Patient Insights in the Age of AI

"One of the greatest cost drivers in healthcare is still hiding in plain sight. So began an article in Forbes last month by Hayden Bosworth, professor of medicine, psychiatry, and nursing at Duke University Medical Center, and Prescriptions for a Healthy America's Sloane Salzburg. The authors called for the issue to be a made "a national priority," and reported on the recommendations by a group of experts representing patients, physicians, pharmacies, and pharma companies on how to fix the problem. Bosworth and Sloane identified the need for improved information sharing between the clinical and pharmacy setting, better integration of healthcare systems, the leveraging of new and better technologies, and better incentives for healthcare providers, plans and drug manufacturers to improve patient adherence in federal healthcare programs. It is revealing that this call for action positions new and better technology as only part of the solution. In the field of digital health and patient adherence, one could be forgiven for thinking that the answers to the nonadherence problem lie in the advancing connectivity protocols and mobile solutions that incorporate medication reminders and encouragement, or enable the timing of medication access to be controlled. In the last few years, as Dr. Bill Byrom, senior director, product innovation, for the contract research organization ICON, points out, we have seen the emergence of: Such innovations continue apace, and their contribution to tackling nonadherence is vital. However, Bosworth reminds us that, while digital health is "definitely here, it's just part of the toolbox." He told Pharm Exec: "If people think of it as panacea that is going to solve everything, they will be consistently disappointed." Clare Moloney, Atlantis Healthcare's clinical strategy director, Europe, further explains: "There is still the thinking that if you put something in an app or on someone's phone, or if you put a device in someone's home, that it is going to be a magic fix.