Bring Home the Benefits of Data-Driven Care

mCompass Enables Anorectal Manometry Testing in Any Care Setting

For an experienced clinician, fingertips can speak volumes during a rectal exam. But for the highest quality-of-care, data, along with digits is crucial. After all, physicians are scientists and know that hard data is invaluable, leading to the better practice of medicine and better treatment results.

However, for most physicians treating patients with anorectal problems from chronic constipation and incontinence to fissures and even sexual issues this data often is extremely difficult to come by without an anorectal manometry procedure. The anal manometry devices that provide much-needed, objective anorectal pressure measurements are costly, complex and unwieldy ill-suited to a medical office environment. While patients may be referred to hospitals for the occasional anorectal manometry test, regular anorectal pressure measurement for ongoing tracking and therapeutic guidance is virtually inaccessible to most office-based practices.

Until Compass compact, portable and cost-effective, with easy-to-use disposable catheters, an anorectal manometry device created just to meet the needs of office-based physicians to help deliver the benefits of data-driven care. “Prior to using mCompass, we knew from observations that treatments were working,” says Evan Goldstein, DO, a proctologist and anal surgeon with a thriving New York City-based practice. “Patients were improving. We could see it. They felt better. But that‘s subjective information.”

Now, he and his dedicated staff rely on mCompass for anorectal manometry testing, which has become an integral part of their practice. MCompass gives us actual concrete data on the involuntary anal sphincter as well as on the voluntary external anal sphincter and rectal muscle pressures to back up what I can see on an anoscope or feel during a digital rectal exam. These muscles, of course, play a major role in a host of anorectal problems. mCompass enables us to determine much more accurately whether the problem is a muscle issue and, if so, how to address it.

According to Steven Lavender, a highly experienced physiotherapist at the practice, “Using mCompass measurement data, we are better able to plan treatment and to track therapy results. For example, like many practices, we use Botox injections to relax the anal sphincter muscles. With appropriate measurement, we can fine-tune the placement and volume delivered into the internal anal sphincter to help ensure desired results. We typically do a 60/40 Botox ratio to the muscle versus the skin for most patients who are too tight. However, we would reverse this ratio with someone who had low or normal pressures. So knowing a patient‘s manometry readings guide care in a very real way.”

Dr. Goldstein adds that he is also able to test anorectal pressures for patients at risk for a variety of problems to deliver preventative care or early treatment. “We also are better able to monitor the impact of therapies by putting hard numbers to results,” he adds.

But for the experienced physician, the benefits of mCompass in anal manometry extend well beyond treatment of an individual patient. Patient care benefits as more objective information about anorectal pressures, patient condition and the impact of various therapies accumulates over time. “In the beginning the goal is to acquire data to help individual cases,” he explains. “Later, it broadens. Data trends become a basis for discussion and putting new information out there so that other physicians can think critically about it.”

More specifically, as the healthcare system begins to amass large datasets, these can be used to provide frameworks, parameters and guidelines for understanding problems and treatment paths for addressing them with reproducible results across similar patients anywhere. “Until you have that type of data, you don‘t have something concrete to discuss about specific approaches and pass on to other physicians.”

Sharing this information, he believes, drives the delivery of more precise care not only to an individual practice‘s patients but to similar patient populations worldwide through this anorectal manometry device.

Written in collaboration with Medspira.