As part of its partnership with a pharmaceutical company to improve adherence for its diabetes drug, mobile health startup MediSafe made an interesting discovery, according to its founder Bob Shor. Caucasian men on the East Coast were missing their 7 pm dosage on weeknights. What was the cause? Jeopardy? Dinner? Or did they leave their medication at home?
If you had guessed the latter, you’d be right. Israel-based Medisafe’s app, which 125,000 users have downloaded since November last year, collects patient data from its users through the cloud-synched app. With users’ permission it converts that information into big data insights for pharmaceutical and healthcare industry partners. It can provide laser focused insights on when people are missing their medication and why.
It’s raised $1 million to add an iPhone app developer and marketer and to scale up partnerships with other pharmaceutical and healthcare companies. In an interview with Shor, he said it expects to have four to five partnerships within six months and another 10-15 one year from now. The app, which has been in beta testing since November last year is expected to hit the market mid-October.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
TriVentures and lool Ventures led the financing round. Other investors included serial entrepreneurs and angel investors Eyal Gura (@eyalg), Yadin Kaufmann, the founding partner of Veritas Venture Partners and Yair Schindel, a healthcare entrepreneur.
For healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, the app’s dashboard shows which demographics have higher non-compliance for a drug in relation to the general population. It also highlights parts of the U.S. with the lowest prescription rates. It can also indicate rival drugs patients use.
Consumers use the app to monitor when and how much medication they should be taking. When users add medications, they are prompted with questions on amounts, frequency and time of day, and whether or not they should be taken with food. If users forget to take their medications or forget to confirm it on the app, family members are notified through text message.
MediSafe was part of a group of companies that graduated from the inaugural class of Microsoft’s four-month accelerator program for its cloud platform, Windows Azure.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
The Centers for Disease Control puts medication adherence in the U.S. at a miserable 50 percent, a pain point that causes complications and drives up healthcare costs. Medication adherence is a pain point that mobile health services are competing to solve. Israeli mobile health startup MediSafe developed a cloud-synched virtual pill box app boasting an adherence rate higher than the national average.
Part of the future of mobile health technology in healthcare is its potential to use apps to predict and change behavior. Medication adherence is just one part of that.
