Digital patient engagement company HealthPrize Technologies has partnered with Walgreens to offer its medication adherence platform on the drugstore chain’s website. The program will be offered to patients filling certain brand-name prescriptions for chronic conditions, starting with diabetes and eventually expanding to others. The platform will be web-based, but Walgreen's site is optimized for mobile devices.

Select patients will have the option to use HealthPrize Action Engine, the company’s adherence platform, which leverages gamification, behavioral economics and incentives redeemable at Walgreens to motivate and engage patients to learn about their condition and adhere to their medications. Using HealthPrize, which has reported a 50 percent reduction in “gap days” for medication adherence in patients using its platform, was a natural choice for Walgreens.

“For us, this is an opportunity to offer both behavioral psychology and also get people educated about their disease state,” Greg Orr, senior director of digital health for Walgreens told MobiHealthNews. “This is a pretty innovative product from a company that has really differentiated itself from a lot of startups.”

Patients who are interested are eligible based on the medication they are taking, and if so, are then guided towards weekly condition-related quizzes and surveys, daily health tips, fun facts, leaderboards, competitions, medication prompts and various reminders. The average user is expected to log in four to six times per week, and the adherence platform verifies every refill.

For HealthPrize CEO Tom Kottler, the Walgreens collaboration marks a new phase of the company’s business strategy, and allows for an omni-channel approach for medication brands to encourage patients to take medication. Historically, HealthPrize has teamed up  with life sciences companies. In June, the company collaborated with pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim to launch RespiPoints, a medication adherence program for patients with COPD.

“We have a great portfolio of customers and we are starting to brand to those customers,” Tom Kottler, CEO of HealthPrize told MobiHealthNews. “Working with a company like Walgreens allows us to get immediately to scale.”

Kottler said HealthPrize is looking to offer more programs with more large-scale companies, both in the pharmaceuticals and pharmacy spaces.

“We want to develop a bigger footprint and expand our program; build a product that reaches more people,” he said.

While the first goal is diabetes medication (planned for implementation with partners during the third quarter of 2016), Walgreens and HealthPrize hope to expand the program to additional conditions and medications such as those for high cholesterol, asthma, COPD and depression by the end of this year. If the partnership is successful, Orr said, the goal is to offer the service to as many patients, and for as many conditions and medications, as possible.

“From our perspective, we have an ecosystem where we are leveraging the best partners out there, bringing awareness to them, and bringing a product to patients,” said Orr. “It’s a natural complement to our services.”