Kevin Deane, vice-president, innovation, Phillips-Medisize, describes how a connected digital health platform paves a promising pathway.
Digitally enabled connected health solutions are becoming more prevalent in helping companies to monitor, measure, and support patient adherence to prescribed medications. Integrating connectivity into drug delivery devices offers promising opportunities for medical plastics manufacturers to consider how they might align with the drive to improve the patient and provider experience, support medication adherence, and share data across multiple touchpoints.
Today’s connected health ecosystem includes three key components: Connected devices (e.g. drug delivery devices), digital interfaces (e.g. patient and caregiver apps), and a cloud platform which enables data integration with multiple sources (e.g. EHRs, IoT sensors).
Kevin Deane
Embedding electronics and connectivity into medical devices can help address these goals, as well as make such devices more suitable for reuse. For medical manufacturers, this offers an opportunity to reduce part count, in turn potentially decreasing the complexity of the plastic moulding manufacturing and assembly operations and hence accelerating time to market. For plastic manufacturers, this might reduce production volumes and provide a route to a higher margin business, better alignment with customer needs, and an opportunity to offer new services such as the ability to integrate electronics, or in our case, to offer data services.
We’ve developed an integrated technology platform that combines plastic components, electronic components, sensor technologies and associated software to create a flexible and scalable solution that can meet the healthcare industry’s needs around connectivity. Basing development of connected medical devices on these platform technologies provides the opportunity to use proven designs and established, repeatable manufacturing processes. This enables manufacturers to utilise existing infrastructure and facilities to continuously produce the core product across multiple customers, and also to design custom features that meet unique applications.
Benefits of a connected health platform
Building solutions on a connected health platform provides many benefits for healthcare stakeholders, and for medical plastics manufacturers, this is an opportunity to provide additional capabilities and services. These benefits include the ability to share information (from digitally connected drug delivery devices) and analytics across pharma companies, clinical researchers, providers, patients and payers, to provide insight into how patients are taking their medication.
Low-cost, high speed deployment is another key advantage. It’s important to partner with a manufacturer who can deliver connected health solutions with electronics and sensors already embedded. This speeds the development process and keeps costs low, for both reusable and disposable drug delivery devices.
Building infrastructure for a connected health solution on a flexible, scalable platform versus starting from scratch for each new device makes it more cost efficient to add or refine infrastructure for future projects. Because the price per user declines as the patient population increases, the costs for integrating connectivity for medications also decreases.
The design
The upfront design is, in itself, another critical success factor in manufacturing medical plastic components that are part of a digital health solution. The right initial design is essential to accurately and efficiently completing all downstream activities that qualify or validate the process.
The best way to tackle the initial design and concepting phase is to start by seeking input from a wide range of stakeholders in the earliest stages of connected medical device development. This allows everyone to work with front-end innovators to define the concepts that deliver the best features and usability for patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals, as well as to identify the manufacturing and commercial realities that will contribute to the product’s success in the marketplace.
Because device manufacturers’ needs are typically built more around business requirements, they should strike a balance between design features and the cost of goods, length of use, production time and manufacturing complexity. Ultimately, the product must be developed at a cost point, scale and level of reliability that will generate return on investment, yet still ensure a positive user experience.
Conclusion
In the end, medical plastics manufacturers who help their customers to create medical devices designed with the patient first and built on a scalable, connected health platform, can embrace the power of a digitally connected future, improve adherence, and facilitate better outcomes.