In 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration reported more than 2 million adverse drug events (ADE), which are drug-related injuries such as medication errors, adverse drug reactions, allergic reactions and accidental overdoses.
Of those 2 million ADEs, there were 1.5 million hospitalizations and 150,000 deaths, making ADEs the fourth-leading cause of death in the U.S. The ADEs also cost health care payers $136 billion annually.
A new Rhode Island startup is trying to cut into those numbers by giving people a better understanding of their health. Q2Q Health is a patient-facing digital health platform that converts health data into personalized and contextualized information.
The app enables people to better interpret testing results, as well as make better health choices by knowing more about how their bodies interact with certain medications.
“Do people fully understand their medications, or lab results, or blood pressure numbers? Probably not,” Roberta Powell, CEO and founder of the company, told Rhode Island Inno. “We are taking numbers and making sense out of them.”
Q2Q users enter information about their health into the app. The app then takes anonymized data from publicly available sources, such as the FDA, or private anonymized data from, say, an insurance provider, and converts that data into contextualized information and results.
Q2Q Health then stacks the two data sets up against one another and determines trends, risks and decision point failures.
Those results can help patients track medications and link them to their conditions, alert patients of serious interactions and side effects of over-the-counter and prescription medications, track allergens and alert you if your foods interact with your medications or health conditions.
The ultimate goal of the company is not to replace actual doctors, but simply provide information.
“We are not saying, ‘don’t take these drugs,’” Powell said. “Rather, we are saying, ‘There is a major interaction, so please go talk to your doctor and pharmacist first.’”
Powell, a longtime public administration worker in the transportation field, came up with the concept from personal experience. Roughly 15 years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. While taking one of her medications, she caught a dosage mistake that could have been fatal.
“I realized just how complicated health care really is,” she said.
Following the incident, Powell completely changed career paths to pursue nursing, which helped her further see the prevalence of the problem.
In the two years since she first started working on the concept for Q2Q Health, the company has come a long way.
At first, the startup was bootstrapped, with Powell investing $150,000 of her own money. Then, the company participated in accelerators including Social Enterprise Greenhouse, MassChallenge and at the New England Medical Innovation Center.
Last year, the company began beta testing and secured its first client for a pilot.
Powell said she plans to target public and private insurance providers. She also wants to release the Q2Q Health store to the general public via the app store.
Powell is in talks to secure seed funding that will hopefully allow her to roll out the app within the next year.
