Entrepreneur Ifat Shterenberg Toledano was 30 weeks into her fourth pregnancy when she started feeling sudden excruciating pain in her pelvis and lower back. “Basically, I became disabled,” she tells ISRAEL21c.
Her horrifying medical ordeal resulted in Shterenberg Toledano establishing Treat Me, a unique platform combining Western medicine, complementary therapies and cutting-edge research.
Designed for practitioners, the platform leverages research-driven data and AI to personalize each treatment, improve patient outcomes and streamline care.
It incorporates all integrative care methods, from more traditional treatments such as physiotherapy, to holistic ones such as Chinese medicine, naturopathy, reflexology and more.
Searching for pixie dust
When Shterenberg Toledano first started feeling pain in October 2019, doctors initially dismissed the symptoms as her body simply being strained from the pregnancy. But after giving birth, the pain worsened to the point where she could no longer stand.
After endless medical tests and doctor visits, Shterenberg Toledano was finally given an MRI that revealed multiple fractures in her pelvis. “The pelvis essentially fell apart; there was swelling all over,” she recalls.
Shterenberg Toledano decided to contact a physiotherapist from Belgium, a world-renowned specialist in similar types of injuries, who advised her “to stay in the water for 18 months,” telling her that using a wheelchair would atrophy her muscles and leave her permanently disabled.
“My husband built me a pool in the backyard, and I stayed at that pool day and night; winter and summer,” she explains. It took Shterenberg Toledano three years to fully recover and be able to walk again.
Shterenberg Toledano credits the Belgian physiotherapist and many other alternative therapists with whom she consulted on the way to recovery.
She also credits herself, having spent those three years scouring the Internet for medical research that might speed up the recovery.
“I was searching for pixie dust to take the pain away,” she says.
Integrative therapy
Eventually she decided to utilize all the knowledge she was gaining during her rehabilitation process to help those in similar predicaments.
Shterenberg Toledano self-funded and developed the Treat Me platform while still in recovery, despite having no formal training in software development. She registered the company in March 2021.
The goal of the platform is to optimize integrative care, including physical therapy, to make it easier for therapists to personalize treatments and speed up recovery times for their patients.
“The field of integrative medicine is very old-fashioned and suffers from a lack of technology. They do not have the ability to stay up to date on research,” she says.
Treat Me’s integrative electronic health record (EHR) cloud-based system, optimized for any mobile device and iPad, offers the practitioner instant access to treatment research and evidence-based treatment protocols; personalized, research-backed treatment options; dynamic tracking of treatment progress; evidence-based alternative recommendations; seamless integration of Western and complementary modalities; enhanced patient engagement and streamlined administration.
Shterenberg Toledano explains that not a lot of funding is being invested in integrative medicine and related research. Existing therapists often are overworked and underpaid.
“How many physical therapists do you know who are pelvic specialists? They can’t do it; they’re busy because there’s a shortage of physical therapists. The same thing is happening in Chinese medicine and other fields,” she notes.
Treat Me
Treat Me strives to make order of that chaos and is the first platform of its kind, says Shterenberg Toledano.
“[Treat Me] has a database of research of all these treatment methods contained together in one place, and the system knows how to analyze them.”
The database allows therapists to find the best possible treatment plan for each individual case based on specialized questionnaires patients are asked to fill in.
“For instance, if you’re about to have surgery, a therapist can upload your medical profile into the system and get a [post-surgery] treatment plan and a recovery timeframe, based on studies about rehabilitations of patients similar to you,” Shterenberg Toledano adds.
The system also allows therapists to document each treatment protocol in an optimized and efficient way to properly keep track of the patient’s progress.
The company’s first pilot was done in cooperation with Tel Aviv University (TAU) and included 2000 therapists. “We saw that [the platform] was working, it was crazy.”
Earlier this year, Treat Me became one of nine Israeli startups selected by the Dangoor Health-Tech Academy to help its partners in the UK tackle challenges related to healthcare. The Academy was initiated by the UK-Israel Tech Hub at the British Embassy in Israel in partnership with The Dangoor Foundation.
The company, which has four full-time employees, is gearing up for its first funding round and official launch in April.
For more information and to request a demo, click here.
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