A new study of 1,500 patients casts doubt on the effectiveness of several promising medication adherence technologies and strategies, including connected pill bottles and lottery-based incentives.
The study, called the HeartStrong Study, was recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine. It was a year-long single-blind study of heart failure patients taking some combination of statins, aspirin,...
In addition to recently entering the digital health world with a prescription-checking app, online glasses retailer Warby Parker has also hired a new vice president of computer vision with a digital health background. Serial entrepreneur David Rose, who joined Warby Parker in March, was the founder and CEO of Vitality, maker of connected pill bottle cap brand GlowCap. Vitality was one of the...
Personalized medicine was a hot topic at the BIO conference in Philadelphia, but in a session on digital health and patient engagement, payer and provider panelists also talked about how, in order to really drive medication and treatment adherence, patient engagement also has to be personalized.
"You have to understand what are they worried about, what are their fears, what are they trying to do...
It's possible that folks in the industry can be a little too quick to call out signs of the times that mobile health has "gone mainstream" or "hit the big leagues." But there certainly have been some strong signs lately. Samsung announced mobile health features as a key part of its release strategy for the Galaxy S4. The House of Representatives hosted three days to holding hearings on mobile...
Medication adherence is a huge problem, and it's one that seems solvable. People fail to take the pills prescribed to them for many reasons, but one of the biggest is forgetfulness, especially among elderly patients who take a lot of medications and can easily become confused.
Pillboxes have always been the go-to technology to improve adherence, whether it's a simple Monday-through-Friday...
Last month, Vitality made their GlowCap pill container caps available for direct-to-consumer purchase from CVS. The company has also been quietly developing a new product, the Vitality GlowPack, a customizable pouch which provides similar functionality to the GlowCap. The advantage to the GlowPack is that it can be used it for medications larger than pills.
CVS Caremark and Vitality GlowCaps are...
Earlier this month Nant Health, the healthcare company that is a part of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong's tight-lipped NantWorks portfolio of companies, raised $31 million in two rounds of funding, according to SEC filings. Another NantWorks company, NantiD, which appears to be the next generation of the iVisit LookTel technology that Nant acquired a few years ago, raised an additional $15 million in...
Care4Today by Janssen Healthcare Innovation
For one reason or another, as many as half the patients in the United States don't take the medication that is prescribed to them at a cost to the US healthcare system of $290 billion a year in waste. That's according to NEHI, formerly known as the New England Healthcare Institute, which has been tracking the medication adherence problem for years....
Mobile and wireless technologies are helping give rise to a new form of clinical decision support that's being called "patient activation."
"We're making a category that really hasn't existed," according to Doug Thompson, a senior research director at the Advisory Board Co., a Washington-based research firm that is making a big push into healthcare of late.
"The term 'patient activation' can be...
LookTel powered by NantWorks
Earlier this month Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong announced the name of the company that he has been building through a series of acquisitions over the past few years: NantWorks. This week Vodafone announced that it had partnered with NantWorks on researching and developing remote patient care mobile health services over advanced wireless networks. Vodafone recently opened...