SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the How-did-I-miss-the-:Analogue"-Pill? dept.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a "digital pill" that contains a sensor intended to track whether a patient has taken their medicine:
For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a digital pill — a medication embedded with a sensor that can tell doctors whether, and when, patients take their medicine. The approval, announced late on Monday, marks a significant advance in the growing field of digital devices designed to monitor medicine-taking and to address the expensive, longstanding problem that millions of patients do not take drugs as prescribed.
Experts estimate that so-called non-adherence or noncompliance to medication costs about $100 billion a year, much of it because patients get sicker and need additional treatment or hospitalization. "When patients don't adhere to lifestyle or medications that are prescribed for them, there are really substantive consequences that are bad for the patient and very costly," said Dr. William Shrank, chief medical officer of the health plan division at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
Ameet Sarpatwari, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School, said the digital pill "has the potential to improve public health," especially for patients who want to take their medication but forget. But, he added, "if used improperly, it could foster more mistrust instead of trust."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday November 15 2017, @07:59PM (5 children)
The sales pitch is that you share this information with your doctor. That's false. You share the information with a third party who keeps it in a central database. Then your doctor can engage the bureaucracy to get access to your personal data, all without consulting you.
It's effectively the same thing for patient outcomes, but it has a slew of problems:
1. The central database is a target for hacks.
2. Your doctor has to fill out a bunch of paperwork to get the data (or more likely, keep even more paper-pushers in the office to do it for them).
3. Any doctor can fill out the same paperwork to get the data without the patient knowing who has it.
And the biggest problem of all:
4. Because it's all going on behind the scenes, nobody will think too hard about it.
This will lead further into our EMH hell of more impossible security, less patient engagement, and skyrocketing costs to engage the ever-expanding bureaucracy.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 15 2017, @08:56PM
Come on now, do you honestly believe that this proprietary database that you don't have the slightest bit of control over will be insecure? History tells us that companies are astoundingly good at security, so what are you afraid of?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday November 15 2017, @09:15PM (3 children)
5) If patients are merely forgetful, they could just as well set an alarm on their phone reminding them its time to take their pills.
6) If patients are avoiding the meds, they just drop the pills into the little quart bottle of orange juice they keep the patch glued to.
So its totally unnecessary for compliant patients, and easily outwitted by non-compliant ones.
Clearly the device (they call it medicine, but its clearly a device embedded in medicine) sends a signal to the patch.
What is the range of that signal? Can it be read by any nearby patch? Can it be spoofed?
The new patch has to be paired with your phone every 7 days. The old one goes where?
7) What ever is possible will be mandatory.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday November 16 2017, @03:02PM
To play devil's advocate for a moment, there is a utility to this that has nothing to do with making patients more compliant. Doctors do need to know how compliant the patient is in order to know if the drug is working properly. Forgetful patients won't know exactly how frequently they managed to take their pills.
Probably the one good part of having it in a central database is so that your doctor can be notified automatically if your forgetfulness is likely to lead to a medical emergency.
In my humble opinion, though, none of this constitutes a good reason to start pushing centralized medication monitoring on the general population.
The real solution to this problem is to find a continuous delivery system that doesn't rely on the patient's memory. They make birth control implants now that do exactly this, although they have their own disadvantages that mainly come from not being reloadable once implanted.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 16 2017, @04:33PM
If patients are forgetful, they'll forget their phone as well. Or forget to charge it. Or forget to set the alarm.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday November 16 2017, @09:25PM
I'm more curious if the thing can tell the difference between one pill activating vs an entire bottle of them...and what they do if you activate the entire bottle at once...and how many different entities you can sue if the cops break down your door and shoot your dog during the resulting "wellness check"...