We are a group of people who suffer from a range of GI symptoms, people who do clinical research on new products for various GI issues, and clinicians who specialize in GI issues. We all want to learn which specific treatment programs, drugs, over-the-counter products, activities and lifestyle changes have a positive impact on GI health. Tracking all of this on a daily basis is essential to understanding how well these treatment approaches are working for you.
We designed GItracker to allow us to review individual patient symptom data to help make diagnoses and assess treatment approaches. We also designed it to allow us to learn about the treatment approaches that work for patients who experience the same types of symptoms. We do this research on groups of people who report experiencing similar symptoms and use similar treatment approaches.
We also designed GItracker to be helpful in collecting relevant data for clinical trials, including Phase 4 trials, which specifically monitor newly introduced products. For many clinical trials, we create separate GItracker systems that are used for specific clinical trials.
Your privacy and our research – a great fit
In the Settings & Profile Section, you will notice that – other than asking your gender, year of birth, and general location – we don’t ask for any personal details. We ask your gender because some questions are gender-specific. We ask you the year of your birth because we know age impacts certain GI systems. We ask your location because some GI system products are only available in certain areas, and many products are named differently from one area to another.
You will also notice that we provide you with a randomly generated unique Clinician Identifier in the Profile & Settings Section. Should you wish to allow your doctor or healthcare professional to access your data (and we believe that the data may help your healthcare professional better understand your symptoms and identify the best possible treatment program for you) then this is the number you will need to give to your doctor so she or he can access your data through this website. Your healthcare professional will have to register with this website to be able to access data on the system. It usually takes no more than 24 hours for your doctor to be provided with access to this website. GItracker is free for you to use and www.gihealthtracker.com is free for your doctor to access.
We use aggregate GItracker data (the data from many people) to help us do research into what helps people with specific symptoms. We won’t market to you – we don’t want to and can’t because we don’t know who you are. The people at Apple may know you downloaded GItracker, but they don’t provide app developers with the details of who downloads specific apps. For us, GItracker is about getting as many people as possible to use the system so we can do better research into what works for people who have specific GI issues. You can also select not to share your GItracker data. If you do this, however, your data will also not be available to your doctor.
Aside from being able to share your GItracker data with your healthcare professional, once you have a few weeks of data in your GItracker system, you can review how the symptoms with which you struggle develop over time. Perhaps you are trying a new supplement or diet and want to see how it is affecting your symptoms. The Snapshot Section of the app lets you take a look at that.
The daily monitoring process takes a few moments each day. You can record specific bowel movements as they occur by tapping on the Add Movement section or include bowel movement frequency during your daily assessment review in the Daily Assessment section. You can set it up so GItracker reminds you at a specific time each day in the Settings section. If you miss completing the daily assessment on a particular day, you can complete the daily assessment for a missed date at a later time by selecting the missed date in the History section.
For ease, we group the daily symptoms into three sets of questions: upper abdominal (stomach and above), lower abdominal (intestines and bowel), stress factors, and a few additional questions that can in a general sense be related to your GI issues. To make it more efficient for you to complete the daily assessment, we ask whether or not you experienced upper abdominal symptoms, lower abdominal symptoms, and/or stress that day. If you say no, you won’t be asked those questions. No matter which symptoms you experienced during a specific day, we do ask what products you used that day. The first time you use a new product, you will have to add the product name. If you want, you can also include the dose you are using. Some of our users include dosing to monitor specifically what doses have what effect. We suggest you record all the drugs and over-the-counter products you use because many of them that aren’t specifically for digestive issues can impact your digestive system function.
We use a ten-point scale for each of the symptoms we ask you about, with zero being none and 9 being very, very severe. The slide is set to zero, so if you haven’t experienced that symptom that day, just scroll to the next one. Place your finger on the bubble and drag it to the position that reflects how severe that symptom was that day.
A few words about stress: stress can have a significant impact on digestive system function and your healthcare professional will be able to use your stress information to help in developing the best treatment program possible. So when you first start using GItracker, we ask you a few questions about the role stress plays in your life in general. This sets the baseline again which you can compare the impact of stress on your digestive system functioning over time.
GItracker is set up primarily to monitor specific GI symptoms on a daily basis. We also use a set of questions that asks you to think about how your GI symptoms affect your day-to-day life. These questions ask you to think about specific symptoms and how they impacted you over a week or so, rather than daily. When you first get started using GItracker, you will have the chance to complete these questions for you in general to establish a baseline. These questions, and your responses, focus on how these symptoms affect your day-to-day life, so it is helpful to take a few minutes every week to complete this Quality of Life (QoL) section.
We will track your responses and report back to you how these symptoms affect you over time. To help you think about the QoL symptoms, we would like you to use these five levels to indicate how much of a problem these symptoms were for you during the past week:
| Score | Short Description | Detailed Description |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | No problem | This symptom was no problem for me during the past week |
| 1 | Mild problem | This symptom could be ignored if I didn’t think about it |
| 2 | Moderate problem | I couldn’t ignore the symptom but it didn’t affect my daily activities |
| 3 | Severe problem | This symptoms affected my concentration on daily activities during the week |
| 4 | Very severe problem | This symptom had a strong effect on my daily activities and it may have made me take additional rest during the past week |
In the Settings Section, we let you decide at what time you would like to be reminded to complete your daily assessment and on what day of the week and at what time you would like to be reminded to complete the QoL section. We suggest you select a day and time when you will usually have a few minutes to complete the questions.
