Digital pharma bits | January 24th 2018
My selection of the most interesting articles of the last seven days.
Digital Pharma Marketing
Social network for patients and HCPs “Target My Hives”
“Target My Hives” is a digital health network App for patients and HCPs treating chronic urticaria (also known as hives).
The platform integrates physicians and patient associations into its network with the objective of improving patient outcomes.
The app includes a community for patients to share their experiences, a patient progress tracking tool and a function for finding physicians treating chronic urticarial with more than 150 clinics currently in the community.
Launched in 2016, the app has been downloaded approximately 70.000 times, has 3.500 active users globally and got a total of 150.000 individual sessions.
The service is available in eight languages and it is mostly used where access to healthcare is limited, like in Brazil, where the app has been downloaded over 10.000 times.
Visit MyHives myhives.com
Mobile Apps
In a recent research by New York University with 934 mobile phone users:
• 100% said they used a mobile phone for health-related purposes
• 53% tracked exercise
• 48% percent tracked diet
• 28% used an app to track sleep
• Men were more likely to track sleep than women: 35% vs 20% of respondents
• People with higher income were more likely that those with lower income: more than half of respondents making more than $100.000 per year tracked sleep compared to just over 15% of those making less than $25.000
In terms of health indicators, people who tracked sleep also tended to have a higher self-report of their health, the healthiness of their diet, and their exercise habits.
People who used health apps for other purposes, like medication tracking, exercise tracking, or tracking a biomarker, were more likely to track sleep as well.
Virtual Digital Assistants
Enterprise Virtual Digital Assistants (VDAs) are controlled by an enterprise and deployed for interaction with a specific set of systems, using:
• Channels the organization typically controls: such as phone/interactive voice response (IVR), websites, mobile applications, or kiosks
• And channels they do not control: such as messaging applications like Facebook Messenger, LINE, Telegram, or smart assistants like Amazon’s Alexa
According to a new report from Tractica, enterprise adoption of VDAs will grow rapidly in the coming years, rising from 145.2 million unique active users worldwide in 2017 to more than 1 billion unique active users annually by 2025. By the end of that period, enterprise VDA market will reach $7.7 billion in global annual revenue.
The report covers how enterprise VDAs will be used across multiple channels in six key use cases: customer service & marketing, e-commerce & sales, business applications, healthcare, foreign language tutoring, and tax filing & processing.
Digital Health
Artificial Intelligence-powered “physician”
HealthTap is the world’s first Global Health Practice providing 24/7 immediate access doctors via video, text, and voice. The service includes a personal Artificial Intelligence-powered “physician” that allows patients to figure out whether they need to immediately go to a hospital if they are feeling sick, access doctors through virtual visits, receive reminders about taking or refilling prescription medications, and keep a unified record of their medical history.
In almost 10 years of operations, HealthTap registered billions of virtual medical queries answered by more than 100.000 doctors in its network.
HealthTap has recently teamed up with Bupa, a health care provider that offers both insurance and medical services to millions around the world. HealthTap CEO Ron Gutman describes it as the “biggest digital health deal” he knows of.
Visit HealthTap www.healthtap.com
Digital Glucose Monitoring Mobile app
Ascensia is a global company established in 2016 through the acquisition of Bayer Diabetes Care by Panasonic Healthcare Holdings.
Their Contour Diabetes smartphone app pull data from a digital glucose monitoring meter that allows patients to monitor their condition.
The app was recently updated to include a new tool called My Pattern, which identifies patterns in blood glucose data: for example, if the app register high blood sugar level on a certain day of the week, it will prompt the patients to think about what aspects of their diet, medication or exercise could have caused the spike and also provides advice on how to address these.
Read the news on DigitalHealth
Visit the Countour Diabetes product website
App to diagnose respiratory disease from cough sounds
ResApp Health, an Australian company that develops digital healthcare solutions to assist doctors and empower patients to diagnose and manage respiratory disease, has begun enrolling participants in a study evaluating the feasibility of an app in the diagnosis of pediatric respiratory disease from cough sounds.
SMARTCOUGH-C-2 is a multi-site and double-blind study, which enrolled 1.667 patient ages 29 days to 12 years who had come into one of three site presenting symptoms of respiratory diseases.
The app used for evaluation is based on machine learning algorithms and uses cough sounds to diagnose and rate the severity of respiratory conditions.
Read the news on Clinical Innovation
Visit ResApp Health website www.resapphealth.com.au
#digital #health #healthcare #app #track #sleep #Artificial #Intelligence #AI #eHealth #diabetes #machine #learning
Note: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
Senior Customer Success Manager at N-able
7yResApp Health very cool!