The Journal of mHealth Vol 1 Issue 3 (June 2014) | Page 38

Engaging Patients Using mHealth
Continued from page 35

which a suitable approach for specific
diseases or populations can be identified.
When developing an mHealth solution
for a specific disease population, in addition to understanding aspects of patient
segmentation like age, disease stage and
medication, we need to remember that
that patients will also be at different
behavioural stages. We therefore need
to respond differently to a patient who
is in denial of their condition, than to a
patient who has accepted their condition
and is trying to learn how to better manage themselves. We also need to bear in
mind that once we get patients to progress from one behavioural stage to the
next, they may revert back to a previous
behavioural stage.
For some, trying to also incorporate
behavioural change into mHealth solutions might feel like a bridge too far. Perhaps this is seen as a level of complexity
too difficult to incorporate on top of
everything else. However, when broken
down to its constituent parts, behavioural change can be incorporated into
an adaptive platform.

INCENTIVES
At Exco InTouch we have been working to incorporate incentivisation into a
patient’s goal and lifestyle management.
Patients can either work towards predefined goal programmes, which might
be specific to their condition or more
generally around diet and exercise, or
they can define their own personalised
goals. Patients can then work towards
these goals individually or collaboratively.
In terms of patient collaboration, the
universal growth of social media, software apps and gaming has made the
concept and acceptance of collaborative engagement common place. This
can either take the form of co-operative engagement, which might include
patients working together towards a
common goal, or patients working individually or in teams in competition with
others.
How then, do we plug incentivisation
into goal and lifestyle management?
For those patients starting out,

36

June 2014

they could view other existing patient’s
socially shared activities, these patients
would perhaps then display their own
individual goals and achievements within
the social environment. Patients looking to get started could then find others
dealing with similar personal challenges
and this acts as a powerful behavioural
nudging mechanism to show what can
be achieved. For those patients not
wanting to engage within a patient
community, they can still
do their own thing and
could still gain tremendous
benefit from seeing
other patient’s
approaches
and achievements.

patients the right kind of support and
encouragement to work towards important healthy targets is fundamental to
patient engagement. We can then build
on this and explore new and appropriate ways to remunerative and financial
incentive. This could take the form of
a reward points or voucher based system that patients can spend in specified
areas. With any incentive system with
monetary value, it will be important
to build checks into the system to prevent fraudulent activities. This
could simply be
a case of linking achievement
to
clinical outcome, for
example a
reduction
in BMI,
possibly
requiring health
care professional verification. Although
the mechanics of a
reward system can be
universal, a product might
need to connect into different reward
programmes in different territories. I
believe there is a real opportunity here
for the pharmaceutical industry to consider a completely new approach to drug
pricing. mHealth programmes like these
can provide pharma companies anonymous real world data on patient adherence to their medication and self-management. This provides the opportunity
to link reward to drug price by offering
discounts to patients who achieve longer term adherence and agreed clinical
and health improvements. This discount
could go directly to patients who pay for
their drug products in some countries or
feed through to