Innovative ways to improve therapy outcomes
Ypsomed smart devices in response to emerging health care needs:
- Smart injection devices to improve patient adherence and clinical outcomes
- The key to seamlessly integrate information between healthcare stakeholders
- Strategic focus on the development of smart devices across platform products
- Innovation centered around the mechanical and electronic / connectivity interface
- Leveraging our strong in-house competencies in electronics, software and connectivity
Improving therapy outcomes
Improving patient support
New therapies often require infrequent injections for which patients require additional support and training. Providing devices with augmented patient guidance mechanisms improves patient confidence. Ypsomed smart devices boost ease-of-use and adherence resulting in safer and more effective injections.
Outcome-based paradigms
With significant healthcare costs for newer biologic therapies, health insurers are looking to shift from unit priced payment towards outcome-based compensation models. This drives the need for technical solutions that automatically record whether and how successfully the patient follows therapy guidelines. Ypsomed smart devices are a response to the emerging need to track therapies and enable pharmaceutical companies to demonstrate successful therapy outcomes.
Big data analytics
Both private and public healthcare systems increasingly ask for real-world drug effectiveness data to study therapy outcomes. Smart devices will become tools of pivotal importance for accumulating such data and making it available to physicians, pharmaceutical companies and payers.
Patient engagement
As we increasingly focus on improving patient adherence, mobile apps, online communities and social media act as a forum for patients and healthcare professionals to discuss personalised therapy plans. Smart solutions facilitate such dialogue, thereby enabling optimal decision-making between clinicians and patients.
Case study: Smart devices to monitor adherence in clinical trials
The significant costs of designing, implementing, and monitoring a clinical trial point to a clear need to rethink its design. Smart devices support innovative patient-centric trial designs by tracking injection time and date, guiding patients step-by-step throughout the injection process, and by identifying the drug product being used. These key capabilities translate into benefits for pharmaceutical companies by lowering trial costs while improving adherence, data quality and its integrity:
- Automated adherence tracking to improve overall data quality and integrity
- Reduce patient exclusion due to non-adherence
- Real-time overview of adherence data “outside” trial site visits
- Overall cost efficiencies due to lower administrative overhead during the clinical trial
- Real-time insights into device acceptance across sites i.e. differences in geographies/ countries
- Increase patient safety with track-and-trace solutions, authenticate product at time of use
- Simplify and check drug allocation to sites and treatment arms e.g. dosage strengths
Adherence monitoring data can then be aggregated in a clinical trial adherence management dashboard to summarize drug adherence data (see image on this page). Specifically, the adherence dashboard provides information on two critical dimensions: injection schedule as per study protocol (“adherence injection schedule”) and occurrence of use errors (“adherence device usage”). The adherence dashboard enables the monitoring of adherence patterns and, for instance, allows immediate measures to be taken in case handling errors accumulate at certain clinical trial sites.
Leveraging unique in-house capabilities
With more than 30 years of experience and pioneering spirit in the development and manufacturing of innovative injection systems Ypsomed is well equipped to tackle “connected” healthcare needs and is strategically working on the development of smart devices. Anticipating the future needs of pharmaceutical customers, payers, healthcare professionals, and patients we move beyond purely connected entities. Ypsomed’s smart device solutions strive to transform patients’ lives by measuring therapy-relevant parameters and processing them appropriately. We leverage our unique in-house capabilities in electronics, software and connectivity for the development of new devices. The development of Ypsomed Smart devices benefits from recent technological advances and the constant dialogue between patients, healthcare professionals and our multidisciplinary innovation teams located at our Swiss headquarters.
