Digital Medicines

Proteus Digital Health is a Silicon Valley technology company with a vision to transform ‘healthcare for everyone, everywhere,’ using digital medicines. I led this project while working full time for Proteus as a Senior Design Lead in the UX team.

Digital medicines are a new category of medicine, that include any pharmaceutical compound combined with an ingestible sensor. They help doctors understand the two most basic questions in drug therapy: Did the patient take the prescribed medicine? And did it work?

Proteus have developed the first FDA-approved ingestible sensor in commercial use. It is combined with various drugs to treat conditions including type 2 diabetes, Hepatitis C, cancer and various mental health issues.

Proteus Discover® is a digital medicine program that uses DigiMeds (medications containing sensors), a small wearable patch and mobile app.

Each time a patient takes DigiMeds™ a small electrical signal is transmitted to the wearable patch, registering the drug name, when it was taken and in what dose. The patch also captures other health metrics such as activity, resting heart rate and steps taken per day. This information is sent to web and mobile applications accessible to the patient and helps healthcare teams tailor treatment to individual needs.

At least seven out of ten individuals in the United States (over 200 million people) have been prescribed medication. And at least half of them aren’t taking it as directed. According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 125,000 Americans die every year from not taking medication correctly.

Nonadherence has been shown to cost $100 billion each year in excess hospitalizations alone. Overall, nonadherence (along with suboptimal prescribing, administration, and diagnosis) costs as much as $290 billion per year. The current model and infrastructure for delivering medication can’t support population needs, and chronic diseases and their associated costs are rising.

Given the huge financial and human costs, we might expect new solutions to be eagerly adopted, but there are multiple obstacles to overcome:

The Healthcare Industry is slow to change and sceptical of new technologies that are not based on substantial clinical evidence. The industry is heavily regulated and risk-averse. Drugs typically take years and billions of dollars to develop.

Many Doctors feel they know their patients well enough already. They are stressed and drowning in data, so learning a new system adds to their workload. They feel uncomfortable ‘selling’ a new technology to their patients. And they believe the product is too complicated to use and too expensive.

Some Patients think they don’t have a problem or that this is not the right solution for them. They’d rather trust their doctor than a device and they worry about safety – ‘Where does it go when I’ve swallowed it?’ They also have fears about Big Brother and being monitored. Will the data be used against them to withhold care, if they aren’t a ‘good’ patient?

As a relatively new and innovative company, Proteus itself faced a communication problem. It didn’t have the instant brand recognition of the big established players, and there was no unified brand and product experience.

Proteus Discover® had been rigorously tested and shown to be successful in clinical trials. But it was not being introduced in a clear and compelling way to doctors and patients. Marketing materials and user instructions had been made ‘quick and dirty’.

All of which meant the benefits of the Proteus Discover® program were in danger of going undiscovered.

I was assigned the task of assuming design leadership and collaborating with cross functional teams (marketing, board execs, UX researchers, designers, product owners, developers, regulatory, clinical, quality, and legal) to achieve the following:

· Develop marketing materials to communicate the value of Proteus Discover® clearly and accurately to all audiences.

· Make it easier for healthcare professionals to use the product and integrate it with their own systems.

· Make it quicker and easier to onboard patients.

· Convey the benefits of digital medicines via evidence from clinical trials.

I started by evaluating the product experience and all related print and digital communications to understand what was working and what wasn’t.

I also interviewed Proteus board members and external consultants to understand the business and how we wanted to be perceived by health systems, healthcare professionals, patients, investors and new candidates.

My team and I held workshops with sales, UX and product teams to get a sense of which product attributes were most aligned with perceived value.

Next, the team prototyped a variety of creative executions and explanations of the product. We tested different messaging and value propositions with patients and healthcare professionals, to understand which resonated the most.

I developed a content strategy based on content that can live anywhere, not only in specific channels, and a communication plan tied to product releases and health system expansion plans.

I created a new image library, organising photo-shoots to capture real life scenarios featuring patients, spouses, doctors, pharmacists and nurses. These images give a warm and authentic look and feel to posters, brochures, campaigns, animations and presentations.

We created a series of video explainers to communicate how digital medicines are made and how Proteus Discover® works. We also wrote guide scripts for third party broadcasters to use in news segments. To create these videos I had to lead a production team and co-ordinate with multiple sales and engineering teams in Proteus, with video shoots on-site in California and in a London studio.

I partnered with product design consultancy Tone to create a discreet and portable presentation box showcasing the technology, that sales teams can give to prescribers and use for demonstrations at pharmaceutical companies.

I streamlined the corporate site fixing usability issues and adding analytics. We worked with an external agency AvreaFoster to re-orient the tone of the website for a professional audience.

We also created a responsive patient website to register patients and explain Proteus Discover® to them, saving time in the onboarding process and reducing the amount of printed materials required to get them set up.

Read an article explaining how I helped Proteus to lead advances in digital medicine.

· The marketing and educational materials produced by my team supported Proteus in securing $88million in funding from Otsuka Pharmaceuticals to advance digital medicines in Mental health and oncology. We also doubled our partnerships with US health systems from 4 to 8.

· The video explainers tested successfully across different therapeutic areas: patients who watched the video formed a clear mental model of how Proteus Discover® works and its benefits to them. They also had fewer questions and fewer fears about using the technology.

· The video and animation assets were used by broadcasters including CBS, ABC and NBC to explain digital medicines to their viewers.

· The new patient website reduced average onboarding time for new patients from 1hr to just 20 minutes.

· Traffic to the corporate website rose by 2,000 visitors per month; site traffic is now 12,000 visitors every month.