Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DrBox (eHealth platform to assess patient clinical progress due to prescribed medication)

Teaser

The objective of prescribing medicines is to improve patient health. However, many times the expected results of medications are not achieved, which causes morbidity and mortality associated to medication use. These failures of prescription drug use have been published in...

Summary

The objective of prescribing medicines is to improve patient health. However, many times the expected results of medications are not achieved, which causes morbidity and mortality associated to medication use. These failures of prescription drug use have been published in numerous scientific studies and negatively affect patient health as well as cause economic damages (to patients in particular and society in general). But studies show that the majority of these failures are avoidable.
Although expenses in healthcare to treat patients are high, the prevalence of morbi-mortality associated to drug prescription is high, mostly due to the fact that patients fail to follow doctor’s instructions on prescription and/or doctors duplicating therapeutics, which includes unforeseen drug interactions that can cause harm to patients.
The prevention or correction of the incorrect use of prescribed drugs requires a regular evaluation by health professionals and the measurement of periodic indicators that allow the monitoring the effectiveness and safety of prescribed medication use by patients.
To this avail, Farmácia Saude, working closely with chemists, medical doctors and patients since 1960 in Portugal, with a team of 14 experts has created a new department in the company, focused on ICT, dedicated to develop an eHealth platform for pharmacies to assess patient clinical progress due to prescribed medication and provide services to patients – DrBox.
In this Phase 1 we aimed to establish the technical Feasibility of the DrBox version (with several end-user interviews and client feedback) and to define the beachhead markets for the commercial launch of the service.

Work performed

One of the major contributions for our work developed during the Phase 1 Feasibility Study came from our EEN coaches, which have helped us research and assess the UK and the Spanish markets.
We concluded that Spain, in particular the Basque Country, will be our beachhead market, in parallel with Portugal. We will carry out pilots in these areas in order to test DrBox for the market launch.
We have also improved our market studies, state-of-the-art and competitor analysis, including the identification of new players in the blockchain privacy for medical data, based on the USA.
We have decided that we will spin-off DrBox from Farmácia Saúde as a new company.

Final results

We have successfully established a new market and commercialization strategy and defined the process to perform the spin-off of DrBox as an individual company focused first on the Portuguese and Spanish markets.
We have also established important partnerships with a future distributor for 4 EU countries, also present in Africa and South America.
We were also able to prove willingness-to-pay, signing several pre-sales contracts with interested beta testers (pharmacies) that will become paying customers when DrBox is launched to the market.
Finally, a technical feasibility roadmap was established for the next 3 years, focusing on which features are more valued by our clients and their end-users (using interviews and feedback), and which segments are our priority.

Website & more info

More info: http://drbox.azurewebsites.net/.