On the drawing board

The challenge

Health care costs are on the rise worldwide. Patients who fail to take their medication on time or do not take it at all – referred to as noncompliant – are significant contributors to the upward trend. Various studies indicate that as many as 50 percent of patients fail to follow the instructions for taking a medication. The cost of hospitalization and physician visits related to noncompliance total an estimated $8.5 billion annually. And noncompliance in the U.S. alone accounts for as much as $100 billion in health care and productivity costs.

Research also indicates that the health care industry could better contain costs if there were safer, more effective ways to assess patients preoperatively, release them earlier from the hospital environment and monitor drug retention to help ensure the right dosage of medication for each person.

The pharmaceutical industry, which directly supports health care by providing the medications so many patients need, faces its own set of challenges. Stock prices are on a steady decline due to a gap between the financial expectations of investors and actual industry performance. Despite doubled research and development costs, new chemical entities are lacking. And new products are taking longer than ever to reach the marketplace.

From a technology standpoint, clinical information systems are a number one priority, especially as the demand for better quality of care and fewer errors increases. These systems help improve the overall efficiency of the clinical development process – particularly clinical trials – which consumes a vast amount of time and resources. When clinical development is inefficient, valuable investment expense is wasted and precious time is lost. Ultimately, profit potential and a company’s competitive advantage are compromised.

For both industries, the challenges could be addressed by a single solution designed to deliver the technology that can help reduce research and development costs and monitor patients to verify that vital signs are in the appropriate range and medication is being taken as directed.

The approach

For health care providers to reduce noncompliance and shorten hospital stays, they need the tools to better monitor patients’ health pre- and post-operatively. For pharmaceutical companies to succeed in bringing new and innovative products to market faster and more efficiently, they must improve in four main areas of the clinical trial process: patient recruitment, data management, verifying drug usage and documenting side effects. IBM Research labs have collaborated to create a technology tool, IBM mobile health toolkit, designed to help address these key issues for both industries by collecting critical patient information as actions are taken and helping to improve the overall patient experience.

The IBM mobile health toolkit supports two central monitoring functions: the patient’s drug intake and, through various sensors, his or her ongoing health status. The sensors can be used to monitor patient vital signs – such as blood pressure, glucose levels and heart rate. The IBM mobile health toolkit itself is a middleware product that can be integrated into a mobile device such as a personal digital assistant or mobile phone, transforming it into a personal mobile hub. The hub is designed to function as an aggregator and router, automatically gathering trial and patient data from Bluetooth-enabled monitoring devices and transmitting the information to the pharmaceutical company’s or service provider’s backend system.

The IBM mobile health toolkit goes one step further than “simple” electronically supported data collection. Because the data is collected automatically from patient devices, it can help clinical development operations reduce costs and improve efficiency in supporting the pipeline for new products. It also helps enable more accurate information capture, with less reconfirmation of facts and more up-to-date file data.

Next steps

Currently, the IBM mobile health toolkit is being used in the pharmaceutical industry to help streamline the clinical trial process and, in turn, help improve return on research and development investments for pharmaceutical companies. Because broad use of this solution within the health care industry requires the agreement and alignment of a large and technologically diverse ecosystem that includes doctors, hospitals and insurance companies, the health care industry has not yet been able to adopt the technology.

However, IBM researchers believe that deploying the IBM mobile health toolkit can help patients live healthier lives, with fewer hospital and clinical visits. It is anticipated that the IBM mobile health toolkit can trigger new business models and opportunities to enhance quality of care – such as diagnostic and patient management solutions for heart rhythm irregularities – for life science and health care companies worldwide.