Given the risk of misinformation, especially high in the health field, it is essential to create sources of safe information for doctors and patients. For this reason, Tonic App has created a digital library of educational content for patients, in collaboration with the associations that represent them.
This is the new project of the app that was born in 2016, in Madrid, with the aim of making medicine simpler. Created by four IE Business School students, one of whom is a doctor with more than 16 years of experience and the current CEO of the company, Tonic App continues to grow to help more professionals every day. Currently, more than 110,000 doctors use the application in four countries: Spain, France, Italy and Portugal, where it has its headquarters. Soon it plans to start activity in England and Germany, and thus reach the five largest markets in Europe.
With nearly 300 contents over 75 different diseases, from cancer to chronic and rheumatic diseases, the Tonic App digital health library offers doctors information selected and reviewed by other doctors. The informative contents are the result of collaboration with more than twenty patient associations such as the Spanish Association against Meningitis (AEM), the Association of Lactose Intolerant of Spain (ADILAC), the Association of Women Affected by Endometriosis (ADAEC) or the Association of People Affected by Atopic Dermatitis (AADA).
Impacting a universe of more than 41 million patients, Tonic App has already registered more than 18,000 interactions of its medical community with the content for its patients. Among those who share this material the most are medical specialists in Family and Community Medicine, Psychiatry, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation and Neurology.
Luís Pinho Costa, a specialist in Family and Community Medicine and coordinator of the Tonic App digital library project, recalls that «Doctors and patients often search for diseases on Google like they search for a restaurant, but of course the consequences are of a very different nature. There is a lot of misinformation online and you have to be careful what you read, because the damage is to your own health. It is not easy for an Internet user to know how to verify the quality of the health information that he is looking for. Misinformation in health is as dangerous as or more dangerous than lack of information, both recognized as risk factors for poorer health and lower quality of life«.
Faced with this situation, Tonic App makes life easier for doctors, not only because it brings together the digital resources they need for their work on a single platform, but also because it selects and reviews all the information, and only publishes what is truly valuable for the doctor-patient relationship. The application collects content on diseases and other health conditions, ranging from prevention to available treatments, and which also clarifies other concerns of patients, such as its impact on family and social life and the support that is available for each patient. case. To be integrated into the digital library, the resources produced by recognized organizations — patient associations and also public entities, pharmaceutical and medical device companies — are previously analyzed and validated by a multidisciplinary team of seven Tonic App members.
For Elena Moya, vice president of the Spanish Association against Meningitis, “informative content not only benefits people affected by the disease and their caregivers, but also everyone who comes to their doctor’s appointment”. The reason presented is simple: “the information we provide is not limited to explaining the disease and sharing testimonies of what it is like to live with its consequences, but, above all, to raise awareness about the disease and the importance of vaccination for its prevention”.
