MoxyTech is a healthcare software company that provides tools to improve chronic pain care through better to tracking, analysis, and communication of pain. Founded in 2015, Dr. Alexandre DaSilva and Eric Maslowski developed GeoPain, a clinically proven mobile application that renders a 3D view of the body with a unique data model that allows for precise tracking and aggregation of pain data. The application, which is offered as a standalone app or embedded module, lets patients zoom, rotate, and paint where they have pain on their body allowing them to indicate pain intensities at a much more granular level. MoxyTech is improving quality of life for patients in pain, impacting many aspects of the healthcare ecosystem:
- Patients: For those who deal with chronic pain on a daily basis, GeoPain provides an effective communication platform for them to describe their pain. It also helps improve understanding with loved ones offering a clearer view into what they face on a daily basis.
- Clinicians: They receive a complete visual record of the patient’s pain, both before and after the treatment, so they can build a better roadmap of their patients’ care plan. Much of the current opioid epidemic stems from an incorrect pain diagnosis due to the lack of understanding details around the patient’s pain.
- Payers: The data generated from GeoPain creates accountability around the quality of care for the patient via the treatment record, which shows what the doctor did and the actual treatment outcome. Not only does it drive accountability to focus on the outcome of the patient, but it also provides proof when clinicians apply for reimbursements.
- Life Sciences/Clinical Trials: GeoPain can help provide more insight and visibility into how the pain has or has not changed throughout a clinical trial, due to the granularity of data GeoPain captures and shares. This provides quality data (not emojis or numbers) that proves what the trial affected: did it change the pain, or move the pain, or did the pain take a completely different form, for example. Prior clinical trials showed quicker results with fewer patients when compared with traditional measures (ex. NRS).
Figure 1: MoxyTech’s GeoPain mobile application
The Challenge
MoxyTech knew that GeoPain could help millions of people in the US alone and billions worldwide. Therefore, they knew this application would not be for a small niche group—they needed to build something scalable. Prior to going live, MoxyTech hosted GeoPain locally with their own controlled settings. To support the global vision of MoxyTech, the team needed to develop on a platform that was both scalable and secure. The MoxyTech team preferred AWS due to its technology capabilities, as well as AWS’ experience in healthcare. However, MoxyTech knew they needed to take extra efforts to protect their patient data. While the MoxyTech team did extensive research to understand how to manage compliance in the cloud on their own, they realized the time and capital costs would be better spent on research and building their application—not on managing compliance in the cloud. MoxyTech needed a partner focused on privacy and security as it relates to sensitive healthcare data, so they could build their application in a safe and secure manner to launch successfully in the market. Additionally, MoxyTech needed a partner with extensive compliance expertise beyond HIPAA regulations so that their application could help patients in markets outside of the US and still adhere to different countries’ specific requirements, such as GDPR.
Figure 2: Visualization illustrating the average of 1500 self-described Fibromyalgia patients using GeoPain
The Solution
MoxyTech chose to partner with ClearDATA to build their application on AWS. With ClearDATA, MoxyTech can focus time and effort on the problems they need to solve around improving the quality of life for patients in pain, and not spend excessive time and resources on security and compliance in the cloud. ClearDATA provides guidance around HIPAA and GDPR standards and regulations, and configures the cloud environment in a safe and secure manner with guardrails that keep the MoxyTech development team compliant. This guidance gives MoxyTech the building blocks to develop their application and get it to market quickly, safely, and securely. MoxyTech leverages the reports from the Compliance Dashboard to show the compliance status of GeoPain , which helps build trust and confidence with both prospects and new customers. MoxyTech can be equipped with the latest AWS services quickly because of ClearDATA’s cloud expertise
The MoxyTech development team has a public EC2 instance that hosts the public facing GeoPain app on a platform that requires minimal support and maintenance. Armed with ClearDATA’s close collaboration and partnership with AWS, MoxyTech allocates their internal resources on core priorities, reducing stress on the technical end because ClearDATA manages all new features and updates that come regularly from AWS. For example, when the MoxyTech development team ran into Apple’s ipv6 requirement for new apps, ClearDATA could spin up an ELB to fulfill that requirement quickly, because it was a module already available on AWS and integrated with EC2. ClearDATA manages the thousands of updates from AWS every year and configures them in a compliant manner—one fewer action the MoxyTech team has to take on its own.
The development team also has a private EC2 instance that communicates with the public EC2 instance and hosts MoxyTech’s database, which is the central repository for the data of all of their users. Eventually, MoxyTech wants to apply machine learning technology to the data they’re collecting to understand bigger trends that could help solve problems around chronic pain. This is all functionality MoxyTech can leverage without having to spend a lot of resources or man power to both understand and configure how to use these services in a secure and compliant manner.
As MoxyTech focuses on growth and expanding to other markets, their partnership with ClearDATA helps them on both the market and client development side. MoxyTech’s target audience of providers, clinicians, and patients all have their own concerns about the security of the application and how it is managed. MoxyTech can confidently answer those questions by sharing the credentials and capabilities of their partner, ClearDATA, and work to fulfill their mission of helping the billions of people worldwide improve how they manage pain.
