PatchRx, a medication management startup, improves prescription adherence and helps patients remember to take their medication through data-driven technology. Today, the company announced a $1.2M pre-seed round and moved its operations to Tulsa, Oklahoma, joining the growing number of startups that have relocated to the city over the past year. The company’s second capital raise was led by Atento Capital, followed by Cortado Ventures, and the Gaingels Network.
According to the World Health Organization, poor medication adherence can account for up to 25% of hospitalizations and approximately 125,000 deaths every year in the United States. PatchRx has developed and patented the first universal smart pill bottle device to ensure that patients regularly take the right doses and help pharmacies play an active role in encouraging medication adherence.
The company’s patient-facing services notify users when to take medications and operate as an all-encompassing health tracker – “a personal EMR for patients.” Patients can also request refills from any PatchRx-registered pharmacy and collect rewards through the mobile app. Clinicians are also notified when doses are missed, allowing for real-time, effective monitoring of daily adherence.
PatchRx was founded by two students at Trinity University in San Antonio, each with deeply personal connections to medication adherence.
“When Gavin and I first met, his grandfather had recently passed away due to a medication non-adherence issue. And not long after, I was diagnosed with cancer and learned firsthand how overwhelming it could be to manage multiple prescriptions,” said Andrew Aertker, co-founder of PatchRx. “From that point on, we were focused on easing the burden that patients and families feel from managing medications. After several successful early launches of our smart pill bottle caps and software platform, we’re thrilled to be taking our company to the next level in Tulsa.”
New technology is set to have a significant impact on the classroom of the future for nursing education, as indicated by the results of a new survey of nurse educators published today by Wolters Kluwer, Health. “Forecast for the Future: Technology Trends in Nursing Education” identified respondents’ plans for technology usage, adoption, and investment during the next five years and shed light on the barriers and opportunities related to those initiatives.
This is the second survey of nursing school administrators, faculty, and deans conducted by Wolters Kluwer in collaboration with the National League for Nursing.
Post-COVID tech adoption
“Technology adoption was well underway in nursing education before the COVID-19 pandemic, but in transitioning to remote instruction, faculty quickly learned how diverse technologies can work together to give students an optimized, hybrid learning experience that they crave as digital learners,” said Julie Stegman, vice president, nursing segment of health learning, research and practice at Wolters Kluwer. “Educators are now seeing how technology investment can help address several of the longstanding challenges they face including clinical limitations, assessing students’ cumulative performance as they learn, and developing practice-ready nurses. That is a powerful shift.”
The survey found that 73% of institutions went fully online at the start of the pandemic and that technologies that aid in remote learning all had significant increases in adoption. Nearly 40% of respondents said they plan to offer more online courses in the future, and many forecast a continuation of the investment in technology seen during the pandemic.
Based on the survey data, the report predicts the classroom of the future will be a hybrid learning environment that is in-person and leverages existing and next-generation technologies including the emergence of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR and AR).
Plenty of jobs take place in a healthcare environment. Because of the need to help patients and work with vulnerable people, these roles are anything but easy, which is why it takes a special kind of person to thrive there.
Whether you want to become a counselor, nurse, or dentist, here are nineteen essential skills you will need to work in a medical setting.
1: Quick Learning
While you might have learned all that you could during your healthcare degree, you must also pick up lots of new information along the way. To do this, you must be a quick learner. This will mean that if a new kind of technology or piece of equipment is introduced, you will have no problem learning its methods.
Quick learning is also helpful during your studying years. If you are doing a human services degree, you will have a better time understanding psychological disorders and social discrimination if your brain absorbs information quickly.
2: Confidence
Working in a medical setting means having bounds of confidence, even if you do not know everything. After all, a patient will not feel comfortable in your hands if you seem shy or unsure of your abilities. Confidence is not about being loud, though – it is about having meaning in all of your actions.
If you decide to pursue a certain medical method, and your knowledge and experience tell you it is the right decision, do not start overthinking it. Remember that you are where you are for a reason, so have confidence in that, and if you ever feel you need a second opinion, do not hesitate to seek it out.
3: Flexibility
One of the benefits of working in a healthcare setting is getting flexible hours. After all, healthcare is needed at all hours of the day! For this, though, you need to be flexible yourself. That means if you have a rigid schedule for the day, you can shift things around in order to accommodate a change in your obligations. You never know what is going to come up in a medical setting, which means never having set expectations about your day.
The rising out-of-pocket costs from health insurance is one of the most common barriers to health care for patients. According to a recent study, 46 million people cannot afford needed care. With significant increases in job loss due to COVID-19, many people have become uninsured and are deferring care, which consequently places financial burdens on healthcare systems.
Further, many patients who are uninsured or underinsured don’t know there are financial resources available that could help lower their out-of-pocket costs. Providers are in the unique position to adopt strategies to help remove barriers to treatment using technology, particularly for those struggling to afford care. These can lead to better financial outcomes for both the patient and provider.
Here are four ways technology is helping providers remove financial barriers to care:
Predictive analytics. Healthcare organizations can leverage predictive analytics to proactively identify patients at risk of not affording treatment – and mitigate the financial and personal stress that comes with receiving a costly medical bill post treatment. Providers can analyze patient data including income, propensity to pay, health insurance out-of-pocket cost, and treatment plan to assess financial risk. It can also help prioritize which patients have the highest probability of not affording high-cost care. This level of visibility can help providers identify more patients upstream needing financial care and take the next steps toward reducing the financial burden.
The Cures Act Final Rule’s technical requirements call for radical changes in electronic Patient Health Information Exchange (ePHI). Care providers must adhere to the CoP requirements for patient event notifications (ADT Notifications) and the real-time exchange of ePHI through APIs in 2021. In addition, payer organizations must facilitate the electronic exchange of ePHI between other payers and healthcare providers through a patient access API. They must also provide patients with a list of care providers to choose from for medical services by compiling the provider directory API.
These technical requirements are driven by the CMS’s pursuit of seamless semantic interoperability of healthcare systems and the ONC’s specifications for 2015 requirements of Certified Electronic Health Record Technology. While they affect care providers and payers, health IT developers (HIT vendors) are the catalyst to facilitate the patient centric care.
HIT vendors must swing into action to adhere to their regulatory requirements and enable providers and payers to do so in the process. The stifling competition that is already upon them only lifts the normal for innovation and reflex time. HIT software development requires specialized skill sets and exhaustive processes that escalate costs. In a bid to rein in these costs and adhere to regulatory requirements, HIT developers tend to dilute their competitive edge.
Hospitals rely on data loggers for a variety of reasons; here’s a look at four of the critical ways in which they use data loggers:
1 – Protect Sensitive Assets
The most common use of digital data logging in a hospital is to monitor temperature levels in fridges and freezers that are used to store sensitive assets such as vaccines, tissue samples, blood, and organs for transplant. Because these items require storage at a cold temperature to ensure they are safe for use, a data recorder can monitor the conditions to ensure they stay within acceptable ranges. Before digital data loggers, these storage areas had to be monitored manually by humans. Not only were the temperature instruments not very accurate, but it was also unknown if the storage temperatures had remained within the required zone between readings. Data loggers provide continuous readings and alert personnel when the temperature gets too warm or too cold.
2 – Regulate Sensitive Environments
Hospitals contain sensitive environments where conditions must remain at strictly regulated levels. This includes such places as operating theatres and cold rooms. A digital data logger tracks temperatures and humidity in an operating room to ensure that both the patient and operating staff are comfortable during a procedure. In cold rooms that are used to store medical supplies, a digital data logger can be used to alert staff after hours or on weekends if a door does not close properly or is left open, potentially threatening the integrity of the stored items. Also, if a system failure occurs, the data logger can send an alert to inform maintenance staff to correct the problem.
The increasing number of online pharmacy retailers emphasize growing consumer inquiry for address delivery. More and more polls show that the cost of such delivery is the greatest concern for both consumers and suppliers.
Such trends have resulted in an expansion of mobile apps usage for prescription drugs. The chronic conditions patients like diabetes, heart, kidney or liver diseases, or HIV infections rely on pharmacy services that provide continuous prescriptions renewals and deliver to patients’ homes.
Market Overview of Pharmacy Delivery Apps
In 2023, we expect the pharmacy delivery market to reach 6.4% CAGR for the forecast period up to 1,694.7 billion dollars. Besides the growth of chronic diseases patients that require ongoing medicine supply, there are such major factors as technological progress and new products release.
Especially since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic boosted medicine delivery needs to reach an unprecedented level. Implementing such an opportunity into your online drugs retailer may force the business growth. Furthermore, the pharmacy delivery applications must provide the right information about the medicine and accurately distinguish drugs.
By Ben Holmes, senior clinical data analyst, Syapse.
When it comes to getting a clear picture from real-world data, breadth of view and careful analysis matter equally.
Interpreting data is always a challenge; it’s a problem space with high dimensionality, deeply interrelated variables, and where data completeness is defined in infinite ways. Separating actionable insights from mountains of data requires rigorous statistical validation, thoughtful modeling, and a variety of analytic approaches. Biostatisticians take these steps to avoid biasing results, and to make sure that samples are truly representative and relationships between variables are accounted for.
But even with all possible care and due diligence taken, it’s possible to arrive at skewed results if the view from the data sources included is limited by their inherent biases. For example, mortality is an important data element in oncology research that helps oncologists communicate chances of remission to their patients. Yet, in the real-world setting, there isn’t a single complete source for mortality data that can be used to better understand remission and survival rates.
This is, partly, because many of the traditional mortality data sources only apply to certain groups of patients. For example, death data from hospital registries is only applicable for patients in cases where registry data is available. Additionally, registries tend to rely on electronic health record (EHR) and obituary data to capture deceased status, which do not naturally account for all patients—for example, women and minorities are less likely to have obituaries. With that in mind, datasets that rely heavily on obituary data alone are going to under-represent deaths and overall survival curves associated with women and minorities. This finding is consistent with recently published studies of digitized obituaries which showed that women were awarded significantly fewer obituaries compared to men.
PatchRx, a medication management startup, improves prescription adherence and helps patients remember to take their medication through data-driven technology. Today, the company announced a $1.2M pre-seed round and moved its operations to Tulsa, Oklahoma, joining the growing number of startups that have relocated to the city over the past year. The company’s second capital raise was led by Atento Capital, followed by Cortado Ventures, and the Gaingels Network.
New technology is set to have a significant impact on the classroom of the future for nursing education, as indicated by the results of a new survey of nurse educators published today by 
By Ben Holmes, senior clinical data analyst,