HealthBeacon - Medication adherence and smart home care

costly problem, both in terms of clinical outcomes and in terms of payer and health care burden and so forth.

So the figures are well into the hundreds of billions.

And I think when you get into those type of numbers, I tend not to get too precise in it.

But suffice to say, it's an enormous number.

depending on which report you read, north of 400 billion.

Enormous impact globally, that is, for these challenges.

And what we see is that the stat of one in two patients built to stay on their medication is a UN number, but that's borne out across the world.

And what was striking to me as I started looking at the problem more closely was those adherence challenges exist across indication.

You might think, well, you know, for more serious drugs and treatments, that surely the adherence is much higher because of the consequence and so forth.

And the sorry truth is it's not, right? And that's due to a multitude of reasons.

It's patients getting better and not taking it or taking it less.

It's patients not getting better and deciding to opt out.

It's patients having a patchy experience with the medication whereby they just can't remember, they've got shift work and all of the things that come at you in life.

So there's a whole suite of reasons that patients don't take the medication.

And of course, downstream of that, you've got all these clinical consequences.

Obviously, from a patient perspective, their first concern is on themselves, you know, can I get better? And these drugs today are hugely transformative, but they're transformative if you take them, right? So there's the patient's trying to get well element of it.

And then, of course, if you zoom out to the wider clinical challenge, you've got all sorts of challenges around from a payer perspective.

So payers have agreed, we've got you on this treatment, we're going to pay for the scripts.

It's actually in their interest that you take the full course of treatments to get the positive outcome.

So from a payer perspective, yes.

It can leave satisfactory outcomes, you know, at a macro level.

And then, of course, from a clinician perspective, and we hear this time and time again from clinicians, where if a patient is not responding to treatment, invariably they're left with a few options.

And those options will be either stop the medication or switch treatment.

And in many cases, that decision is fine because it's clinically driven.

There might be a diagnostic or some tell on it.