We’ve seen huge developments in eHealth in recent years, and we need to ask ourselves in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry if what we’re currently doing is having the desired effect.
The number of health apps in online stores has more than doubled in recent years to more than 100,000, and leading pharmaceutical companies developed 63% more apps in 2014 compared with 2013.1
However, it seems that only a few are being used extensively. This isn’t awfully reassuring considering that the number of smartphone users worldwide is set to reach 2.32 billion this year.2
So where, and why, is pharma going wrong? At Merck, we are highly confident that the future of healthcare lies in digital technology, and we are ensuring that what we’re doing is having the desired effect we seek.
The digital health sessions at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference highlighted, and rightly so, that information not being put into the hands of the patient is one of the biggest issues that the healthcare industry faces today.
Historically, healthcare knowledge has been concentrated and only available to a few groups of people; but, now, we are able to use technology to start democratising this knowledge. The patient is the least-trained participant in the healthcare ecosystem and, to improve issues such as patient adherence, this needs to change.
The importance of developing initiatives (such as patient-centric devices and apps) to educate, inform and thus empower patients to engage with and self-manage their condition, to improve medication adherence, is becoming increasingly evident.
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