Chevy Chase, Maryland-based startup MyOwnMed raised $1.3 million in funding this past December, according to an SEC filing from late last year.

The company, founded in mid-2013, is headed up by Founder and CEO Vicki Seyfert-Margolis, a former senior advisor of science innovation and policy to the FDA Commissioner's Office who has also worked in non-profit medical research circles, academia, and as a director at NIH.

MyOwnMed pitches its offering as "a customizable digital platform and mobile health app that captures between-visit patient health data" that aims to better educate patients, support caregivers, aid physician decision-making, and provide payers and health systems with new analytical tools. The company believes that medical technology companies have not focused enough on user experience to date and that digital health tools for both patients and doctors remain "kludgy and difficult to use", according to MyOwnMed's website.

"At MyOwnMed, we believe a great user experience is critical to the long-term engagement of patients, but also understand that users in this context are very different and therefore their needs are different," the site reads. "An 80-year-old arthritis sufferer taking care of himself doesn't need half the functionality that a 55-year-old mom taking care of her daughter and her mother needs. A doctor needs different functionalities altogether. MyOwnMed serves each of these categories of users with a different set of tools, functionalities, and reporting capabilities consistent with their role in the health care system and in the individual's care, each built to high standards for user experience."

While its offerings have yet to launch, MyOwnMed promises a mobile app and web platform that include communication and collaboration tools for patients and caregivers. They will offer both real-time communication tools and asynchronous trackers. The company said such simple tools will, for example, "help detect how drugs interact in real time".

MyOwnMed also plans to help its users form communities through it platform based on whichever topic or shared characteristic users choose to use as a focal point: demographics, disease states, location, etc. It will also host a question and answer feature to allow "users to ask and answer questions in a forum-styled way, allowing users to get quick advice without signing on for the full community features."

"We will be able to generate actionable information from data provided by hundreds of thousands of users — data that will be visualized and shown back to users themselves to make them better patients; to family members who care for sick loved ones; and to doctors who need efficient ways to know where to focus their attention and better tools to recognize [patient reported outcome] patterns to provide better care," the company writes. "Hospital systems and other large companies will be able to use the data to gain insights as to when and why their products and approaches do and don't work. An advanced analysis engine allows you to dig deep into aggregate patient data to review potential cost-savings, learn about patient experiences, and gain a deeper understanding of consumer markets."