6312, [email protected]
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