Getting patients, especially the elderly, to take a complex combination of different medications can be a tough task and up to half of all medicines aren’t taken as they should be. When patients don’t adhere strictly to their prescription, it leads to a drop in the effectiveness of their treatment and a negative impact on their overall health. Not only does this waste up to £300m of prescribed medicines within the UK’s National Health Service annually, but there’s approximately £500m of additional healthcare costs as a consequence of missed medication.
An innovative solution to the problem of medical adherence
In October 2016, Folium Optics was awarded £1 million in SBRI Healthcare funding to develop a novel solution for the medicine adherence problem in the elderly population. The result of this funding, and the collaboration with SBRI Healthcare, has been our My Health Tags system.
My Health Tags: how it works
My Health Tags is an incredibly easy-to-use solution for its target audience of elderly users, with a cloud connection to send invaluable data and statistics to healthcare providers regarding the patient’s medical compliance.
The core components of the system in a patient’s home are:
The core components of the system in a patient’s home are:
- A tag that’s fixed directly to medicine packaging.
- A reminder unit, with a large, easily read display for showing alerts from one or more tags. It’s placed wherever best suits the patient’s routine to help jog their memory.
A successful trial of My Health Tags
“We are delighted to have had the opportunity to work with SBRI Healthcare. Their program opened doors that we’d otherwise have struggled to gain access to. It gave us great insight to real problems - if we can solve them, we can make a real difference to patients and to the NHS. Clinical trials are an essential part of developing any medical product, and we’ve been very fortunate in having access to patients, consultants and nurses from the Bristol Heart Institute for our 6-month trial of the My Health Tags system.” explains Steve Kitson, Folium Optics CEO.
“Comments from our trial users have been extremely encouraging, with patients finding the reminder unit easy to use and extremely helpful. And the feedback from SBRI Healthcare has been overwhelmingly positive and we aim to take the development further.”
Joop Tanis, Business Development and SBRI Healthcare Programme Director at Health Enterprise East commented: "This is a great example of how technology can bring new solutions to healthcare challenges. We're delighted to have worked alongside the team to develop the device and support the clinical evaluation.”
“Comments from our trial users have been extremely encouraging, with patients finding the reminder unit easy to use and extremely helpful. And the feedback from SBRI Healthcare has been overwhelmingly positive and we aim to take the development further.”
Joop Tanis, Business Development and SBRI Healthcare Programme Director at Health Enterprise East commented: "This is a great example of how technology can bring new solutions to healthcare challenges. We're delighted to have worked alongside the team to develop the device and support the clinical evaluation.”
A bright future for intelligent displays
Steve Kitson is now looking to the future: “we see a great future for My Health Tags as a system that helps people remember to take their medicines. We are now actively looking for partners to help us bring this technology to market.”
If you would like to find out more, please do get in touch.
If you would like to find out more, please do get in touch.