The other morning while I was at my desk, I got a notification that a recurring charge on my credit card had changed. Strange, I thought, though grateful for the alert since there’s no chance I would have caught this adjustment.
It got me thinking, if we can do this for financial transactions, why can we not do this for health metrics like adherence? We can. Well, KEEP can.
Adherence can broadly be broken down into two concepts: monitoring and intervention. Monitoring refers to the real time collection of data whereas intervention implies an action that is taken based on the data observed during monitoring.
At its most rudimentary, monitoring - detecting day-to-day differences in adherence - can simply mean observing if the patient has taken their medication or not. One way KEEP has insight into medication behavior is through a built-in scale that captures whether doses are being taken or KEEP’s Patented Dose Recognition Technology. Because KEEP combines hardware and software, we are able to alert care teams and caregivers of potential issues in the moment through the KEEP’s passive data collection.
In fact, stakeholders are set to benefit from early anomaly detection in a patient's medication routine. The timely flagging of inconsistencies helps improve quality of life for patients and their caregivers, through insights like consistent weekend non-adherence so that they can be better prepared. Proactive identification of potential issues can lead to efficiencies for insurance companies and healthcare providers by understanding conditions that accompany abrupt discontinuation of medication.
KEEP not only understands when the patient stopped taking their medication but also has the data points to help us tell the story around behavior leading up to their nonadherence. Were they starting to show inconsistencies in their dosing times a few days or weeks beforehand? Is what was once a steady drumbeat now striking off center (similar to my month over month credit card charge)?
This insight into behavior over time and patterns in behavior help us better understand how to design thoughtful, effective interventions. While monitoring may seem relatively straightforward, the factors affecting daily decisions to take medication are nuanced and varied. This means that interventions for medication non-adherence can and should be heavily informed through the behavioral and empirical data collection.
Thankfully, the same tools that give us the ability to monitor adherence also give us the levers to intervene when drift is detected. Drilling into the source(s) of nonadherence, clinical teams may want to follow up on outcomes or refill barriers which they can do securely through the KEEP platform.
With so much going on in all of our lives, it can be hard to notice hints of what might eventually become more serious issues. KEEP does the heavy lifting, driving accountability while providing tailored support, often when it is needed the most.
