Apply HN: Mental Health Medication Self-Assesment App

Selection of medication used in mental health treatment is often a complicated process of trial and error. A prescriber will begin with an educated guess for the most effective treatment for a given patient and the patient begins a period of medication evaluation to determine if if the right ratio of efficacy and side-effects are met; if not, the process is repeated.<p>Sometimes during this process, patients will only meet with prescribers for 30-minutes once a month providing a narrow window for observation. Patients are given the difficult question of answering if they feel the medication &quot;is working&quot;. There are two main challenges to this evaluation:<p>1. In a study of 1, it is very difficult to control for other factors that effect mood or the effectiveness of the medication (e.g. sleep, diet, dosage timing, external life events)<p>2. The nature of these medications could change perception, so it is sometimes difficult for a patient to self-evaluate how their mood one day compared to the past. A patient may have one feeling about the effectiveness of their medication and another a week later when visiting their doctor.<p>I would like to build an app that acts as a friend during this difficult evaluation: regularly asking questions about sleep, diet, stress, mood, and general impressions of the medication. The patient and doctor could use the data from this app together to discuss a more complete picture of the patient&#x27;s recent mood than may be revealed in a discussion on any one particular day.<p>With the correct privacy controls in place, this app could provide a source of research data for studies to help discover why some medications work better for certain patients.<p>I would like this to be a tool to help people and create greater efficiency in this are of mental health and would like to make it available to all patients. I am considering if a non-profit would be a better path than attaching a business model to this.