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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:45PM   Printer-friendly
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."

FDA news release.


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  • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday November 16 2017, @03:02PM

    by meustrus (4961) on Thursday November 16 2017, @03:02PM (#597719)

    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.

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