The Back-app project was initiated in 2016. Our group of neurosurgeons was well aware of the raising problems in the health economic system. We have to make a choice for the right treatment paradigm for a specific patient with a high chance of success, instead of ‘trying’ multiple treatment paradigms in order to get to the desired result. A variety of treatments are available for the pathologies treated, but the paradigm remains an individual choice of the physician. So we believe in BIG DATA. Diversity and multifactor analysis can help us to sort out which treatment or treatment combinations might benefit patients at which time. However data acquisition can be a laborious task.
So a team of scientists, spine specialists and IT-specialists had the wish to fill in the gap between easy data collection and medicine and thereby providing a paradigm to answer these questions. In two years time we developed a tool in 3 major spine centres to get and effortless, patient driven data collection and to get some clues to answers about patient profiles and preferable treatments. In a time in which Apple, Android, Google, Youtube and many others developed a convenient world to create and share data collections, it seemed strange that medicine was still running behind. So we wanted to create an easy to use quality control tool in order to justify the need of certain therapies in spine pathology and neuromodulation. And even more: a tool, which might guide us to start the right treatment(s) at the right time for the right patient.
We had three main goals while developing our app:
- To create an effortless data collection tool for all physicians (university Hospitals, general hospitals and private healthcare): In times in which physicians are flooded by administration due to their regular work and are confronted by high demands to keep up-to-date with literature and technology, we didn’t want to create a tool which demanded a precious amount of time. So it had to be patient driven, reliable, complete in data collection and easy to use. Fortunately time and technology do support this way of collecting data and instant-results can be achieved just by the effort of the patient and a small input of the physician in any centre.
- To create instant, comparable and understandable outcomes: The outcomes of the questionnaires are instantly available in a comprehensive visual representation. This allows the physician to instantly see how the patient evolves. These results have to be comparable between physicians, between centres and between nations. This implies that quality control is an achievable goal on a multi-level setting and helps to justify the costs of treatments per patient for society. Back-app intents to create a real-life BIG DATA set. Real-life BIG DATA sets allow us to learn from treatment results in certain patient profiles and compare our patient with the matching patients. This might give guidance towards treatment planning. BIG DATA also learns us about the patient flow through treatment paradigms and can learn us which is the right timing of a treatment for a patient. Randomized controlled trials have been the golden standard in order to justify treatment, but real-life data and long-term follow-up will give us the real life perspective on treatment outcomes. Back-app wants to fill in the gap of BIG DATA and re-affirm the ‘gut feeling’ of the physicians.
- Collaboration: Back-app wants to open up borders between physicians, between centres and ultimately between countries. Differences between all of these microclimates of treatment paradigms and outcomes are surely there, but general long-term data collection on treatment outcomes will open up the setting to discussions to improve results.
In the past years we have spend time to make this happen and we made an easily accessible tool to make a start of a big data collection.
