Health IT, Hospitals, Pharma, Startups

Sticky sensors help patients and doctors manage at-home cancer treatment plans

Are you taking your meds or are they rattling around in your purse? This is […]

Are you taking your meds or are they rattling around in your purse?

This is the question that Gema Touch wants to answer with a new medication tracking system.

Joanna Rogerson and Jon Guida have created the Gema Kit, that features stickers embedded with sensors that link to a patient reporting website. These small circles go on pills, pill bottles or blister packs. The sensor is proximity-based, so when a person’s cell phone is waved at the sticker, it brings up the reporting portal. In addition to recording when a pill was taken, a user can report symptoms, side effects and mood. The touch-to-activate patches include proprietary technology but also meet NFC Forum Type 2 Tag standards. They can be read by any NFC-enabled mobile device including cell phones, tablets or readers.

Rogerson said she decided to start with cancer patients because of a trend in cancer treatment shifting from the doctor’s office to the patient’s home. One oncologist told Rogerson that oral chemo medications were going to increase from 10 percent of the practice’s business to almost 40 percent in a year’s time.

Unsurprisingly, medication adherence and patient support plans are not keeping up with this change.

“Doctors are losing the monitoring capability and increasing treatment costs,” Rogerson said. “Basically the nurse calls the patient at set intervals to check in, it’s very labor intensive.”

The kit goes to the patient and he or she affixes the stickers to the medication. The Gema Touch system also includes a reporting and tracking system for oncologists. Rogerson said the system includes alerts for individual patients to let a doctor know if a patient is feeling worse. The platform also can aggregate data for patients in the same treatment program.

Rogerson said that once Gema Touch has established oncology customers, the plan is to expand to other highly managed diseases.
“The hardware doesn’t change, we can link it to any passive surface, like fabric or plastics,” she said. “The user experience will be different, to reflect different motivations and drivers.”

Before joining the Healthbox class, Rogerson and Guida got a $50,000 grant from NC Idea to develop the technology. Healthbox was the company’s first equity investor.
Rogerson said that she has one confirmed pilot that will launch in early 2014. She is looking for introductions to more oncology clinics. She said she expects to do a series A round in late 2014.

There was an audience voting contest at the end of the demo day and Gema Touch won. Rogerson and Guida took home an extra $20,000 to Raleigh.

Rogerson is the president and CEO of Gema Touch and a molecular biologist. She previously worked as an innovation and commercialization adviser at RTI International and the NC Biotechnology Center. She has an MBA with a concentration in technology, entrepreneurship and commercialization, an MS in biotechnology and a BS in biology. Guida is the vice president of business development and specializes in consumer behavior and psychology.

Veronica Combs

Veronica is an independent journalist and communications strategist. For more than 10 years, she has covered health and healthcare with a focus on innovation and patient engagement. Most recently she managed strategic partnerships and communications for AIR Louisville, a digital health project focused on asthma. The team recruited 7 employer partners, enrolled 1,100 participants and collected more than 250,000 data points about rescue inhaler use. Veronica has worked for startups for almost 20 years doing everything from launching blogs, newsletters and patient communities to recruiting speakers, moderating panel conversations and developing new products. You can reach her on Twitter @vmcombs.

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