I heard the other day that by 2017, 50% of the pharmacy spend in the U.S. will be on specialty pharmacy.  It seems this is driven by two phenomena.  The first is the growing crop of new molecules that are in the class ‘biologics’ –  [..} These are classified as specialty pharmacy drugs.  The second phenomenon is that just about everything else will be generics. Specialty drugs in this one burgeoning expense class seem to be taking over the pharmaceutical industry, and bucking the trend in health care — to succeed by being more efficient.  This brings to mind two opportunities for connected health.  One is surrounding these expensive therapeutics with connected health applications in order to improve outcomes and reduce costs.  The second is that connected health interventions, because of their demonstrated improvements in adherence, can  improve the care experience, patient satisfaction and quality of life, and themselves prove to be therapeutic.

I am not going to speak to the first opportunity, but we are working on a real-life example of this at CCH now.  We are under non-disclosure with the research sponsor, but I promise you it will be an exciting result when we can publicly discuss it.

The latter opportunity is intriguing and a bit of a sleeper.  Traditionally, the introduction of new technologies into health care has been assumed by knee-jerk reaction to add costs.  Yet, we’ve accumulated evidence to the contrary. I have two stories to demonstrate this.
The first example is a clinical research program we have under way with adolescents who have asthma.  We’ve created a private Facebook group for them to be part of, and that’s about it really.  No fancy bells and whistles.  Just old-fashioned social networking.

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The second example is in type II diabetes, using connected health to improve activity.  We randomized patients with type II diabetes into two groups, one received an activity tracker and nothing more versus a second group that received a tracker plus were sent automated motivational messages every day.

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Source: chealthblog.connectedhealth.org