Today’s medication experience is broken. It’s a $500 billion problem that affects employers, health insurance companies, and individuals. The good news is that it’s fixable.
Picture this scenario that happens millions of times every day. Your doctor prescribes a medication and you go to the pharmacy to pick it up. When you’re there, you may get some advice, and then are sent on your way with an amber-colored bottle in a white bag, along with an intimidating piece of paper full of fine print. Now, you are on your own; it’s just you and your pills because you already recycled that piece of paper.
What do you do? Enter MyMeds.
MyMeds is bringing to market a patented suite of solutions unlike any other in the digital health space. Its best-in-class, Digital + Human ACE platform (Adhere, Connect, Engage) is redefining the medication experience in real-time and ensures people are never alone:
- Adhere—the Whole Family solution that allows people to manage themselves, their kids AND their elderly parents, all in one place. It includes prescription information, access to multi-modal education
(Mayo Clinic content, videos, WhyMeds), identify better prices and have a telephone or video chat with expert pharmacists. - Connect—real-time data connectivity to pharmacy benefits managers (PBMs) + CMS (Medicare). MyMeds is the only company in the country with this capability.
- Engage—connected clinical platform powered by data and insights to proactively identify and engage people before it’s too late.
MyMeds has now partnered with some of the world’s most respected health companies to provide a solution that improves patient satisfaction, health outcomes, and cost savings.
In 2000, while finishing medical school, MyMeds Founder Dr. Rajiv R. Shah was doing his clinical rotations. He noticed that people came in with messy, illegible handwritten notes listing their medicines. Having an accurate medication list is important for doctors to know a person’s conditions and the severity.
Unfortunately, most lists in the medical records are wrong, even today. And, when people see multiple doctors who prescribe meds, they don’t always communicate with each other. The patient is usually the only one with a complete record. “This was the dotcom era; there were point-and-click solutions for everything and I thought to myself, why didn’t we have something better?
In addition, I’m a firm believer of the Patients as Partners philosophy and know that most people want to be more involved in their care. With my background in Cognitive Psychology and as a kidney doctor taking care of patients with multiple conditions and meds, we were able to design something that we know would help the people who needed it most and their caregivers,” he says.
Initially, Dr. Shah created MyMeds for his patients to improve their experience. “In a typical 20-minute appointment, patients were using 15 of those minutes providing medication and allergy data to a nurse and not talking to a doctor. With MyMeds we were able to cut it down to 3 minutes, and as a result, I had more time with my patients—leading to better patient-doctor experience.” That experience helped Dr. Shah understand how much of a difference his solution could make to patients everywhere, and in 2012 when medication non-adherence (not taking medicines as directed) became a major issue, he was contacted by clinicians around the country stating that MyMeds was the best solution for patient engagement with their medicines.
“At that point, I was surprised that people knew about MyMeds since it was just for my patients and we didn’t do any publicity.” It was then that MyMeds became a business. He created the first prototype of the solution we see today and field-tested it in rural Minnesota. “We really wanted to create a solution that worked for everyone and we wanted to meet people where they were.” Today, MyMeds is recognized as the market in its space and is used by some of the most respected companies and healthcare systems across the US.
