QuiO cofounder and CEO Alexander Dahmani
America is getting sicker and wasting money due to what, at first glance, might seem like a simple problem: patients don’t stick to their medication plan. Some studies suggest that patients fail to correctly take their medication by between 25 and 50 percent, which leads to an almost across-the-board increase in subsequent health costs and a poorer standard of living. Among senior citizens alone, up to ten percent of hospitalization events can be traced back to what, in the medical world, is known as medication nonadherence.
But the bigger problem is not that troubling slate of statistics themselves, unsettling as they may be. What scientists and the medical profession as a whole are truly grappling with is closer to the root cause: the lack of reliable data when it comes to tracking whether a patient is following their medication plan as instructed.
“It’s a daunting challenge and no one has been able to solve it,” said founder Alexander Dahmani, the cofounder and CEO of a company called QuiO, makers of a platform that enables data collection from smart therapeutic devices.
An approximation of the data, Dahmani said, is obtained by calculating it through prescription refill claims. The peril? By the time the stat makes it back to the patient’s electronic chart, they might have been off their meds for weeks or months. With nonadherence causing around 125,000 deaths a year, it’s nowhere near accurate enough.
That’s the variable Dahmani’s company is trying to solve for: how to transform medications into “disease management solutions” that, through connected therapeutic devices and the power of data analytics, are able to produce a consistent stream of information that helps caregivers and physicians keep tabs on how medication is taken.
“We started this company in 2014 with the goal of creating smart injection devices,” said Dahmani, who has a Master’s Degree in Microbiology and Immunology from Columbia University. “The reason we looked at smart injections is they can record each dosage event, but the missing link has been the data showing which patients are following through on their treatment.”
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 devices leverage the stability of cellular chip connectivity to ensure patients can easily handle the task at hand. As opposed to Bluetooth connections, the QuiO smart injectors avoid the trouble of losing pairing or making patients go through complex processes to be linked to their profiles.
“Our devices are also advanced in the sense that they’re capable of collecting a number of data points like skin contact, temperature, how much medication was loaded and how much was delivered while in contact with the skin,” Dahmani said.
For QuiO, the ‘Eureka’ moment came after taking stock of how valuable the generated data might be in the search for a solution. Since 2015, QuiO has been building a connected cloud platform to store the data — in, of course, a HIPAA-compliant environment — and has now opened up that platform to third party devices.
“The bigger opportunity here is the software,” said the CEO. In November 2017, the company entered a strategic partnership with Taiwan-based SHL Group, which will be responsible for manufacturing the physical devices. Meanwhile, QuiO is building up its pool of developers to become a more software-focused company looking to offer its cloud platform to a broader, growing ecosystem of connected therapeutics: think smart pill boxes, weight scales, activity trackers, glucose meters and many more.
What will Dahmani like to see in the next decade of his company and the industry as a whole?
“First, the mass adoption of connected therapeutic devices,” the CEO said. “However, that’s just half the solution. Once the devices are out in the market, we’ll be able to use that information to develop and test behavioral and economic interventions. We can use the device data to determine how the interventions can impact patients. And then, basically, let a thousand flowers bloom.”
