Adheris Study Finds First 30 Days on Antidepressants Critical for Medication Adherence

I had a call a few months back where I was pitching Intelecare's Services. The prospect asked "who are your competitors". I gave the answer, "well, no one". I know it is not the proper VC answer, however, at the time (March) there wasn't anyone in our space doing what we do.

No one has a robust, web-based proprietary medical messaging platform that sends patient and caregiver created reminders via email, text and voice messaging. No one offers our hosted and enterprise solutions to industry. No one has 3.2M users and sends out 4M reminders daily. No one has a pro bono program that gives away their technology. No one is developing the next generation in Adherence 2.0 applications like we are.

Since that call, a handful of competitors have emerged offering similar products. In fact, one such competitor even used the same phrasing we have used on our website for two years to describe the services they offer and the industries they serve.

Competitors aside, Intelecare is still the gold standard - no matter how many other companies come into the space.

Even though our competitors charge for their reminders, we still offer a free service to patients and caregivers to ensure that they are helped with the #1 cause of medical non-adherence, forgetfulness. We still integrate our reminder platform into any existing web portal - both as an out of the box hosted solution and as a fully customized enterprise solution. We still offer our hosted email reminder platform pro-bono to non-profits that specialize in chronic disease states.

That being said, I found a press release from Adheris today announcing a study which results "showed that patients new to antidepressant treatment and those who had restarted therapy after a lapse of 6 or more months were twice as likely to discontinue therapy in the first 30 days of treatment versus patients previously dispensed an antidepressant."

This is significant because the first 30 days of therapy are integral to a patient continuing their therapy. "The practical implications of this study are that while all patients lapsed at an alarming rate over time, increased patient follow-up and education within the first 30 days of therapy in newly treated and lapsed patients restarting therapy are critical to help improve adherence and patient outcomes."

Adheris is a fantastic company that has been in the space for over 9 years. They are focused on increasing patient adherence and education at the pharmacy level. Several times I have been asked to compare our services to theirs - however it is apples and oranges. We are both trying to get to the same goal - increasing patient medication adherence - we just have two distinct ways of doing it.

Medication non-adherence costs the US $300 BILLION annually in unnecessary health care costs and lost revenue. 1 in 2 patients does not take their medications as directed with 84% of them citing forgetfulness as the reason.

I think this market is big enough for a few players with different ideas of how to end this pandemic. It not only takes reminders, but education and lower drug costs to help eradicate the problem which affects us all in one way or another.