Scouting Report-Medisafe A Personalized Medication Management Platform Raises $30M

Event: Venture Beat reported that Medisafe, “a personalized medication management platform to help patients stay on top of their prescriptions”, announced it had raised $30 million.” According to Medisafe it uses “digital drug companions” to improve medication adherence and compliance for patients. VentureBeat noted 20%-30% of prescriptions are never even filled costing the U.S. healthcare system approximately $100 billion to $300 billion per year.

Description: Medisafe was founded in 2012, and has raised approximately $52 million, including this round. The company has operations in Boston, Israel and London, with 50 employees and revenue of several million dollars. As noted by VentureBeat, once a patient enters their medication into Medisafe’s smartphone app, it guides them through a process to collect patient release forms and help them with drug titration schedules. Once entered into the app, Medisafe’s “Just-in-Time-Interventions” (JITI) applies its artificial intelligence algorithm to: 1) help patients administer medication, 2) evaluate whether they qualify for financial support programs, 3) assist with refill ordering, and, 4) collect information for providers via surveys. Medisafe claims that its analytics and real-time behavioral assessments can boost adherence by up to 20% and that the technology drives average adherence rates of almost 90%, compared to an industry average of approximately 50%. Medisafe competes with the MyTherapy app by Apotheke of the Netherlands, Walmart’s Care Zone, Healthprize and ZappRx among others.

Implications: Medication adherence and compliance have long been a significant problem for patients, often leading to ineffective treatment and poor outcomes. Services like Medisafe’s in-app Care Connector feature, create a convenient way to facilitate communication between patients and doctors around concerns or issues with their medications that may ultimately lead them to discontinue use. Not only does this help patients maintain their medication schedules, it also allows physicians to be alerted to issues, some of which are easily addressed, that without intervention may lead to non-compliance (ex: patients inability to tolerate medication or side effects). In addition, when platforms contain additional features like Medisafe’s Maestro which provides information on patient census, program reporting and integrations with pharmaceutical company data, additional insights are gained and improve the effective prescribing and post-approval surveillance of medications. However, they must always be implemented with strict safeguards to ensure this isn’t abused for marketing purposes. Mobile medical apps like Medisafe as well as medtech tools such as smart pill bottles, smart packaging systems, smart pill dispensers and even smart pills have the potential to greatly improve compliance at low cost all while supplying practitioners and researchers with real-time data on usage patterns.

Medisafe Raises $30 Million for Predictive AI That Reminds People to Take Their Pills & Medisafe Raises $30 Million in Series C Led by Pharma Giant Sanofi

Editors Note: Beginning this week, each Friday we are going to profile a healthtech prospect, an interesting, up-and-coming healthtech company.

This is not an endorsement, nor are we getting compensated for the profiles. Instead, we want to highlight an intriguing company that may have caught our eye due to the friction it eliminates, the space it's in, or the ingenuity of its solution, etc.