Patient Compliance to Reduce Pharma Losses

Q: Where is the pharma industry heading?

A: In the pharma industry you cannot only provide medicine anymore. The industry is heading toward delivering the product along with support for the patient to achieve the best outcome possible. In 1997, SignuFarma started its integrated doctor-patient system. Many saw this as just a temporary program to follow the trends at the time, but we saw that there wasn’t an answer to solve the big problem, which was the large amount of money lost, around about 40 percent of the business the pharma industry loses because of lack of patient compliance. Patients need relevant material to help with their treatment so we have created several solutions. One is to accompany the patient through their medical journey and treatment to see what they truly need. They need patient education where they can learn what to expect from the treatment.

Q: What are you doing to accomplish these goals?

A: We are taking advantage of technology such as sophisticated and dynamic CRM programs that deliver information to our clients in the pharmaceutical industry. We gather the information, put it in our apps and transfer to our platform on a daily basis. We have an app for data managers that interview physicians about patients to deliver the information to us. Another app is a disease management program for physicians. We deliver a tablet to them and they add the information to collect in real time. We also have a patient app in development. With this technology, we have reached 95-97 percent patient compliance, which means at least 95 percent of patients are compliant within 1-3 years. For the first time we have developed an agreement that bases pay on positive patient outcomes. The average cost of treatment for a patient is around MX$300,000 (US$16,000).

Q: How do you give patients medical education and information?

A: Most of this first class medical information is sent by mail, e-mail and sometimes with packages of medicine. There are also many points to consider with compliance and regulatory laws to observe in COFEPRIS, so SignuFarma takes care of those things on behalf of pharmaceutical  companies. We have developed several tools, like a patient feedback program. We interview patients regarding their quality of life improvements with treatment and then we deliver evidence-based results to the physician, for him to see in real time and in the voice of their own patients the positive outcomes. A common complaint from patients is that they have difficulty finding the medication in pharmacies, so we have operated for the past nine years a mail-order pharmacy to distribute medicine nationwide.

Q: How can patients be sure their data is safe with the use of these information-sharing apps?

A: We complete a tech-response paper that tells us the needs of every company we work with. This document says which firewalls and what technological protection they will need for us to work with them. As everyone knows, data is never 100 percent protected but we use cloud-based encrypted technologies that guarantee strong protection. Also our call centers have special computers that block anyone from removing information from them. All employees sign a confidentiality contract that bars them from giving any of this information to other parties. About 95 percent of the patients have given their informed consent. And finally, the physicians also sign a disclaimer that says the information collected can only be used for the stated purposes.

Q: Who do you work with and who are you looking to work with?

A: We were pioneers with Pfizer for more than 10 years, BMS, Roche, Janssen, Lundbeck and Amgen, who we are working with and developing a strategy to deliver biotech drugs to patients. We have worked with almost every international company in Mexico and abroad, and some national companies. Our next step is becoming more technological. We would like to implement cost-effective ways to monitor the quality of life for patients using digital health. There are some new interesting devices on the market like a pill bottle that monitors medicine intake. We would also like to deploy a big program for the government. To expand the benefits for more people, we need to be able to reach them through public institutions.