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Agent · rheumatologyIn design
An agent for the gap between rheumatology visits
Status. Design stage. Nothing is deployed. No symptom threshold, alert or flag, which is a design decision rather than an omission.
The setting
- Months pass between two rheumatology visits, and in that interval the system stops observing the patient. Every visit begins from a reconstruction by memory.
- The cohort study above is the reason this matters more than convenience. If cancer risk in these patients is highest in the first year after diagnosis and falls thereafter, then the first year is exactly the period in which the system currently observes them four times.
What we did
Designed an interface for capturing symptoms between visits.
What exists now
An interface prototype. No backend, no data collection, no participants, and no clinical site agreement.
What it does not do
- Nothing yet, and specifically: no symptom threshold, no alert, no flag.
- The moment software tells anyone to act on a change in a patient's symptoms it is monitoring software under Rule 11. That is a design-phase decision, made now rather than after a pilot.
What has not been established
Everything. There is nothing to evaluate.
Where it goes next
- Two questions come before anything gets built, and they are the interesting part: what is actually worth capturing between visits, and does capturing it change what happens at the next one?
- The first is a design question a clinician answers, not an engineer. The second is a study.
What we are looking for
A rheumatology service to answer the first question with us, and later to host the second. There is no site agreement in place.
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