Dr. Savage has an App for That
Ricochet's George Savage is too modest to post this, which is fine because I'd like to do the honors:
From the latest issue of Popular Science:
As a doctor, George Savage had the power to save lives, but part of his job still made him feel helpless: After patients left the hospital, he had no way of knowing if they were taking their medications. According to the World Health Organization, patients fail to use their prescriptions properly at least half the time.
It was a former grad-school housemate, Andrew Thompson, who brought Savage a solution. While perusing vendors at an American Heart Association meeting in 2004, Thompson noticed a glut of technology demonstrations on the device side, but a dearth on the drug side. “The only tech on display was a cappuccino machine,” he says. Inspired, the pair set to work with electrical engineer Mark Zdeblick to digitize medicine. Their Proteus Digital Health Feedback System, a blend of MEMS and wireless data transfer, could take the guesswork out of drug delivery for good.
It took the team seven years to create the centerpiece of the Feedback System, a pill that doubles as a radio. “The biggest question was, What types of materials would the FDA allow us to use?” Zdeblick says. “So we decided to use [ones from] a vitamin.” Small amounts of copper and magnesium conduct enough electricity (1.5 volts) to power a one-millimeter chip. When a pill containing the chip hits the stomach, the metals interact with stomach fluid to generate a current. The current transmits to a 2.5-inch patch on the patient’s torso, which relays the signal as binary code to his phone over Bluetooth. An app will determine the pill’s serial number, manufacturer, and ingredients, and saves that data to the cloud. Doctors will eventually be able to set up automatic alerts when adherence problems arise.
Wait a minute. Innovation? In health care?
Yes. There is. Or was. Innovation and entrepreneurial risk-taking are essential to every business, and even more so in the most important business of all: health. What's amazing about what George's company is doing is that it's so ... not amazing. It's the perfect kind of invention -- when you hear about it, you don't say, "Oh man! That blows my mind!" You say: "Of course!"
The questions are: 1) How much more innovation can we expect in the future, with government control and oversight of the entire medical industry? And 2) How can a generation of young people growing up in a world where technology is all about customization and setting personal preferences accept an Obamacare world, a world where one-size-fits-all, where the behemoth of the state is untouched by competition, technological disruption, or consumer empowerment?
Why do we demand excellent customer service from Amazon, but accept being pushed around by the federal government? Why do we set our preferences on our iPhone, but allow the government to set them for us in our retirement savings and our health care?
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Re: Dr. Savage has an App for That
The legal cast to our regulatory and reimbursement systems has led companies to over-invest in absolute therapeutic capability--what a product can do--rather than in treatment systems--what a product will do in the real world.
The 20th century acute care model was a blowout success: You get sick and are admitted to the hospital; doctors write orders; nurses give you medicine and assess your body's response; doctors check the data and revise your treatment plan. Hopefully, you are soon well.
But the challenge of 21st century medicine is chronic disease Patients and family caregivers manage illness as best they can between 8-minute medical visits. And pharmaceuticals are designed by people like me for other people like me, not for patients and families.
One-half of all prescribed medicines are taken incorrectly, and treatment plans are changed without objective data. Yet the pharma model is to spend billions on a 5% better molecule, not the 50% systemic failure.
We are developing a digital health feedback system to allow patients and families to take control of their health care. The right medicine at the right dose in the right person at the right time.
Edited on November 20, 2012 at 12:54amRe: Dr. Savage has an App for That
Incidentally, computer industry R&D used to work in an analogous fashion: Computers designed by techies for techies. Twenty years ago if you weren't a technology buff but needed to use a computer, someone of a nerdly disposition from the IT department would build the whole product out of components--processor, peripherals, display, applications--set everything up and show you what you could touch and what you must not.
Beginning with Steve Jobs's second stint at Apple, computer engineers started working with user experience designers to create systems intuitive enough to be useful to the vast majority without a personal IT specialist on call.
My bet is that medicine, led by the new digital health sector, is beginning a similar transformation.
With or without Obamacare.
Edited on November 20, 2012 at 12:49amAug '10
Re: Dr. Savage has an App for That
I hate to quibble but, 20 years? 1992?
There were Macs and PCs before 1992.
Re: Dr. Savage has an App for That
Misthiocracy I hate to quibble but, 20 years? 1992?
There were Macs and PCs before 1992. · 43 minutes ago
Yes, in 1992 there were Macs and PCs. And they were unusable for most people.
Back then, PC aficionados wrestled with Windows 3.1, while Mac users had a slightly more intuitive experience with OS 6. In 1992, somewhere between one and two hundred million personal computers were in use worldwide.
Six billion people use cell phones today, most of which are actually easy-to-use systems: portable computers connected to the wireless Internet and running apps, one of which emulates a telephone.
Sep '10
Re: Dr. Savage has an App for That
In the late '80s I traded my Epson 8088 for a new Compaq System 3 "portable" computer. They both ran something called Microsoft Smart that contained word processor, spread sheet and data base management capabilites...it was like carrying around a small tv set... no it was heavier and more bulky than that.
Apr '11
Re: Dr. Savage has an App for That
My pessimism may be unfounded, but I hope this isn’t like my experience with my CPAP. The machine keeps a year worth of data on my sleep quality, but that is explicitly not for the patient; only doctors can (legitimately) buy the tools to read the memory. Device makers are entirely capable of building units that communicate only with the doctor, excluding the patient from the loop and leaving us no better informed than before. Diabetic testing is completely different in terms of patient participation and learning, but that seems to be very much the exception.
Re: Dr. Savage has an App for That
ET, I share your frustration. My Proteus Digital Health colleagues and I continually bang on about the need for our technology to be centered on the patient and the family caregiver, if any, not the physician.
One reason health care costs so much is that productivity is so low. A key contributor to low productivity is the ingrained practice of routing pretty much every new technology through the physician.
Imagine what Google searches would cost if results were first moderated by a professional librarian earning six-figures.