Mobile app helps patients, cos. increase adherence

Diabetics are most adherent around meal times, especially during breakfast and toward the beginning of the week, according to a review of Medisafe’s more than 160,000 diabetes patients who utilize its adherence tool in an effort to better manage the condition.

(To view the full Diabetes Report, click here.)

“It makes sense — you wake up and have breakfast and take your medication — it’s routine,” Jon Michaeli, EVP marketing and business development for Medisafe, told Drug Store News.

Another interesting finding: Patients managing their diabetes using insulin are slightly more adherent (76%) than patients who use only oral medications to manage their diabetes (74%). “[This shows] there are different types of patients, perhaps, [who] are more dependent on their diabetes medications and [subsequently] have higher levels of adherence,” Michaeli said.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 2.9 million patients manage diabetes using insulin only, 3.1 million patients manage their diabetes using a combination of insulin and oral medications and 11.9 million patients manage their diabetes using oral medications alone.

All told, approximately 3.2 million patients utilize Medisafe’s mobile app adherence tools to help better manage the health condition, and earlier this year Medisafe opened that patient population to pharmaceutical partners through its Medisafe for Pharma offering. Following successful pilots, Medisafe has bundled a number of services into a software license that helps pharmaceutical companies increase adherence to their medications while gaining actionable, insights generated by complex, self-learning algorithms analyzing billions of user engagement data points Medisafe has collected to date.