F.Years from now, when patients show up in clinics with migraine headaches, multiple sclerosis, obesity, and just about every imaginable ailment, doctors will offer a new class of treatments, including both pharmaceutical-based medications and remedies. will suggest a treatment plan for Prescription digital therapy. Accessible from a patient’s smartphone, digital therapy offers personalized, evidence-based interventions to treat a patient’s condition. All of this is completed through daily lessons and a game-like interface guided by sophisticated algorithms. Pharmacotherapy and digital therapy work together to deliver the best possible results. This approach is well established by extensive evidence and is recommended by clinical practice guidelines.
Such a future is unlikely. It is inevitable. The only question is when will digital therapy become the standard of care, and who will lead the way?
I first realized the potential of software to treat disease in 2012 when I coined the term “digital therapy.” I see the industry at an inflection point and poised for widespread acceptance of prescription digital therapeutics. This is driven by the advent of the latest generation of technology developed with the rigor of traditional medicine. The need for new business models in an increasingly burdened healthcare system. and a rapid increase in AI capabilities and availability.
Prescription digital therapies provide broad access to the latest behavioral, cognitive, and skills-based interventions, democratizing care previously limited to patients with access to specialists and academic centres. More advanced applications also offer neuromodulatory mechanisms of action that safely target specific neural pathways inaccessible to biopharmaceuticals. Continued use retrains the brain and makes new connections for lasting results, providing therapeutic benefits with minimal side effects.
What is needed are leaders to move forward and seize this opportunity to build the patient journey of the future. Its leaders must be pharmaceutical companies, not the tech industry.
Pharmaceutical companies have the precise capabilities to launch these new therapies effectively and at scale in the best possible way for patients. And prescription digital therapeutics are an integral part of the AI-ready future of pharmaceutical companies. These are the ways pharmaceutical companies are winning the race to introduce AI into patient care.
The shift to prescription digital therapeutics requires evidence-first players, strong commercial and regulatory departments, and deep expertise in changing standard of care to embrace new therapies. Pharmaceutical companies check all items. With a proven digital prescription product backed by compelling evidence in hand or in development, pharma companies should have no trouble enlisting payers, policy makers and prescribers. It has been done as new categories of therapies have emerged, such as biologics in the 1980s, immunotherapy and CAR-T in the last decade, or gene therapy today. Pharmaceutical companies should stop thinking of prescription digital therapeutics as a digital health project, a field that has historically struggled to succeed, and instead embrace it as a new therapeutic program, and without exception, pharmaceutical companies should become experts in it. is.
Efforts are being made everywhere to use AI to make operations more effective and efficient. It is recommended. We see companies working to apply AI and machine learning to drug discovery, manufacturing operations, commercial launch campaigns, and clinical trials.But those efforts efficiency, no product. Efficiency is important. Products are bets that drive future growth.
To that end, pharmaceutical companies may ask: What is the equivalent of ChatGPT?” The answer is digital therapeutic prescription.
These are the keys to achieving everything a pharmaceutical company wants to do digitally. He has three reasons.
First, prescription digital therapeutics deliver AI-driven outcomes to the end user, the patient. Highly adaptable, personalized prescription digital therapeutics are in line with pharma’s desire to put the patient at the center of care. By securely collecting data, prescribing digital therapeutics uses AI and machine learning to not only engage patients, but also modify and personalize treatments, driving truly personalized care and better outcomes. To do.
Second, AI-powered digital biomarkers will be captured by prescribing digital therapeutics via increasingly sophisticated sensors on patients’ smartphones, providing insights that can be used to quantify the effects of drugs and treatments. Offers. Digital biomarkers will give clinicians a more complete understanding of their patients’ experience of illness, facilitate personalized support, and allow developers to use the information and predictive power they provide to inform how care is delivered. Being able to transform.
Finally, prescribing digital therapeutics will drive the long-term, high-quality data collection that is essential for AI to the benefit of pharmaceutical companies. By leveraging prescription digital therapeutics to gain insights on real-world data, pharmaceutical companies can inform their portfolio planning and enable the development of more effective therapies. Without digital therapeutic prescribing that facilitates a direct patient relationship, the data pharma has access to will always be second-hand and incomplete. Real-time, high-fidelity insights are essential to the value-based future of healthcare.
Unless pharmaceutical companies act aggressively now, this moment will pass the industry.
In June, Apple announced that the iOS 17 update for iPhones would include a new mental health and vision companion app. Amazon and Google are also making forays into the space, with Amazon through his acquisitions of RxPass, PillPack and One Medical, and Google through its recently announced expansion of its Vertex AI tool suite into healthcare, including a partnership with the Mayo Clinic. going. The growing interest of big techs in AI-based healthcare solutions indicates that the software ecosystems that will define the future of healthcare are now forming. If pharma fails to seize the opportunity to take the lead by introducing prescription digital therapeutics into clinical care, pharma risks becoming a cog in Big Tech’s future data-driven patient journey.
In that future, patients will not enjoy the clinical rigor that pharmaceutical companies bring to the field. Pharmaceutical companies are also in trouble. The industry cannot grow by waiting for the next blockbuster. This is an unsustainable market strategy as payments are moving towards a value-based, result-oriented approach. The AI-powered pharma of the future is a holistic provider of patient care focused on outcomes, not just scripts.
Prescription digital therapeutics unlock that potential, and in so doing, tightly align pharma’s capabilities, patient interests, and future economic needs. Companies that continue to think of digital therapy as a “nice to have”, commercial add-on or companion app will be left behind. Pharmaceutical companies without prescription-free digital therapeutics will have no truly AI-enabled future.
Pharmaceutical companies waiting for someone to become the first to become commercially successful in this space will likely be left behind. Big tech stands to step in, which could lead to the proliferation of digital solutions that lack clinical rigor like pharmaceuticals. Healthcare systems, electronic medical record providers, and digital health companies using Big Tech’s growing portfolio of AI tools will be the primary owners of AI in the patient’s journey. In other words, if Big Tech remains the lone participant in this race, pharma companies may miss the benefits of AI-powered prescription digital therapeutics. And tomorrow’s patient journey will increasingly depend on the hands of algorithms that pharmaceutical companies had neither the author nor the insight.
Prescription digital therapy works. Pharmaceutical companies need only invest in them as meaningful new pipeline assets and then ensure success through strong relationships with healthcare providers and disease experts, payer expertise and commercial infrastructure. can be Pharmaceutical companies, which are currently shouldering the heavy lifting, will have a head start in AI-enablement of their products and pipelines. Catching up in the software world is not easy. If you don’t move now, you’ll be left behind.
David Benshoof Klein is CEO and Co-Founder. click therapeutics. He is also a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Biotechnology Program, New York University’s Stern School of Business, Columbia Business School, Opus He is Managing Director of Partners, Senior of Pfizer He is Consultant, and several served as strategic advisor to public and privately held companies. Life science company.
