Omri Shor is founder and CEO of Medisafe. The medication engagement platform offers a suite of digital tools, improving patient engagement, compliance and safety.
In the first of six exclusive interviews, Health Tech World called up Omri to get his thoughts on how the digital pharma model is evolving and reshaping healthcare for generations to come.
Medication management is the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the term ‘digital pharma.’
What other interconnected elements fall under that umbrella?
There are three areas that pharma is digitising. The first is the supply chain, which used to be fax-based. Obviously that’s no longer the case.
The second area is R&D, with the move to decentralised trials, patient engagement and the collection of the data. Medisafe is involved with at some capacity.
The third area which accounts for the majority of what we do takes place when a drug enters the commercial phase. Medisafe is becoming a companion for medicines.
How does this work?
One of our partners has a hub with hundreds of nurses working around a specific drug. You can just imagine the tens of millions of dollars that are spent on it.
The pharma company decided that they needed a digital solution on top of that.
That digital solution does two key things: automation and personalisation.
Traditionally, a patient on a particular drug would be called up in the middle of the month to see how they are doing. There’s no medical reason for this timing – it’s just when Salesforce told them that they should call.
Instead of that monthly call, patients have a digital engagement solution in their pocket. They can reach out whenever they need help.
And on the personalisation point, think about when a nurse used to call you. The first thing she’d do is ask for the last four digits of a security number to authenticate you.
I don’t know about you, but if someone called me out of the blue and asked me for my last four, I would be suspicious.
But now, with the new model, they can authenticate you with the digital platform.
After the authentication, they say might say, ‘hey, I see here that you have questions about the injection site. Let me talk to you about it.
‘There is a tool inside your Medisafe to help you identify where should you inject it. It’s super simple. Anything else I can do for you?’
So the whole model is completely flipped upside down.
So this new model enables the patient to better engage with their treatment. They’re no longer passive to it.
Exactly that.
And through this process, massive datasets are being gathered.
Now, pharma companies can start using these datasets, to categorise their patients and better understand how to engage with them.
All of a sudden, not only is the hub now more personalised, but you engage patients in a completely different way, based on behavioural science and machine learning.
Do you see personalisation playing a greater role in medication management in the years to come?
I believe we are going to continue seeing more and more personalisation. We at Medisafe are fortunate to be on the forefront of that.
The second thing that you’re going to see is more integration, with better connectivity between the human side and the digital side.
The last piece is connectivity with healthcare in general.
Currently, the whole patient support side is more pharma-orientated. And it happens completely separately from the patient’s total healthcare support.
I think we will start seeing more interoperability in the years to come.
Are patients more receptive to digital health in general since the pandemic?
A question I would often ask people is, ‘Where’s your bank?’
Most people used to say that their bank was around the corner. But for more and more people these days, the answer is ‘my bank is in my phone.’
I think that we’re going to see increasing digitisation now that the consumer is willing to welcome it into their usual routine.
Consumers used to communicate in digital, but they didn’t live digital. That has changed now, in healthcare and beyond.
What impact will the data generated from these digital tools have on healthcare?
Up until now, it was more of a question of how we collect data to learn how to support patients in a better way
But now we are able to aggregate all the data and extract insights.
These datasets are phenomenal in size. We’re talking about tens of billions of data points that we’re using to characterise patients. This is another area that is only going to become stronger.
And to bring it back to digital and pharma, I think that we’re going to see a fundamental change in how business is done.
In the past, patients got the digital solution, and we just kind of experimented to see if it works.
A client who has worked with us for 15 months has 30,000 patients on a digital companion.
With that, we’re creating a financial impact north of $100 million a year. It is now proven that there is a real business here.
And now the question is, how is pharma going to take it to the next level?
