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Magic pills and the $290bn missing medicine opportunity

The WSJ reports on some fascinating new wireless apps that both improve patient care and lower costs. An industry report talks about annual savings from remote monitoring at "$10.1 billion for U.S. sufferers of congestive heart failure, $6.1 billion for diabetes and $4.9 billion for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease." Partly based on this promise, there was more VC investment in venture health-care in Q1 ($2.23bn) than tech companies ($1.88) - the first time this has happened.

Related to this, Mobihealth calls out the opportunity for better medicine management.

A new report conducted by the New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI) found that not taking medications as prescribed leads to poorer health, more frequent hospitalization, a higher risk of death and as much as $290 billion annually in increased medical costs. Anywhere from one-third to one-half of patients in the U.S. do not take their medications as instructed.

I suspect this number dramatically overstates reality, based on the breahtless overprescription of medicines and procedures in this country, and the fact that the drugs people forget to take are most probably the ones that are not helping them get better. But anyway, even if the number was one third of that, that's still an opportunity worth sharpening a pencil for.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so I immediately think of text-based and mobile applications to do this. However, Mobihealth points to a next generation pill made by Proteus that contains a chip made of food (sic) that transmits info to the doctors by a pill ("Ouch, I was eaten at 12pm", "Ooh, this guy's colon is pretty messy").  It's facing regulatory hurdles currently, but as long as they can make the "it's food products, it's safe" idea at the top of mind, and get costs down below a penny a pill, this could be big. (The fact that the CEO is also a Brit transplant to US and studied at my university in the UK gives me extra cause for optimism.)

These type of Magic Pills will compliment not substitute the phone as the personal health solution. Once the data on pill consumption and their internal investigations has been surfaced, it will be trivial to create really interesting and useful consumer-targeted web and mobile applications that provide helpful pointers to the patient to keep them fit, and take some of the low-level grunt work away from doctors.