Startup CoheroHealth, developer of the AsthmaHero app and spirometer for measuring the volume of air inhaled and exhaled by the lungs, will test its solution on 50 patients at New York City's Mount Sinai Medical Center.
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| Daniel Weinstein, CoheroHealth COO |
The product is used on both daily preventive inhalers and rescue inhalers. "By combining those three things we can do some really cool predictive analytics. From the patient-specific standpoint we can tell this patient's headed for an adverse event, or we can say 'Hey this patient has been taking his medicine the way he's supposed to, but he's not getting better. Maybe the doctor needs to change the prescription,'" COO Daniel Weinstein told MobiHealthNews.
"We can also do some cool macro level things, we can track [whether] certain sub-populations do better or worse on a particular drug, and that's useful for pharma. So we've gotten a lot of interest from pharma to monitor patient populations on their product."
Half of the patients in the study will use Cohero's app, which gives patients rewards, such as gift cards, for adherence, MobiHealthNews says. In addition, the information is transmitted to an electronic health record, enabling physicians and nurses to benefit from it too.
According to Weinstein, patient nonadherence to labeling doubles the cost of treating respiratory disease to $80 billion. In fact, nonadherence is an issue all healthcare companies are struggling with. In a recent speech, CVS Health CEO Larry Merlo said that medication nonadherence is costing the healthcare system about $300 billion per year in unnecessary costs.
Last year, CoheroHealth was admitted into the New York City med tech incubator, StartUp Health, as it seeks to gain additional funding to sell its products in a variety of markets, including pharmacies.
In a related development, startup Propeller Health recently announced that it is testing its inhaler sensor and app on Boehringer Ingelheim's Respimat inhalers. Both companies should benefit from payers' growing demand for data to prove that devices improve clinical outcomes.
- read the article in MobiHealthNews