The road back from a Covid-19 infection is unpredictable and potentially long. Millions of Americans have seen their health worsen with long Covid, which includes a wide range of ongoing health problems that are still largely not understood.
An app from Cambridge-based Goodpath provides a new treatment option for people with long Covid. The corporate benefit wellness company offers the product to employees through their employers, and has partnered with companies like Yamaha Motor Co.
“What we focus on is chronic conditions that are typically being underserved by the current U.S. medical system,” said CEO Bill Gianoukos. “These are the ones that really impact quality of life, but don’t typically affect life expectancy. So, there’s not a lot of resources put against these conditions.”
The CDC defines long Covid as a range of new, returning or ongoing health problems that persist at least four weeks after infection with the virus. While researchers have thus far found that vaccinated individuals who experience a breakthrough infection are less likely to report long-term complications, people with severe or even mild infections can develop long Covid. Symptoms can include fatigue, stomach pain, headaches, chest pain and a fever.
Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiology professor at Yale University and a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, said during an American Medical Association webinar that more than 200 different symptoms have been associated with long Covid. Research is still ongoing to determine the cause of long Covid and how to treat each symptom.
“But what we really need to do is to understand these different endotypes that underlie the disease called long Covid,” Iwasaki said. “If there are four distinct endotypes that are caused by different things, we need to treat them differently. So, for each endotype, we need a biomarker or biomarkers, and then we can separate the patients into the right kind of disease treatment pathways.”
Iwasaki said around 50% of people with severe Covid have long Covid symptoms, and that percentage drops to between 5% to 30% for people with mild or even asymptomatic infections.
Gianoukos said Goodpath uses an integrative care approach, which is recommended for treating more chronic conditions because it combines multiple treatments for a holistic approach to care. Goodpath’s internal medical team designed its program and updates it based on the latest CDC guidance and medical research.
Users start by taking an assessment, said Braden Sweet, the company’s chief marketing officer. Sweet said the assessment collects information about their condition and factors that influence it, such as diet and stress level. She said all the information collected by Goodpath is “completely private.”
“This is the way that we’re trying to get a full understanding of each individual,” Sweet said. “And once we have that, we take that information and run it through our AI that has been built by our medical team, that identifies each individual component of the individual and aligns that with a vetted treatment option.”
Depending on the person’s symptoms, Goodpath might assist the user with eating an anti-inflammatory diet to reduce pain, meditating to reduce brain fog or recommending energy conservation techniques to help with fatigue. Each user works one-on-one with a coach, who has a master’s degree or higher in a clinical specialty, throughout the program.
Because so many individuals are suffering a diverse range of symptoms from long Covid, Gianoukos said it is difficult for the health care system to support them all. Goodpath aims to make this personal support more accessible.
“If you have serious symptoms, your medical practitioner can send you to one of the bigger hospitals that have created brick-and-mortar long Covid clinics,” Gianoukos said. “What we’ve been hearing, on average, it’s somewhere between a six- and nine-month waitlist to get into these clinics.”
Goodpath says this tool is the first of its kind for long Covid. The company has already launched products for managing back and joint pain, sleep and digestive health. Sweet said its products are accessible over the counter and do not require FDA approval.
“The strong underlying principle of our third co-founder and chief medical advisor is that all of our interventions do no harm,” Sweet said. “As again we keep finding other opportunities that we need to expand into other treatments, that’s the type of thing we’d go through following a licensing process.”
In addition to keeping its current products updated, Gianoukos said Goodpath plans to introduce two more condition categories over the next calendar year.
