Digital therapeutics, or digital medicines, have been in development for years, attracting interest from pharmaceutical companies, who see them as a way to add value to prescription medicines by providing supportive services to consumers. They can also reduce healthcare costs by helping doctors monitor patients remotely. They can be used to passively collect data and quantify the effectiveness of these drugs and help patients adhere to care plans.
This Invest in medical technology This week’s virtual conference discusses the future of digital medicine through a panel discussion, putting the spotlight on digital medicine, sponsored by new. Carrie Northcott, Senior Director, Program Director, Digital Medicine and Translational Imaging at Pfizer, moderated the panel discussion, which included:
- Lana Ghanem, Managing Director, Hikma Ventures
- Pierre Leurent, President, Digital Health, Aptar Pharma
- Mario Moreira, Principal Consultant, Emergn’
- Abhishek Shah, Co-founder and CEO, Wellthy Therapeutics
Shah said he sees digital therapy as a way to support health equity.
“How can we use clinically validated software as a medical device to be able to address unmet patient needs, both clinical and quality of life, in a repeatable, scalable, effective, safe and regulated manner and in a patient and In the hands of the paramedics?”
Moreira responded by saying that digital transformation within the organization must be driven by the agile pharma trend in healthcare to drive the development of digital medicine.
Some digital medicine applications include identifying the side effects of certain medications. For example, for cancer patients, they can help them identify and manage the symptoms and side effects of chemotherapy or radiation therapy.
Leurent highlighted how Aptar Pharma’s digital treatment approach supports remote monitoring of dermatological “treatment journeys” to improve compliance. A report published by the American Academy of Dermatology states that 45 percent of people with psoriasis discontinue treatment. Aptar partnered with Noble to develop AdhereIT, a Bluetooth-enabled auto-injector that detects when a patient is injecting and provides real-time visual, audio and haptic feedback on whether the injection was performed correctly. This information also enables healthcare providers to remotely monitor patient treatment through smart analytics dashboards,
Provides valuable patient-specific compliance behavior information, according to a press release on Aptar’s website.
“We’re more and more connected to wearables,” Leurent said. “I think we can go a long way in integrating our drug delivery systems with digital companions. You can see examples of this in the form of smart injectors.”
Panelists agreed that the success and advancement of digital therapeutics depends on collaborative efforts between pharmaceutical and digital health companies, payers, and physicians who support digital medicines.
“We’re starting to see new reimbursement pathways in different markets to cover new activities when healthcare professionals want to monitor patients remotely,” said one panelist, adding that education remains a challenge. “There’s still a lot of room for the market to understand that these solutions exist… We also need to collaborate to make these products very easy to use so that they fit into existing workflows.”
Some panelists also observed that pharmaceutical companies are making more concerted efforts to incorporate the patient’s perspective into the development of digital therapeutics. This appears to reflect an evolution away from marketing hype to building the infrastructure that can support these complex projects.
Driving the clinical validation of digital therapeutics is another challenge that digital therapy developers need to address more robustly for wider adoption.
Given how much data digital therapeutics generate, being able to move data easily is also an important consideration for patients, physicians, payers and regulators, Northcott observed.
