btw, the Ballmer quote occurred in Nashville, the “Silicon Valley of health care”, not Knoxville.

“My No. 1 piece of advice is to start with the patient,” Ballmer said. “Start the dialogue with the physician with the patient’s perspective and the patient’s information in mind. It may not be the most rewarding in the short-term, but it’s the most transformational thing you’ll be able to do in the long run.”

Steve Ballmer (CEO Microsoft)

It is good to have people seem to be getting point

Focusing on one population doesn’t address the issue at hand, and this is what I believe Vasella had meant. Not all patients can be convinced of medically adherent behavior in the same manor. As Vasella noted, patients are people, humans, with different social, cultural, physical, and psychological characteristics that need to be taken into account. With this in mind, I believe technologies, like the one Novartis has recently invested in, can be a huge help in the battle against medication non-adherence when properly leveraged with education coming from doctors, pharmacists, caregivers, and the pharmaceutical companies themselves.

As noted, data is the starting point to understand what to do next. Over the past few years there have been more than a few great studies on adherence, education, and new technologies….enough for us to see that the next step is to embrace them and learn how to use them more efficiently for the mass population.