What the patient says is the foundation of the Patient–Clinician relationship and a key outcome in clinical research. The patient narrative forms the basis of 80-85% of accurate diagnoses and quality care. However, patients only get 11-27 uninterrupted seconds, on average, to report their problems. As a consequence, much of the patient’s narrative is not captured or is not interpreted accurately.
The patient point of view about illness and treatment is challenging to capture, aggregate, and analyze. Patient data is subjective, verbatim data, often using non-medical language. With chronic diseases, these challenges are exacerbated as assessments of treatment adherence, disease progression, and therapeutic adjustments must be made over time. Nearly half of all adults in the U.S. live with a chronic condition, and three-quarters of healthcare spending goes toward treating chronic disease.
With its goal of Making Patients Heard™, Grey Matter is focusing on chronic conditions, with its initial emphasis on neurological diseases. Grey Matter has developed a proprietary approach for collecting patient verbatim reports, analyzing them using data science techniques and clinical curation, and generating a cohesive patient narrative. This patient narrative can equip patients with an ordered listing of their problems and their functional consequences. In turn, this ordered listing helps healthcare providers better integrate and act upon a patient’s health status, performance, functioning, quality of life, and other domains of interest.