Project Summary
HealClick is an online community for patients with chronic illness to share their anecdotes and track their health data. An important next step for us is to help form a comparative treatment effectiveness study that can lead to more informed treatment decisions. With the Tier 1 funding opportunity, we can leverage our community into a patient-powered research network with researchers, clinicians, advocates, and other stakeholders.
Our goal for Tier 1 is to build a better infrastructure to formulate, design, manage, and execute a research study that can lead to better treatment outcomes for patients with multiple chronic pain conditions. The study will address differential treatment outcomes for patients with multiple chronic pain conditions. HealClick currently has a network of over 50 disease-specific communities. Because our average member has multiple diagnoses, we want to create a study that captures the difference in treatment effectiveness for patients with different combinations of chronic pain conditions.
The first step toward completing this study is to create the HealClick Research feature - a collaborative framework for patients, researchers, clinicians, and advocates to propose and prioritize pressing research questions. The HealClick Research feature will allow patients with chronic illness to be directly involved in every stage of the research process. This framework will help us build solid channels of communication between stakeholders as we form an advisory board and build a strategy toward completion of the comparative treatment effectiveness study.
^ Rachael Korinek, from HealClick, was the original project lead for this project.