As most of you know, at Healthcare IT Today, we generally try to stay away from clinically focused topics. We’re not clinicians and we don’t even try to play one on TV. We focus on technology and the use of technology in healthcare. However, we’re certainly seeing a blurring of the lines when it comes to pure health IT solutions and medical devices. For example, when you’re talking about RPM is that a health IT solution or is that a medical device solution? The reality is that it’s a mix of both. Plus, most of you know that some of the most exciting advancements in health IT are when you combine multiple innovations.
Plus, there’s an interesting trend that we have been covering a lot on Healthcare IT Today which is creating objective data about a person’s health. We see this trend happening a lot of places. Many of us now wear watches or rings that are measuring various vital signs and health indicators. Check out my review of the RingConn Smart Ring as one example of this. We’ve covered the Withings U-Scan, Smart Scales, and BeamO as a few other recent examples. The effort to quantify our health is vast and happening across so many aspects of our health.
In most of those cases I shared above, they’re leveraging health sensors to monitor some aspect of a person’s health. However, there’s also a set of health IT companies that are creating other objective tests to measure a person’s health. One example of this is Ellipsis Health which uses AI to analyze your voice to create an objective measure of your mental health for things like anxiety and depression. The push to create objective health measures is big in healthcare.
With all of this in mind, I was really intrigued when I was pitched a company, Qbtech, that created a clinical ADHD test for adults and children that provides objective data for ADHD patients (See this article exploring the Evolution of Attention and ADHD tests). No doubt this company resonated with me since I’d recently had some family members diagnosed with ADHD and I’d always been curious of whether I and others in my family had ADHD. Having experienced my family members ADHD diagnosis using subjective measures, I was really intrigued by the idea of an objective ADHD test.
I asked Qbtech if my family members and I could try out their ADHD test to see how it works. It turns out that at least for now the Qbtest test for ADHD is generally administered by clinicians as part of their assessment and treatment of a patient. Talking with Qbtech, we thought it best to have my wife and I do the free demo of their test, which is FDA cleared for use in patients age 6-60.
The good news is that I was able to do the test remotely and it only took me about 20-30 minutes for testing and setup to do. I did need a reasonably good computer with solid internet to take the test since the test uses your camera and measures your response time for accuracy and reaction time along with commission and omission errors. You also had to be in a place that didn’t have a lot of distractions. The website did a check before taking the test to make sure the technology and environment would work without issue.
I was warned before taking the test that the test would be slightly boring. This made sense since part of the goal of the test was to see how well I could focus through the boredom. At least that’s my non-clinical take on what it’s measuring. Needless to say it was a boring test. However, it was easy to see how the test could be done by a wide range of age groups without a problem. It probably says something about me that I enjoyed the challenge too.
Without going into too many details of the test, you had to hit the space bar when you saw repeating patterns. The computer would then record how quickly you responded, if you should have responded, and if you should have responded but didn’t. Then, Qbtech produces a report based on all of that data to help the ADHD clinician have some objective data about the patient. Here’s a look at part of the report from my test:
There’s a lot going on in these charts which is at least partially why Qbtech is not a direct to consumer product right now. You really do need a clinican to walk you through the results. What it does say to me is that my data from the test differs quite a bit from others who have taken the test from my age group and gender that have ADHD. With that said, it does show that I had a very low rate of ommission and commission errors and that my reaction time was slower than my cohort. If you know me, this will make sense to you. Although, I’ll leave that discussion for another day.
What I found fascinating was how key it was for Qbtech to compare me to those of my gender and age. An 8-year-old girl would likely have very different results on the test than a 46-year-old male. So, it’s great that Qbtech is sharing a person’s detailed QbCheck result alongside the sample case which shows how others from your cohort have performed on the test.
This was particularly interesting for me to see since my wife took the test as well. She’d always suspected that she had ADHD, but had never been formally tested. Given that, it was no surprise when the test showed that she had a high likelihood of ADHD. You can see that in the objective results below including the number of omission errors that occured as the test went on. It makes sense that with ADHD your attention detoriorates over time like it did for her. (Side Note: My wife consented to me sharing these results with you and her ADHD is part of why I love her.)
While the one off test I did was interesting, I think this kind of objective data gets even more interesting when you do a series of tests over time. For example, someone with ADHD could take a baseline test before taking a medication and then takes the test again after taking the medication. This way you can test the effectiveness of the medication in a more objective way. I could also see it being used to see how long the medication lasts. I also think a test like this could be used to identify ADHD symptoms earlier. Many people are good at hiding their symptoms. This could be an objective way to measure ADHD when the subjective symptoms aren’t as clear.
Qbtech also shared that this test can be used by clinicians as an objective reason to stop drug seekers. I’m sure it’s challenging for many clinicians to deny someone who would like an ADHD drug based solely on subjective measures. By adding this objective test to the mix, they can use the data from the test to illustrate why they can’t prescribe the drug to someone who they think is just drug seeking.
Needless to say, I was fascinated by Qbtech’s work to create an objective test for ADHD. Plus, because the test is done digitally, they’re able to offer the test at a reasonable price that makes sense for clinicians. For those clinicians reading this, you can check out their clinical documentation for the QbTest and QbCheck.
Of course the challenge that Qbtech and other companies working on objective measures of health is how to get clinicians to incorporate this into their care. Plus, there is still plenty of work to be done to find more ways to leverage the data the test is providing. However, I’m excited to find a company that’s working to make assessing ADHD more objective. I think we need more and more of this type of data assessment in healthcare.
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