Pharmaceutical industry veteran will talk about Digital Technology’s Influence on Medication Adherence while addressing the possibilities for improving the nation’s billion-dollar healthcare problem through the use of wearable tech
Harry Travis, president and CEO of etectRx will be speaking at this year’s WT | Wearable Technologies conference in San Francisco during the Smart Pills & Beyond presentation on July 12 at 1:15 p.m. Travis, a pharmaceutical industry veteran with over 25 years of experience in all aspects of pharmaceutical distribution channel management, will discuss the growing importance of improving patient adherence to prescription regimes, and how digital technology is making a difference.
Mr. Travis will explore:
- How poor medication adherence affects the nation’s total healthcare bill
- The increasing role of digital technologies in improving our ability to remember to take our medicine
- Types of adherence systems and solutions
- EtectRx’s novel ingestible sensor technology, currently undergoing clinical trials
“Medication adherence issues cost the pharmaceutical industry an estimated $300 billion annually and can greatly diminish a patient’s well-being,” says Travis. “The increasing role of digital technology will allow us to provide information on every pill a patient ingests in real time, in order to address adherence issues on a pill-by-pill basis.”
Travis and his team at etectRx are developing a wireless system to improve patients’ medication adherence. The novel technology incorporates a tiny ingestible communication system into capsules to definitively, reliably, and safely indicate when a patient has taken their medicine. This groundbreaking technology includes a three-pronged approach:
- The patient swallows their medicine capsule that is embedded with an ingestible wireless sensor called an “ID-Tag”.
- “The Reader,” a wearable device that the patient carries around his or her neck, detects messages transmitted from ingested ID-Tags and forwards them using Bluetooth technology to the ID-Cap App on the patient’s smartphone.
- The ID-Cap App relays the messages received by the Reader to the cloud-based Information Management Platform, which provides customizable reminders for medication events and system status, as well as reports on the patient’s medication adherence history.
Read more Smart Pills Will Change the Way We Take Medications
About etectRx
etectRx, headquartered in Gainesville, Florida, is developing a novel wireless system that potentially gives clinicians the ability to accurately monitor patients’ medication adherence on a per-dose basis. The ID-Cap is a standard hard gelatin or HPMC capsule with an embedded ingestible wireless sensor – the ID-Tag™. The capsule looks, tastes and feels just like an ordinary capsule. Each time an ID-Cap is swallowed, the ID-Tag uses etectRx’s proprietary communications technology to transmit a very low power digital message from within the patient’s stomach. The App communicates with cloud-based software which stores the ingestion confirmation messages and allows the pharmacist or clinician to better manage the patients’ medication adherence.
