DeviceConnect Recap: Bringing Healthcare into the Home
On January 30, we hosted our first DeviceConnect event of 2020 titled Bringing Healthcare into the Home at Life Science of Washington's new home in Eastlake.
Our expert line up of panelists included:
Christine Farmer, the Vice President and Site Head at Novo Nordisk Research Center in Seattle
Chris Rivera, Chairman, President, and CEO at EMulate Therapeutics (formerly Nativis, Inc.)
Jeff LeBrun, Co-founder and CEO of Pillsy and optimize.health
Michael Hite, Co-founder, and CEO of Parachute Therapeutics
Moderated by Scott Thielman, CTO of Product Creation Studio
The panel conversation centered on the convergence between traditional healthcare models and consumerism. In an era of shifting attitudes and expectations towards technology, companies are starting to question what role they play in the consumer healthcare space.
How does a company like Novo Nordisk – one traditionally focused on pharma – get into the device space? And where do they focus first – on patient needs or those of the physician and provider?
Additionally, the panel provides some insight into what newer companies are doing to protect patients and increase medication adherence with home healthcare devices, all while reducing the harmful effects or dangers of more potent drugs (like opioids)?
The biggest challenge when it comes to healthcare
Medication adherence is a significant challenge that continues to be a growing concern for physicians and the healthcare system overall. Not only is non-adherence severe (50% of chronic disease sufferers do not adhere to their drug protocol), but it's costly. It can result in death, hospitalization, and just an overall increase in a single patient's total healthcare costs.
So the key is to meet the patient's needs in a way that makes adherence intuitive and straightforward.
Right? Well, maybe.
Technology can help combat this challenge of non-adherence by providing multiple pathways for providers to identify risk, proactively encourage the patient, and facilitate adherence by tracking patient outcomes.
Only there are two problems this presents:
Drug-device combination products bring challenging medical regulatory and reimbursement issues to the surface. This makes addressing the problem of non-adherence even more challenging to address.
If this experience proves to be too overwhelming for the physician, will they even adopt it on their side? We can't ignore the impact this has on the provider-side.
The following summary takes a look at how the panelists have approached these challenges head-on.
What is the key to patient adoption?
Wearables or implantables are the keys to adoption, according to Michael Hite, co-founder and CEO of Parachute Therapeutics. His company is actively developing the Naloxone Parachute, a wearable device to detect and prevent fatal overdose from opioids in chronic pain sufferers.
"When managing chronic disease with technology, the technology must be carefully tailored to the patient's needs to be effective," says Michael. "Wearables offer the unique opportunity to monitor the patient's condition with sensors and automatically deliver the therapy as needed."
Chris Rivera, Chairman, President, and CEO of EMulate Therapeutics agrees, "wearable devices and apps make it easier to monitor a patient's compliance with the prescribed therapy. It allows the doctor to check in quickly and easily to see if the patient is following through."
Also, Chris sees drug development time and cost as "unsustainable." The device technologies that are coming into this newer market can address those issues and cut the costs and time to develop new drugs. With technology, patients don't have to wait long periods to get the treatment they desperately need.
What about the physician, what role do they play when developing a device technology?
When you're considering whether to create with the provider or patient in mind first, Jeff LeBrun offers, "I think you have to do both 100%; you can't pick one or the other."
Yes, when looking at non-adherence, the answers typically lie with the patient. However, these technologies have to be easy for the providers to manage too. Doctors are easily overwhelmed by the complexities of digital platforms and devices and they can't manage 50 new things with separate software and platforms.
To accommodate this balance, Jeff mentioned that Pillsy and optimize.health have shifted slightly away from serving just the patient and more into a vision-first focus. This has allowed them to look at the physician and provider side of the story – the one that shows they're over-worked and under a massive amount of pressure. Building empathy for the other side of the equation has helped them balance their goals and tasks.
"By making things a little easier for [the physician], you're making it better for the patient as well." - Jeff LeBrun
How do the new Medicare reimbursement codes (for medication monitoring) change the game?
In the past year, Medicare began reimbursing for medication monitoring. Is this gold rush for device and pharma companies?
Pillsy and optimize.health CEO and founder, Jeff LeBrun, suggests that if you're looking into this space, start with one thing and integrate it into your existing product.
"Once you have enough patients on your platform, you will have enough data to review and analyze. Start there. See what works best with your product and what works best (or not at all) for the patients using it."
Data security and data management design – he suggests – needs to be planned into the product. This will allow you to create, analyze, and iterate quickly, setting yourself up for success in the longer term.
Vice President of Novo Nordisk Christine Farmer, added to this sentiment with her own experience.
"[At Novo Nordisk], we underestimated how extremely complex this ecosystem is and how many entry points there are. We are used to having a drug that is new and novel, and everyone understands what it brings to the marketplace that maybe wasn't there before. But when you start to talk about [technology and] connectivity, you [see] how many handshakes there are along the way, and it makes you consider, 'where do I even start?' "
At Novo Nordisk, they started by exploring the territory of connected devices. But, that's when they began to question their direction and original plans.
Is a connected device enough? Who's app are they going to use? Do they need to create one or find someone else's platform? Is the physician even going to adhere to this if they have to download 80 different apps from 80 different companies? And then, where does this app plug into, the PBM (Pharmacy Benefit Manager) or another health system?
Christine warns, "this thing can mushroom very, very quickly, which means you are going to have different opportunities available than what you saw before you started."
Join us in May at the next DeviceConnect
Please join us at our next DeviceConnect event in early May. The date and location are still TBD. The topic is titled "The New Era of Minimally-Invasive Surgical Devices."
For more information on the series, and to receive updates of future events, please visit lifesciencewa.org.