New app to help patients with GI disorders

Although GI disorders are among the most common medical conditions, many patients don’t consider their symptoms serious enough to consult a physician and are left suffering in silence. To educate patients and help them figure out if they need medical attention, William Chey, M.D., professor of internal medicine and director of the GI Physiology Laboratory at Michigan Medicine, co-created MyGiHealth.

The online tool and iOS app assesses the severity of a patient’s symptoms and then prepares an automated history for the patient to share with a physician. The system also provides tailored education regarding a user’s GI issues.

“We’ve developed a tool to help patients understand their GI systems and give them information that will help them communicate more effectively to their physician,” says Chey, who is also the co-director of the Michigan Bowel Control Program. “The idea was to create a standardized, digital assessment tool that could be used for clinical practice and clinical research.”

Chey created MyGiHealth along with Brennan Spiegel, M.D., director of health services research for Cedars-Sinai Health System and professor of medicine and public health at UCLA. Their initial goals were to capture extensive patient symptom information, help patients to better understand their GI issues, and improve the ability of a user to tell his or her unique story to their health care provider.

To do this, MyGIHealth uses proprietary algorithms to create a medical history in narrative form which can be shared with a health care provider. In 2014, using an early version of MyGIHealth, the two gastroenterologists conducted a research study which found that histories created by MyGIHealth were more complete, better organized and more useful than histories written by doctors during a patient visit.

The study’s investigators compared HPIs generated through two methods on the same patients. They looked at physician-documented HPIs that were entered into the electronic health record and compared them with HPIs created by MyGIHealth using information entered by study participants.

A panel of 48 reviewers assessed the quality of HPI reports using six criteria overall impression, thoroughness, usefulness, organization, succinctness and comprehensibility without knowing which reports were computer-generated or physician-documented.