An Israeli-made app reminds people to take their medications, alerting family members if the pills are forgotten.
By PATRICIA CARMELMediSafe interface. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Did you ever wonder where the ideas for Israeli start-ups come from? Sometimes it takes no more than an incident within the family to get the entrepreneurial juices flowing.“About two years ago, my father, who’s a diabetic, asked me if I’d seen him inject his insulin,” recounts Omri Shor. “I said no, meaning I hadn’t seen him, but he misinterpreted my answer to mean that he hadn’t injected insulin at all.”The consequence of this miscommunication was that Shor’s father overdosed on insulin and was rushed to the hospital.Shor, whose friends call him Bob – “because I build stuff” – wondered why his father, a smartphone addict, hadn’t downloaded an app that would remind him to take his medication on time. He also queried why his father’s healthcare provider wasn’t monitoring his adherence to his medication regime. These ponderings led Shor, together with his brother Rotem, to establish a medication management system called MediSafe.MediSafe, which has offices in Haifa, is a platform that includes a smartphone app designed to remind patients when it’s time to take their medication. It also gives instructions on how to take the medication – with or without food, what foods to avoid when taking it – and when to renew the prescription.After the patient has taken his meds, he taps the “Pill Taken” button on the app, and it sends a notification to a designated family member. If the patient forgets to take his pill on schedule, the app gives him a 30-minute grace period, then sends an audible alert. Ten minutes later and still no pill, the app sends a second alert that sounds like a shaking pill box.The third alert is the shaking pill box sound along with a textual reminder.Says Shor, “If the patient doesn’t respond to the alerts, the app notifies the designated family member and offers to text the patient, call him or email him.”At the end of each week, the app generates a med-taking adherence record, giving positive reinforcement to the patient who has been diligent about taking his meds on schedule.Prior to developing MediSafe, the brothers carried out a number of studies in the US and discovered some disturbing statistics. Half of the US population takes medication on a daily basis, and of those, some 700,000 people a year suffer a medical emergency by either overdosing on their meds or forgetting to take them; 29,000 die as a result. The cost to the US health care system is huge, around $290 billion a year. In addition, the pharmaceutical companies lose a potential annual income of approximately $187b.“Managing meds isn’t just a personal problem – it’s a major issue for society, whether it’s contraceptives or the vitamins people need to take,” explains Shor. “When our baby daughter came into our lives three years ago, we always forgot to give her the evening dose of vitamin D and iron.”According to his research, there are a number of reasons patients fail to take their medication. For 33 percent of patients, it’s simple forgetfulness.Some patients neglect their medication as a consequence of miscommunication between themselves and their physician, with the latter failing to give a cogent enough explanation of why the patients need their medicine.Others postpone taking their meds until a more convenient time, and then forget.Besides being a medication reminder app, MediSafe provides crucially important data regarding global medication- management habits.“Every time someone takes a pill and taps the app, it is registered in the cloud in real time. We have half a million users all over the world, the majority in the US, followed by Brazil and then Germany. Physicians have started to recommend MediSafe to their patients, which validates our claim that this tool is needed for both the healthcare provider and the patient.”Shor describes MediSafe as a medication management platform that will, over time, offer a number of important features as well as interface with other solutions. There are plans to provide a direct line from the app to the patient’s nurse or caregiver, as well as provide nutritional advice.“For example, if someone is taking medication to reduce cholesterol levels, MediSafe will advise on what he should eat, what he shouldn’t eat and how the medication interacts with certain foods,” he says.There are also a number of solutions available on the market that will eventually function interactively with the app. These include a device that connects to the smartphone’s speaker jack and measures the patient’s blood and glucose levels throughout the day; a smart watch to which the app can send notifications; and an electronic pill dispenser, which sends a notification to a family member through MediSafe when the patient removes a pill from its compartment in the dispenser.In addition, there are several enhancements to the system that are in the planning stages.“We have developed the technology to directly access the physician’s database,” says Shor. “Any changes in the patient’s medications will then be automatically updated into the app installed on the patient’s phone. This will be implemented at some time in the future when the business details have been completed. In the US, we are already connected to the database of one of the HMOs, and we’re in the process of connecting with a few more.”Regarding patient privacy, he verifies that all data stored in the MediSafe database in the cloud are compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which sets the standard for protecting sensitive patient data.For patients who do not use a smartphone, MediSafe is accessible through an automated call system that sends reminders to subscribers through the Internet, usually in the form of an SMS.“There are other solutions out there that remind people to take their pills,” he says. “But MediSafe is the only one that has the added dimension of communication between family members. My father, who triggered the solution, is very excited about it.In the early days of using MediSafe, he switched phones with my mother, [whose phone] didn’t have the app installed on it, and he didn’t take his meds for a few days. We’ve become so dependent on digital devices to remember things for us – who remembers phone numbers today? – he just forgot to take his meds. We call it delegating to the device."Ultimately," says Shor, “we believe it’s all about giving value to people.”• MediSafe version 3, available for download from www.medisafeproject.com • Supports 13 languages, including Hebrew• Can be used with Android and iOS (iPhone) smartphones• Video at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KFt_UB-Mjxw
Related Tagsisraeli medical technology
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