Neuemoon Health

Patient's survey that asks for patient's symptoms. The survey questions can be customized by the HCP office.
Results which provide insights and risk factors for different reproductive disorders.
Comprehensive data around how the patient's symptom is compared to other women in order for doctors to not dismiss the patient's pain.
Specialist look up which specify how much volume of cases these specialists have dealt with compared to their peers and accepted insurances.

Inspiration

There are at least 21 million women in the US who suffer from painfully debilitating reproductive disorders like endometriosis and fibroids. Specifically for endometriosis, it is actually as prevalent as diabetes, yet it takes an average of 10 years to get the proper diagnosis and it is a condition that not many people know about even though it affects 10% of women. That's why we're building Neuemoon Health. Our mission is to shorten the time to diagnosis and to treatment so these women can finally live a better life.

There are many reasons why it takes so long for women to get the right diagnosis. For one thing, HCPs aren't listening to women's concerns.

According to a survey by Abbvie:

40% shared that discussions with HCPs — including OB/GYNs, PCPs, nurse practitioners, emergency room doctors and other professionals who are managing their endometriosis care — are not open or productive.

Also, a survey by HealthyWomen.org found:

42% were told by their HCPs that their pain was simply "part of being a woman," while 47% had their symptoms described by HCPs as "normal."

Lastly, it seems HCPs aren't asking the right question. For example:

Only 34% of HCPs surveyed said they ask if pelvic pain interferes with daily activities at every visit. However, 86% said the condition interferes with their day-to-day activities at least some of the time.
20% of HCPs surveyed rarely or never ask female patients if they have pain during sex, even though it is a common symptom of endometriosis.

Based on these data, it seems it's important to help the dialogue between HCPs and patients to make sure the women can get the care they need as soon as possible.

What it does

The web platform is a tool to help PCP and general OBGYN offices to ask patients about their symptoms, compare the data of the responses against a set of health data of known diagnosed patients, and calculate the risk factors for conditions like endometriosis, fibroids, etc. It'll also help doctors to find which specialists nearby who can treat these conditions (judging by the volume of surgeries they have done, for example, based on insurance claims data) and take the patient's health insurance. Finally, it'll share the patient's data easily with the referred specialists and with the patients for their own record keeping.

How we built it

We decided to build this on the web because of the ease of access. For technology we use React, TypeScript, and MUI. For the treatment volume data, we can source from insurance claims data. For example, we can source the medicaid/medicare data from CMS: https://www.cms.gov/Research-Statistics-Data-and-Systems/Downloadable-Public-Use-Files/SynPUFs/DE_Syn_PUF

58545, Under Laparoscopic/Hysteroscopic Procedures on the Corpus Uteri
58546, Under Laparoscopic/Hysteroscopic Procedures on the Corpus Uteri
58662, Under Laparoscopic Procedures on the Oviduct/Ovary
49320, Under Laparoscopic Procedures on the Abdomen, Peritoneum, and Omentum
58140, Under Endometrial sampling, D&C and Uterus Tumor Excision Procedures
58145, Under Endometrial sampling, D&C and Uterus Tumor Excision Procedures
58146, Under Endometrial sampling, D&C and Uterus Tumor Excision Procedures
Hysterectomy: 58150–58200, 58260–58270, 58275–58280, 58290–58294, 58541–58544, 58550–58554, 58570–58573

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge we ran into is the data source. For example, for treatment volume data, CMS medicaid/medicare data published on the website is just a sample set. We'd need to source from health insurance companies. For the diagnosis statistic data that compared that patient symptoms against the overall women population and against diagnosed endometriosis & fibroids patients, we're not sure where to source, but perhaps some startups such as K Health might have these data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the fact that we were able to ideate, design, and build this web application.

What we learned

We learned to rely on our mentors. Even though we weren't able to get the exact data source, the mentors have been very helpful in guiding us to a product direction that we can design and build within a weekend. We also ran into difficulties bringing up hosting our application because we were using technologies we weren't familiar with, but the codebase is on Github!

What's next for Neuemoon Health

Next is to demo the prototype to doctor's offices to get their feedback. We would love to improve on the tool and see how we can deploy them to PCP and OBGYN offices so we educate more HCPs and can shorten the 10 years of diagnosis gap for the women who suffer in silence and without help.