Drug Adherence Tools That Meet Patients Where They Are
November 9th, 2009
The following guest post on the subject of drug adherence is written by Julie Murchinson, Founder, Health 2.0 Accelerator and Managing Director with Manatt Health Solutions.
The tools are coming! The tools are coming! For a while now, tools to manage drug adherence have been developed, many designed to enable the patient to self-manage in the context of and in collaboration with the health care system from a specifically designed device or heavy application. Patient adoption, however, has been slow and the vision for self-management of drug adherence not yet reality. But recently from the budding Health 2.0 space, we are seeing tools built on more accessible web and mobile platforms that allow patients to manage when and where they want to with their mobile device (e.g. iPhone, Blackberry, cell phone). So, in much the same way many people’s lives have changed as a result of being able to use Facebook or Twitter, or read the Washington Post from their phones on the bus or out at lunch, patients who have previously required proximity to their home device or desktop to log medications taken can now not only track on their phone what they take from their pill box, but also take advantage of glow cap or smart label technologies that can technically interact with a phone-based mobile application.
It was one thing when the Brazilian government was sending text messages to remind women to take their birth control pills (which, by the way, has been highly effective), but we are in a new age of both passive and active patient engagement with mobile platforms. There are iPhone accessible apps like Polka and TheCarrot.com that enable patients to schedule and track their medications taken along with a number of other health topics including sleep, exercise and mood, among others. Medic8Manager provides an iPhone solution that goes a few steps deeper on drug adherence for managing scheduled medications with reminder functionality, refill tracking, missed dose alerts, as-needed meds and discontinued medications. A similar application in development from Informediq even uses the tagline, “enabling healthcare anywhere”. While some products are typically used solely by patients without involvement required from a physician or other caregiver, we are starting to see more user-friendly tools that originate from the physician-patient care process, while allowing for more consumer-friendly adherence tracking, a good example of which we are seeing from the new AdhereTx product. The next step in innovation can be seen from eMedMobile which facilitates a phone working with “smart labels” on prescription medication bottles that store drug data and send alerts to caregivers when a drug is missed.
What mobile drug adherence applications cannot do is change the character of the person using their phone for this purpose.
- Will we choose to tweet about our day, check the latest scores AND log our our Lipitor on our phone?
- Will we enter all of the drugs we take and their respective schedules into one of these applications or will we demand that that information be automatically downloaded from our doctor or pharmacy as part of the electronic prescribing process?
- Will we be more inclined to use these tools if we are doing so in tight coordination with our physician?
A growing number of technology companies are betting on the fact that mobility will enable flexibility and meet the patient where they are, providing enough value to help them change their drug adherence behavior to some extent. We are even seeing some products go the next level to provide incentives to patients like Health Honors, which uses a points-reward system that can be used on health-related awards like fitness equipment, co-payment discounts and other financial benefits. We, the broad “we”, are hopeful if not excited about the prospects for these tools to have a significant impact on adherence once and for all. Although time will tell, innovation in this area is both notable and promising.
Related posts:
- Got Meds: Drug Adherence for Young People with Chronic Medical Conditions
- Drug Adherence Throwdown: Analyzing America’s Other Drug Problem
- Improving Medication Adherence with a Cell Phone
- Drug Adherence Throwdown: Disruptive Women Take on America’s Other Drug Problem
- Just a Spoonful of Sugar: How Healthy Gaming Can Support Drug Adherence
November 9th, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Julie,
Very interesting post on using mobile technology to increase consumer drug compliance, along with great examples of new technologies in play. A few thoughts on the questions you pose at the end of your post.
By way of example, if you look at the adoption rates of personal health records, consumers did not use them unless they were incented to do so by their employers or they were pre-populated (at least to some degree) by either payers or providers. And admittedly PHR adoption rates are still low today. Thus, one might anticipate a similar uptake of drug adherence tools as your blog suggests. Only the most compulsive consumer would take the time to log the relevant details of every medication she was taking. However, if consumers could download this information (e.g., from their PHR, physician’s portal or their pharmacy profile) and the reminder was made available when they needed to act upon it (e.g., it’s time to take that Lipitor pill, renew your prescription) then the utility of the service increases and adoption of mobile reminders should follow.
Our research does shows that consumers will respond to their physicians recommendation to use such tools and are interested in receiving reminders by mobile phone. IDC Health Insights, as part of its Telemedicine Report Series, recently conducted a survey of more than 1200 consumers in the U.S. Approximately 35% of survey respondents indicated that they were somewhat or very interested in receiving health reminders and just under 6% reported that they already did so.
The bottom line, consumers will begin to use these tools when they see value in using them, and provided it doesn’t take too much effort on their part.
Lynne A. Dunbrack
IDC Health Insights
Program Director, Provider IT Strategies