Cogito: A turnkey solution for rapidly developing, evaluating, deploying, and scaling digital therapeutics - Digital therapeutics are transforming healthcare. Digital therapeutics are clinical-grade software used to prevent, treat, or manage a medical disorder or disease. A large body of research demonstrates that digital therapeutics can have a major impact on health costs, health behavior, and health outcomes. For example, in our work, digital therapeutics for substance use disorders (SUDs) more than double drug abstinence rates compared to standard addiction treatment systems in the U.S. and greatly increase retention in SUD treatment. They also have synergistic effects with medication treatments for SUDs. And, they are associated with marked reductions in ED visits, inpatient utilization, and net costs, and increases in medication adherence. Despite their impressive clinical value, several challenges persist in fully realizing the potential of digital therapeutics to improve people’s lives across the globe. First, the pace at which digital therapeutics are developed, tested and commercialized is slow. Second, many development activities are redundant across projects. Third, due to budget, time and capacity constraints, many scientists develop prototypes of digital therapeutics that can be used in research trials but which are not built to scale for use by large numbers of end users. Finally, most digital therapeutics cannot be readily adapted for use by various target populations critical for advancing digital health equity (e.g., adapted to culture, language, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation). Based on over two decades of NIH-supported work developing, evaluating and commercializing digital therapeutics, we have developed a unique digital therapeutics platform (Laddr) which integrates science- based, therapeutic processes to address a wide range of behavioral problems within a single digital platform. This platform offers the potential to revolutionize digital health - as it provides a scalable model for delivering digital therapeutics to treat any disorder with a behavioral component. We now plan to make an editable version of Laddr (which we call Cogito) commercially available to developers of digital therapeutics. Cogito will provide a turnkey solution for rapidly developing, evaluating, deploying, and scaling digital therapeutics for the prevention, treatment and/or management of any disease or disorder - via a drag and drop interface with no programming necessary. In this Phase 1 SBIR application, we will finalize several features of the Cogito platform to increase its commercial potential as a turnkey platform for developing and hosting digital therapeutics. And we will assess the feasibility, technical merit, and commercial potential of the Cogito digital therapeutics platform via usability testing with clinical researchers. We will focus on the usability of Cogito with researchers in the field of SUD treatment in this initial phase and then expand to a broad clinical research community focused on the prevention, treatment, or management of various health conditions in future iterations of this work. Overall, Cogito offers great promise to markedly accelerate the pace and impact of science based digital therapeutics.
