Barcelona, Spain (October 4, 2016) – E Ink® Holdings, "E Ink" (8069.TWO), the leading innovator of electronic ink technology in the world; HTC Healthcare, the direct patient care service provider of data science; and Palladio Group, the pioneering pharmaceutical secondary packaging company, today announced a collaboration to improve medication adherence by harnessing the healthcare segment of the Internet of Things (IoT).
Medication nonadherence is a common, complex and costly problem that contributes to poor patient outcomes and dwindling healthcare resources. Nonadherence is difficult to measure precisely and, to date, interventions to mitigate it have been largely unsuccessful. Using smartphone applications together with IoT-based smart devices provides a new approach to improving medication adherence.
To combat this prevalent problem, E Ink created a smartphone-based smart packaging label that displays personalized content that can be pushed to the packaging label as a communication interface, delivering vital information to patients and creating a gateway to improve patient engagement. With E Ink’s low power, high contrast paper-like display technology, patients can receive information, including:
• A reminder that it’s time for users to take their medication
• The quantity of medication in the package
• The time at which medication is taken
Further, patients have the ability to provide refill service by simply pushing a button on the product label.
“E Ink’s smart packaging label can be applied on both primary and secondary containers, from paperboard cartons to prefilled syringes to pill dispensers,” said Dr. FY Gan, General Manager of ESI Business Unit of E Ink Holdings. “This readily available technology offers many features designed to help patients and healthcare providers improve medication-taking behaviors.”
Developing a privacy-preserving medication management software, HTC enables real-time medication consumption tracking, symptom and side effects disclosure, and treatment outcome evaluation. Patients are able to get detailed information about their health status via two-way communication with the care team (composed of physicians, case managers, and pharmacists) and to refill their prescription via the platform. Dr. Edward Chang, president of HTC Healthcare, said “Our artificial intelligence technology is the backbone of the platform, aiming to improve treatment effectiveness and, eventually, a personalized medication solution in the near future.”
Mauro Marchi, CEO of Palladio Group, adds, “As a packaging and services provider fully dedicated to the pharmaceutical industry, we are committed to developing the most successful applications with our partners. PhutureMed™ is an example of a program that has been conceived with the main objective of creating innovative packaging solutions for the medicine of the future. It’s an intelligent packaging system designed to support patients in monitoring and complying with their medicine regimes.”
Connectivity, smart packaging and IoT enable physical products to generate, harvest and apply data flow throughout their lifecycle. The collaboration among E Ink, HTC and Palladio aims to provide an end-to-end digital integration service across the value chain for healthcare professionals. For example, medication nonadherence has been an emerging topic and a matter of concern in clinical research for pharmaceutical companies. Patient adherence can apply to several different clinical trial facets which may include adherence to study procedures, study visit compliance, medications and adverse event reporting. In fact, medication nonadherence during a clinical trial can result in increased clinical trial cost, as well as impacts to regulatory dosing recommendations upon medical product approval.
Information displayed includes barcode, QR code, multi-language text message and graphics. E Ink’s smart packaging label is compatible with many wireless communication protocols such as BLE, WiFi, ZigBee, etc.
The combination of HTC’s medication application software, Palladio’s packaging operation, and E Ink’s global platform of smart IoT device solutions will enhance patients’ understanding of medication information, empowering people to live better lives. It’s one of the reasons that PhutureMed has been named a finalist for this year’s CPhI Pharma Awards for Excellence in Pharma: Packaging.
More information can be found at here.
