Maryland Pharmacy School Embraces mHealth for Medication Adherence

The University of Maryland School of Pharmacy will be using an mHealth platform to help care providers and their patients improve medication adherence.

The Baltimore-based school is partnering with emocha Mobile Health, a digital health company spun out of Johns Hopkins, to use the company’s video Directly Observed Therapy (vDOT) service. The vDOT platform enables patients to use their smartphone or tablet to record themselves taking prescribed medications, then send that video to care providers.

The telehealth platform enables care providers to monitor medication adherence, in terms of both what drugs are taken and when. Through the mHealth app, patients can also report side effects, receive reminders to take their medications, access additional resources and collaborate with care providers on care management and treatment progress.

The school will make the service available to hospitals, health systems and payers “with the goal to increase medication adherence, address medication related problems, and manage the rising cost of care and readmission rates.”

“At the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, we focus on providing highly supportive services to patients through comprehensive medication review and reconciliation to prevent and reduce drug-related problems,” Magaly Rodriguez de Bittner, PharmD, director of the school’s Center for Innovative Pharmacy Solutions and associate dean of clinical services and practice transformation, said in a press release. “We are pleased to collaborate with them to provide medication therapy management services to a wide array of patients using this technology.”

Launched roughly 10 years ago, emocha proved its mettle early on in helping care providers and public health workers monitor medication adherence among populations living with Hepatitis C, tuberculosis  and HIV. More recently, the company has partnered with providers and payers to monitor medication adherence among those living with diabetes, and is involved in at least two federally funded programs testing the platform for opioid abuse treatment.

The company is one of several applying mHealth technology to a pain point that’s costing healthcare providers between $100 billion and $289 billion a year as a result of medications not taken at the right time or in the wrong doses. Adverse drug reactions lead to roughly 1 million additional trips to the ER each year and 350,000 hospitalizations, and can lead to a wide range of negative clinical outcomes down the road that affect a patient’s health.