Eating disorders affect about 24 million people in the U.S. and have the highest mortality rate of any other psychiatric problem. Only about one in 10 with anorexia nervosa, bulimia and other eating disorders seek treatment. Jenna Tregarthen, an entrepreneur-in-residence at Stanford University, was frustrated with patients’ incomplete therapy homework and thought there was a better way to engage patients.

She took a break from working towards a PhD in clinical psychology to develop a cognitive therapy app. The goal? To help people with eating disorders that would be more interactive to improve patient engagement. It was also important for that tool to appeal to the 16-25 year old age group — the average age of onset for eating disorders.

In a phone interview with MedCity News she said: “Paper diaries are such a huge obstacle to patients. We are trying to reinvent the therapy homework with data and tools so they can be more efficient in treatment delivery.”

A lot of users see it as an optimal tool to avoid relapses, according to Tregarthen, based on the feedback it’s received.

Recovery Record’s clinician facing version of the app is just coming out of Beta testing and Tregarthen and her co-founder have learned a lot from pilots with clinicians.

“We are already seeing clinicians prescribing this to patients because the need for this technology is so big.”

The clinician facing app is designed to improve patient interactions and better assess the patient’s progress.”We thought about what motivates clinicians to engage in technology…to influence positive treatment outcomes would be great. They can check in and see how engaged their patients are in realtime.” It also can send a message to users that their therapist has viewed their diary entries.

Here’s some of how it works. When patients make diary entries, such as what they had to eat at each meal, they can indicate how they feel. But the clinician also get a sense of how engaged their patients are by how frequently they make diary entries. Custom goals, coping tactics and meal plans are delivered to patients day-to-day, to help keep them on track.Users receive rewards, surprises, pictures of baby animals, affirmations and social support to keep patients engaged in their treatment program between visits with a therapist.

An algorithm calculates a baseline norm and when there is a deviation from that it calculates the difference. A traffic light’s three colors indicate the level of attention the clinician needs to give to the patient. When certain thresholds are reached it triggers a traffic light color to change. The clinician facing app calculates disordered behavior frequency, how frequently the patient is doing their therapy homework – and combines those metrics to calculate the level of attention the clinician needs to give.

We are allowing the provider to push a treatment to the patient’s app. The app is used as a treatment tool as well as making the clinician more efficient. Clinicians can also view the data each patient accumulates over time to evaluate progress over time.

Two large US payers are setting up three-month pilots to more vigorously measure cost savings and health outcomes and clinician-patient satisfaction.

“Our vision is to give clinics a dashboard of outcomes data so they can become much more evidenced based in way doing research.”

Beyond eating disorders, Tregarthen also sees applications for mood disorders such as depression, bipolar and anxiety disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders and post traumatic stress disorder.

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