Iodine: How does this medical big data company solve the problem of whether medicine for depression has no effect?

Release date: 2016-03-21

Background: 13% of American adults receive antidepressant medication, but according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on November 3, 2015, millions of people use it effectively. A potent drug with less than half the time. This leads to the need for patients to try several different drugs, usually six to nine months to find the one that suits them.

Service and profit model

The treatment of depression is a natural entry point for medical startup Iodine. Founder Goetz believes that "this is an industry that is very wasteful because of insufficient information. So we think this is a typical software." The stage of optimization that helps. Depression is ubiquitous in our society, affecting people directly or indirectly through family and friends. It is entirely coincidental that last year, three of the people I knew were involved in depression and mental illness. Suicide in the struggle."

Iodine handles a large demand from Internet users: 23% of Internet users are looking for drug information, and half of them are not satisfied with the information they have searched. The market's existing WebMD and Drugs.com are different from Iodine. Their website design can't meet the needs of users, but to seek more advertising business and hide the information that users want to search.

In addition, it also obtains opinions on the efficacy of the drug by analyzing reports from patient anonymity. “This can also lead to predictive analysis of drug use,” Goetz said. “For example, considering the specific circumstances of a patient, the analysis shows that a drug or a specific dose is more likely to be effective for him.”

The company plans to sell these opinions to specific customers, such as health insurance providers, because through these analysis results, patients and health insurers don't have to waste time and money on drugs that are not suitable for them, but usually this needs to be done through the call center. The phone reminds the patient to take the medicine on time to achieve it. “This is a multi-billion dollar issue,” he said. “What we are trying to do is solve this problem through software, not just to let patients take medicine, but to try to solve the patient drug use program through software. Question - Is this medicine effective for you personally?"

Product portfolio

The "Start" app developed by Iodine tracks the progress of medications in patients with depression, determines if new drugs are helpful, or whether they and their doctors should try another drug.

“Start” uses the PHQ-9 scale, an officially used self-test diagnostic criteria scale for depression, which contains nine questions, such as how often you have experienced depression, depression or despair over the past two weeks. The answer to the multiple-choice questions ranges from “never” to “almost every day”. The special contribution of “Start” is to allow patients to pass the bi-weekly PHQ9 test and to answer iconic questions such as weight gain or loss of libido to track their health over time. “Start” uses visual charts such as graphs and histograms to illustrate changes in the patient's condition.

PHQ-9 App screenshot

“This is more of a concern than most doctors for mental illness.” Former executive editor of Wired magazine, 12-year senior media person Goetz said. According to a 2011 study by Johns Hopkins University, nearly 80% of antidepressants are prescribed by doctors rather than psychiatrists, and more than 70% of patients have not even officially diagnosed patients. For depression.

"The medical records don't provide a lot of follow-up records," said Adam Baker, who worked in Google's user experience department before joining Iodine as product design leader. "If you take blood pressure medicine, the doctor will let you go back to the clinic very quickly, and may let you monitor your blood pressure at home," Baker said. "Antidepressants are not like this, it's more vague, and we want to provide some specific information."

APP "Start" currently has thousands of users, and Goetz believes this number is very meaningful, he said, "The largest clinical trial of antidepressant efficacy is the federally funded STAR * D trial, which has been in place for 7 years. 4,041 patients were included in the study. The number of our users has exceeded this number,” Goetz said, but he added very quickly that Iodine did not collect the same kind of data as the STAR*D test, nor did it take so long. track.

“Start” marks a shift in the company's use of drug information from patient reports on the use of certain drugs, and now there are more than 100,000 reports. When Iodine's website was launched in 2014, Time magazine called it the "Yelp" in the pharmaceutical industry. “We really can't get a lot of information from the patient's one-time medication experience review,” Baker said. “The quality control of drug use through the website is completely different from the APP. We think APP is the main source of our profit.” Iodine hopes that later It is profitable through anonymized data from "Start" and future APPs for chronic pain.

What these two APPs have in common is that the main source of drug efficacy is the patient's own medication report. “There is no blood test, no laboratory tests, only depression,” Goetz said. “If you think the drug is effective, then it works.”

Business Cooperation

Iodine's data quality has earned the respect of Pro Publica, a non-profit news organization known for its in-depth research reports in many areas, including reports of fraud and waste in prescription drug use. In mid-November, the two organizations announced a collaboration, and Pro Publica will receive data on drug availability through Iodine's new Application Programming Interface (API). Goetz said that he has discussed API connections with about a dozen people, including those from pharmacies, academia, and other startups, and is now free to visit. Goetz said: "It is basically a strategy for us to reach these people and bring them back to Iodine and "Start."

Entrepreneurial team

In 2010, Goetz published the book Decision Tree, which describes how patients can use new data-driven tools such as APP, personal DNA testing, and websites such as “PATIs Like Me” to directly understand their health and guidance. Their health care. In 2013, he co-founded Iodine with Matt Mohebbi. Matt is a former Google engineer who has developed a flu trend tracking project for search engines.

Company Name: Iodine

Company Address: San Francisco

Company website: http://

Financing situation: 2.5 million seed funds were received on February 28, 2014 (the first round of financing in January 2014, the wind investment funds obtained were not announced)

Source: Flint Creation

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