A new survey into drug intake trends in the U.S. says that nearly 125,000 people are killed in the country each year and costs the U.S. health care system $290 billion annually due to patients missing out on their medication or taking the wrong dose.

A very recent report published by Lux Research, which provides research on emerging technologies claims that they have found out that the ratio of the number of people in the country who do not take their medications as prescribed accounts for nearly three out of four Americans.

The best ways to coax patients into taking the right amount of medicine at the right time and for the right period of time is to make use of ‘smart’ packaging, mobile apps, tele-medicine and new drug-delivery technologies, the report suggests. The report also notes that fewer people would ultimately fall sick and that would help the public health systems and industries around the world make savings if these technologies were introduced in a wide scale.

Smart pill bottles that detect when a patient opens the container and even how much medication is taken out of the container by the patient are included in the smart technologies for tracking medication adherence of patients. Then if the smart bottles find that the patients are not taking their medication as prescribed, they can alert either a physician or an automated system who can in turn alert the patients.

Indicators of when medication has been taken and how the body responds are noted by ingestible sensors or wearable monitors which can also help better medicine taking habits.

“The fact that these technologies can detect the actual delivery of the drug is critical in certain high-risk populations, such as psychiatric patients or patients on high-cost treatments where a missed dose may have a direct economic impact in the tens of thousands of dollars,” the Lux Research report said.

On the other hand, physicians are able to track their patients taking medicines in real time with the help of smartphone apps or special software that can photograph people when they take their medication. Such apps could give independence to people who would otherwise need another human to remind them to take their medication even though the level of monitoring could raise privacy concerns.

Some doctors have termed the trend of Medication “non-adherence” as epidemic due to the fact that this trend is so widespread. Patients who are mentally impaired or patients with psychological problems and those patients who have complex or multiple health problems that require them to take multiple medications tend to show more of this medical non adherence tendency, the report states.

“With the growing population, and especially due to the negative trends associated with poor lifestyle choices, the number of patients with (multiple) chronic diseases will grow significantly in the upcoming years,” Lux Research said.

“These patients are the most likely to struggle with keeping up with multiple medications and, to control the costs of care and improve outcomes, the healthcare industry will increasingly rely on medication adherence-monitoring solutions.”

(Adapted from CNBC)

Categories: Economy & Finance