Cleveland Medical Hackathon – Project Overview

On Sept. 26-27, Centric participated in the inaugural Cleveland Medical Hackathon at the Global Center for Health Innovation. The goal was to build an app in 24 hours that would improve care, reduce costs and enhance overall patient experience. The team included experienced hackers and first-timers, and not all developers. So what did this disparate group think of the event? What were the lessons learned? In this series of articles, hear their unique perspective on this enlightening event.

The Problem

With nearly half of all Americans on at least one medication, and estimates of 8% or more of non-compliance with medication instructions, Medication Management and Patient Compliance are BIG problems.

Patients who fail to take the right meds in the right doses at the right frequency may spread disease in their community or may harm themselves or others if they suffer from mental health issues, and they will quite certainly have diminished outcomes and a higher likelihood of readmission.

In addition to increasing the stress on their caregivers, they also run the risk of encountering life-threatening complications. Ultimately, non-compliance with medication instructions is an enormous waste of very limited healthcare resources and provider time.

Our Solution

Facing this challenge, our ManageRx Medication Manager allows patients, caregivers, providers and payers to monitor medication dispensing using beacon-enhanced prescription containers, and leverage a patient’s natural dispensing motions to track and report on medication compliance.

The solution consists of customized pill bottles with embedded Low Energy Bluetooth Beacons, communicating with a mobile application and a web-enabled provider dashboard. We foresee a workflow in which the pharmacy registers the drug to the beaconized container and activates it before dispensing it to the patient. Once the patient initiates a dispensing motion, the beacon broadcasts this motion and the mobile application records and forwards this data via the Web to a server, which drives data out to the patient, caregiver and physician mobile monitoring apps. It also stores the data for analytics uses.

Due to the comparatively low cost of the Beacon technology, our solution is extremely cost-effective, and we believe that healthcare payer organizations would, in large part, defray the costs of acquiring and distributing these ManageRxBeacon Pill Bottles, since they are the primary financial beneficiaries of their members’ improved compliance.

The Presentation

Want to learn more about ManageRX, the app Centric presented? Sign up to download a PDF.

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