the goose

I was listening to the excellent Pegram Harrison talking about Building a Business in a podcast series released by the Oxford University.  Pegram was going over how to evaluate ideas.  All very good stuff.  One throw away comment did prick my interest though …

“Unless you have the cure for cancer, there probably isn’t the need for your product you thought there was”

“I know how to cure cancer”, I thought, “maybe I should do something about that”.

Now, I am perhaps being a little dramatic for effect, but there is an opportunity for someone to literally prolong and enhance the lives of millions of people.  Lets run through some stats and see if you can guess how.

• One fifth of patients don’t fill out their prescriptions
• 125,000 American’s die annually by virtue of not taking their pills properly
• 60% of patients cannot identify their own drugs
• 1 in 4 people in nursing homes are there because they can’t figure out their own meds

You should be starting to get the idea.  Basically, hundreds of thousands of people die annually simply because they don’t take their pills right.  The problem is especially acute for diseases where the symptoms are apparent when taking the pills.  Hypertension is a good example.

“as many as half of ‘failures’ of treatment to bring elevated blood pressure down to normal levels may be due to unrecognized lapses by patients in taking antihypertensive drugs as prescribed.” source

So how do we solve this?  Send the text messages morning, noon and night?  Well.  Not really.  They get ignored quickly enough.  The real enemy here is confusion.  People don’t understand why they should be taking their meds until they are in the middle of a heart attack.  Then it suddenly sounds like a much better idea.  There are a couple of things to be done …

• Patient reminders
• Patient education
• Incentives
• Peer support
• Self-supervision

All well and good but where is the money?  Well, in theory, there are a lot of people who can gain by patients taking more pills

1. Patients:  they get to live and stuff.
2. Doctors:  ’refill’ appointments take less time and more profitable than regular diagnosis appointments.  Also a chance to up-sell.
3. Pharmacists:  More product getting refilled puts more money in their pocket.
4. Pharma companies: ditto
5. Goverment:  More peope self-medicating means less stress on public infrastcuture.

So what is the problem?  Why isn’t anyone fixing this?  Well there are various approaches which have been tried but it seems to me like something could be done in the technology space.  What exactly, I’m not sure.  Here is my progress so far on getting something off the ground.

• Pitched to a pharama company that has a hypertension product (twice).  You need a serious looking piece of kit parked in the car park to sell to these guys though, and I normally catch the Dart.  I could buy a better suit and try again but I’m thinking you’d need someone with serious big ticket sales experience to get it over the line.
• An innovation centre in Dublin had a look at it.  In a kind of chicken and egg scenario though – I’d no industry backer to get their interest with.
• Pitched to a GP.  He was actually interested.  Refill appointments are good money for doctors with a quick turn-around.  He is up for running a trial but I should perhaps rack up a few other volunteers before I dive in.

Ideally I’d like to run some kind of trial with one of the medical organisations and get the results published in a medical journal.

So if this is such a great idea – why am I blogging about it?  Well, in truth, ideas aren’t worth that much and I thought if I am not going to do anything with it, it might as well provide some blog content.