In a mobile world, providing seamless content delivery and an elegant user experience is the key to repeat use and monetization—separating successful products from those that are downloaded and never used. While the lion’s share of resources and attention are funneled into R&D for products that encourage and track healthy lifestyles, manage chronic disease and curate clinical data, some of the causes outside of the mainstream can deliver the biggest impact on our health system.
These include apps to create health system efficiencies and, as a recent Forbes article explores, translate an improvement in drug adherence into Medicare and Medicaid cost savings. The Annals of Internal Medicine estimates that the costs of non-adherence are between $100 billion and $289 billion each year. To illustrate the scale of this issue in other terms, up to half of all prescribed medications aren’t even filled. According to the Congressional Budget Office, improving the rate of filled prescriptions by 1% can create a Medicare savings of nearly $4 billion over the next decade.
Whether the end result is an app with an alarm, “Inbox” of drug dosing information or a tool that syncs up with an Outlook or Google calendar; this is another example of using technology to address a simple problem—the mantra guiding solutions-based app design.
As the patent cliff and death of the blockbuster changes biopharma as we know it, adherence is an increasingly important communications focus. Medications taken incorrectly help no one. If we channel resources and place an emphasis on innovation, there will soon be an app for that.
