TowerView Health founders (clockwise from left) Ankur Aggarwal, Hareesh Ganesan, Rahul Jain and Nick Vallis with the company's specially designed pill tray and pill box.
Nick Valalis, now president of TowerView Health, was in his first week of medical school at Duke University when he was diagnosed with a form of cancer -- acute myeloid leukemia. He went from taking no medications at all, to trying to handle more than 10 pills a day.
Nick spent so much time trying to
organize his medications, remembering to take them, and going to the pharmacy
for refills that he thought, “If I, a medical student, am having so many
problems managing my medications, think what it must be like for everyone
else.”
Nick, with several of his friends
and classmates, founded TowerView Health, to try to help with this issue. Established
just a year ago, the company has developed a special digital pill box that has
sensors that detect when a patient has missed taking his/her medication on time.
The missed medication triggers an email, text message or phone call that can go
to the patient, or to relatives or nurses who are managing the patient’s care.
TowerView Health could not solve such a pressing problem as medicine
adherence without the help of the rest of the healthcare community. The company
has just embarked on a pilot study, in conjunction with insurance company,
Insurance Blue Cross, and healthcare provider, Penn Medicine, to test its
system on diabetic patients.
The pilot study will look at how
well the company’s new digital pill box system can help high-risk diabetics who
take medicine to control their blood sugar levels. The goal of the study is to
enroll 150 patients, half of whom will receive their medications in a standard
manner and the other half of whom will use TowerView’s system. Both groups of
patients will be tracked for six months.
Patients testing the TowerView system will receive prefilled trays of
medication from one of the study’s participating pharmacies. The tray
will fit into the company’s proprietary pillbox to measure when these diabetic patients
take, or miss taking their medication. Software displays the data collected by
the pillbox in two dashboards — one for patients so they can track their own
compliance and the other for care providers and health insurers so they can
target patients who are continually non-adherent.
Hopefully, the study will lead to
better medicine compliance for many people who are currently struggling with
managing their medication. If you would like to participate in this trial or
just learn more about TowerView Health or the issue of medicine adherence,
please go to www.towerviewhealth.com.
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