Merck collaborates with Medisafe on digital offering to help with adherence

Merck has revealed its collaboration with US-based Medisafe, which is aimed at helping cardiometabolic patients better manage medication intake and adherence to prescribed treatment regimens through a digital offering.

“This is an extremely important step towards realising our vision of supporting patients with comprehensive, integrated, value-added services that look beyond medicines to improve treatment outcomes,” specified Simon Sturge, chief operating officer at Merck´s Biopharma business. “We are confident that offering such a solution to our patients has the potential to significantly improve medication adherence by giving patients and carers the tools to organise, understand and manage their medications.”

Merck patients from the countries included in this collaborative deal will be able to access a customised version of Medisafe’s mobile platform that could combine reminders, motivation and support systems, targeted content, coupons and interventions in their local language.

Medisafe is a medication management and adherence solution that has been invested in by mVentures. Its mobile platform was named top app for medication management by November 2017 IQVIA (Quintiles IMS) report and has received endorsements from the American Pharmacy Association, Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), and Ranked Health.

This digital solution will complement Merck’s current offering of Primary Care medicines for cardiometabolic conditions, which includes treatments for type 2 diabetes, thyroid disorders, and cardiovascular diseases.

Oftentimes the full benefits of medications in the treatment of chronic diseases are not realised by patients due to poor adherence to treatment regimens. Factors that contribute to poor medication adherence are many and include those that are related to patients, physicians and healthcare systems. As a result, understanding of the underlying causes of poor medication adherence is limited. Through this partnership it is hoped that new overall insights into patient behaviours through aggregated and de-identified data collected by Medisafe may be revealed that could lead to improved chronic disease management in the future.

The first three countries where patients receiving Merck’s primary care medicines will have access to a customised version of Medisafe will be Brazil, Russia and Mexico.