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.
Health2.0 meetup: Handhold Adaptive & Healogic
Went along last night to the well attended Health2.0 meetup, organized by Eugene Borukhovich. A capacity crowd - I thought there might be a danger of overcrowding and asphyxiation but relaxed when I remembered about 95% of the people in the room were MDs.
Two impressive presentations which go to show why mHealth is such an interesting space. The first was by Rick(?) Tedescu from Handhold Adaptive. It's a technology company making solutions for people who are, as their tagline reads, "differently enabled". Powerful story of a guy being motivated to create a solution to improve the life of his family and his son, Evan - who has autism. Their first product, iPrompts provides visual icons on the iPhone linked to words to make it easier for developmentally challenged people to interact. They're selling this on the App Store for $50. Lots of development plans there. My concern was whether the Apple rights management system was secure enough to prevent piracy of such a high value app.
Second up was a very smooth - apart from the technical glitches - presentation by Healogica, who make it easy for people with illnesses to find and register for relevant clinical trials. The founders Jean Luc and Jeff are MDs who have come fresh from heading the healthcare practice at Gerson Lehrman, and have raised 750k in angel funding in April this year, having self funded it for a year. Very polished performance and technology that seems to solve an identifiable problem for a certain group of people (the size of which is obviously the key question). They have an iPhone app whose revenues will be 100% given to research Pancreatic cancer research (Steve Jobs' disease, a savvy but well meant marketing touch).
Looking forward to more of these events, congrats Eugene.