PHARMA GEEK

Startup companies are coming up with new technologies aimed at getting people to take medicine only as directed.

Taking medication haphazardly—skipping doses, lapsing between refills or taking pills beyond their expiration date—has been linked to health complications and hundreds of millions of wasted dollars for insurers and hospitals.

 "After six months' time, only half of people taking prescription medicines are taking them as directed," said Troyen Brennan, chief medical officer of drug retailer CVS Caremark Corp. 

Health insurers and pharmacy-benefits managers like CVS have long relied on robo-calls, mailers and face-to-face meetings with pharmacists to keep patients on their dosing schedule.

Now they are evaluating a range of more cost-effective technologies, from pills and bottles with digital sensors, to data analytics software and social games that offer patients rewards.

Insurers and pharmacies are motivated in part by Medicare, which offers financial rewards for proving their members have improved their overall adherence to medication schedules.

They also stand to benefit if their members are healthier. The New England Healthcare Institute estimates that some $290 billion in costs is wasted each year on unnecessary hospital and doctor visits by people who failed to comply with their medication schedule.

CVS is pilot-testing technology from Virginia-based RxAnte Inc., which sells an analytics platform that looks at millions of patients' claims data and clinical data to identify people at highest risk of failing to comply with doctors' orders.

These patients include people with a spotty track record of adherence, those who take several different medicines or those facing unwanted side effects, Chief Executive Josh Benner said.

"It's all a targeting game," Mr. Benner said. "We predict individual behaviors, and suggest interventions."

While digital gives you the opportunity to reach out to millions with a single click, it also poses a problem: if not monitored properly, it will not be as effective as face-to-face communication.

L’e-santé est un terme générique qui désigne l’application des technologies de l’information et de la communication (TIC) à l’ensemble des activités en rapport avec la santé. Elle porte les promess...

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Les médecins comme les patients surfent de plus en plus sur le web santé à partir de smartphones ou de tablettes.
Pour accompagner cet usage, les applications santé se multiplient, de la simple calculette virtuelle à la base de données médicamenteuses mobile, en passant par de complexes outils ludo-éducatifs.
Pour aider les professionnels de santé, comme le grand public, à distinguer les plus pertinentes, la société dmd Santé lance dmdpost.com, une plate-forme d’évaluation associant médecins et patients...

Note that these companies, all of whom appear regularly on "Most Innovative" lists, spend anywhere from two to eight times their R&D budgets on sales and administration. I have yet to hear complaints about how this makes all their research into some sort of lie, or about how much more they could be doing if they weren't spending all that money on those non-reseach activities. You cannot find a drug company with a split between SG&A and research spending like there is for IBM, or GE, or 3M. I've tried. No research-driven drug company could survive if it tried to spend five or six times its R&D on things like sales and administration. It can't be done. So enough, already.

Vervloet, M.
Have you taken your medication yet? The effectiveness of electronic reminders = Heeft u uw medicijnen al ingenomen? De effectiviteit van elektronische herinneringen. Utrecht, NIVEL, 2013

Dutch article of recent published thesis by M. Vervloet.

The medication Box automatically monitors when a drug is taken: RTMM: Real Time Medication Monitoring, through a central server. The patient can be remembered about his/her medication through severla methods; texting etc. They appear to like this (although there was a small number of patients). But this is a great step to knwo how we can help/support patients.

The (Dutch/ English) summary of the thesis can be downloaded at the same site page.

Research enabled by the Dutch ministry.

Qualcomm Life is committed to on-demand healthcare (like what we expect from our technology) and plans to pilot ideas for the future of health systems on their employees.

Les applications autour de Twitter dans le domaine médical se développent de plus en plus comme en témoigne la variété des articles sur ce...