Innovations in Medical Adherence
Please take your drugs!
Medical adherence remains possibly one of most underrated issues affecting healthcare worldwide. To restate the obvious, the best HIV drug in the world has zero effectiveness sitting behind your bathroom mirror.
While drug discovery sits at a global market size of $35 Billion (2016), medication adherence is not even a $2 Billion market. Despite the small market currently, the effects of medical non-adherence is staggering.
It is predicted that over 40% of patients do not take prescription drugs as directed- leading to an estimated 125,000 deaths per year in the U.S. The associated healthcare costs due to re-hospitalization and increased morbidity exceeds $100 Billion per year (compare this number to the market size).
With large pharmaceutical companies making developments to increase patient compliance, startups in the field still have the advantage of rapid innovation and flexibility. Technology in this field can be divided into two broad categories: Those that are purely software and those that have both hardware and software components.
In this article, I will give an brief overview of these two types and industry leaders in each category. Upcoming articles will go more in-depth regarding the actual technology and pro/con analysis.
Software:
This category of startups invariably uses the patients smartphone to act as an sensor- either to monitor or encourage compliance.
Camera Visualization
One such company is AiCure that developed a visual recognition system for use on the patients phone camera to identify medication, confirm ingestion, and confer the data back to clinics.
On a similar note, the New York based startup, Wellth created an app to target compliance in patients with high blood pressure (hypertension). In additional to taking prescription pills, the Wellth app can also encourage patients to check blood pressure and eat healthy meals- sometimes through financial rewards.
Chatting Robots
Catalia Health takes a different approach with it’s AI-powered engagement robot that holds daily conversations with patients. In giving medical reminders and discussing symptoms with patients, Catalia Helath is targeting people suffering from chronic illnesses. Valuable information regarding disease progression can thus be obtained without frequent hospital visits.
Hardware (and some software)
This category uses primarily hardware sensors that is sometimes supported with a smartphone app for data collection.
Smart Prescription Bottles
This one is large enough to be it’s own independent article. In essence smart prescription bottles can give patient reminders on when to take a pill and also verify that a pill has been taken. In the next article, I will do a more in-depth review of each prescription “bottle and cap” startup and the technologies involved. Edit: That article can be found here!
Edible Sensors
The idea here is to incorporate cheap and compatible sensors into pills that, once eaten, will notify your smartphone. Proteus is a startup that developed a small metal sensor to be included with every pill. This technology is helpful for drugs that are extremely sensitive to compliance- for example PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), an HIV prevention drug.
I hope the overview was helpful for getting familiarized with this field of startups. If you are interested in learning more, stay tuned for more articles on patient compliance coming soon!
