Eli Lilly and Company has developed an app for people living with Type II diabetes who use Trulicity, the company’s once-per-week injectable diabetes medication that also works with a click-activated pen. The app, which has been fully functionally since September, is currently available free on iOS to anyone with a Trulicity prescription.
“It’s important for people to successfully start any medication, so Lilly developed the Trulicity app to make it easier for new users to remember to take their once-weekly treatment,” Juan Granados-Zuniga, Lilly’s product director of consumer marketing, told MobiHealthNews in an email. “In addition, we wanted to make it easier for our customers to connect to some of the other resources we provide to help enhance their experience."
The Trulicity app offers a few different features to aid those using the medication in their treatment: a virtual demo pen that mimics every feature, function and sound of the real Trulicity pen; weekly dosing reminders that users set for the day and time to take their medication, and the ability to instant message or call the Lilly Answer Center if they need any help with their medication.
“We know that people with type 2 diabetes, just like everyone else, lead busy lives and have a lot of obligations,” Granados-Zuniga wrote. “We learned from early research that a once-weekly medication is in some ways harder for people to remember than a daily one. This is probably the case, because people who take prescription medications like pills, for example, are used to taking them daily or maybe even twice daily.”
With Trulicity, the medication works 24/7, responding with the user’s blood sugar rises. As such, it may be easier for patients to push their treatment to the back of their mind, which is where the app comes in.
“We wanted to make it easy for our patients to get in the habit of taking their medication once-a-week and felt an app on their smartphone was a nice way of better fitting into their busy lives,” said Granados-Zuniga.
Lilly plans to conduct usability testing in early 2017 to see how it is working out with users, as well as looking at other avenues to expand the app to other platforms outside of iOS. There is no current plan to expand to Android.
