Drug companies want you to follow your doctors’ prescriptions
Notions addressed: More and more information items are produced on individuals … by objects around you
This information items organize interpersonal relations with increasing effectiveness
A Financial Times article reports that the pharmaceutical company Novartis is currently testing a technology that resort to inserting a tiny microchip in each pill that you take. Another transceiver chip implanted in the patient’s shoulder detected the taking of each pill. If the person does not follow the doctor’s prescription, the smart transceiver initiates the sending of a short text message reminder on that person’s cell phone.
Tests conducted on 20 patients taking Diovan, a medication lowering blood pressure, would have increased the compliance to prescription from 30% to 80% after six months.
One can imagine the benefits of such technology for people who tend to avoid or forget to take their medication or to reassure those who may forget if they have taken it or not (and could therefore also avoid overdoses).
However, the Financial Times reports that the primary interest of drug companies is obviously to increase sales of their drugs, particularly in the case of chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes. These companies have a vested interest in that patients strictly follow their prescription of profit making drugs for many years.
This news brings to two observations.
Objects and us
Increasingly, the objects that we handle will generate information on the use we make of them and communicate through the Internet.
Today, it is especially the case of devices that already imbed electronics: computers, phones, TV selectors, PDAs, terminals, cars.
However, various consumer products and identification pieces already include radiofrequency identification (RFID) chips to enable their detection at close range by computer terminals or even genuine microprocessors that enable more sophisticated processing. In theory, there is no object that cannot be equipped this way. And not only our objects, but even every part of our body.
We directly generate more and more information through our handling of our tools. However, these and other objects are increasingly generating information on their own about the use we make of them. Several common software products like Office suite, Acrobat Reader or our web browser, have the ability to produce information on the use we make of them and the malfunctions encountered, then transmit this information to their manufacturers through the Internet.
Objects between us
The Internet. It now connects more than computers, but also objects. And through these objects, ourselves and our fellow human beings.
In the case of microchip pills, these can connect us to our doctor and our pharmacist. The professionals can then be informed in “real time” about whether or not we take our medicine. If the automated reminders are not enough, they can be alerted and then admonish us. If instead we follow out their recommendations, we will be congratulated. The pharmacist may even remind us that it is time to pick up another bottle of pills. Or simply deliver at home without us having to contact the drugstore since our pills inform it directly about the number of the remaining ones in our home’s pharmacy.
Thanks to the Internet, any object - like a pill - becomes a go-between in our relationship to others. Thus, the question is how this relationship is organized.
Does the chip that monitors my medication taking communicate only with myself or also with others? Is this tool to support my autonomy? Or rather a tool to support control by others? Or both? One or the other option is not positive or negative in absolute terms, particularly in healthcare where each case is more or less particular.
Then remains the other inevitable question: who decides? Me? The doctor? The public or private insurer? The pills’ manufacturer? The vendor of the computer solution?
To learn more about this type of biomedical technology, see the website of the technological partner of Novartis, Medical Proteus.