Matthew ’s health care tidbits: The drug model for DTx was wrong

Each time I send out the THCB Reader, our newsletter that summarizes the best of THCB (Sign up here!) I include a brief tidbits section. Then I had the brainwave to add them to the blog. They’re short and usually not too sweet! –Matthew Holt If you were to look at pharmaceuticals in the US you might make three observations. 1) They are the most important way health conditions are helped, cured or eradicated. 2) The way they are delivered to patients (via pharmacies) is very badly integrated with the health care delivery system. 3) They are way too expensive. OK, so those are my observations not yours but I think you’ll agree they’re all true. Now I am going to tell you that we’ve developed a technology that lives in your phone that has the same impact as a drug, if not better. It will cure your depression, insomnia, pain, even maybe Alzheimer’s. And because it is a software product, not a drug you ingest, it has no (or at least few) dangerous side effects. And because it’s software and easy to distribute to millions of people, it can be cheap. Wouldn’t it be a great idea for the people managing health conditions—a patient’s clinical care team—to directly integrate this technology into the care they are delivering? Some of the people building these technologies agreed, but most of them decided that they liked the current model of prescription pharmaceuticals. They built these cool technologies and decided to distribute them via physician presc...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Tech Matthew Holt digital therapeutics dtx Pear Therapeutics Source Type: blogs