New age smart pill box, DoseTap, helping patients to take the right medicines at the right time
Hindustan Bytes 
Startup: DoseTap
Founder: Swati Padalia
Year it was founded: 2019
Location: Bangalore
Sector: Healthcare technology
As per WHO, the majority of the 50% of patients who do not take medicines as prescribed are simply the ones who forget to take their medications on time. This situation worsens in India with increasing lifestyle diseases and low doctor-patient ratio and this figure ranges between 60-80% as per a research journal Therapeutics and clinical risk management.
Not only patients and their families are negatively impacted by poor adherence to medications for long-term illnesses such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, dementia, etc but it is also creating a big problem for doctors and the pharmaceutical industry due to poor patient retention. As per available research this non-adherence is primarily attributed to forgetfulness than any other factors like high cost of medicines, late refill, late consultation etc.
During her time with Novartis in healthcare marketing, Swati discovered that poor medication compliance begins as early as 3 months into treatment and realized the need for a holistic solution which will cater to all stakeholders in the patient journey, not only the patients themselves or their families and caregivers but also the doctors and the healthcare organizations. Encouraged by academic research that therapy adherence devices increased medication adherence to more than 94% she started working on DoseTap in 2019 to develop a connected hardware solution to increase medication adherence.
DoseTap has features like sensors timestamp medication which provides dose refill alert & visual and audio alarms. In addition to reminding the patients when to take medication, the DoseTap smart pill box provides insight for doctors and healthcare organizations regarding medication adherence patterns. This innovation is also a patent pending device which could substantially increase the medication adherence among patients.
DoseTap smart pill box combined with DoseTap mobile app also enables caregivers and family to remotely track whether or not their loved ones are taking their medicines as per prescribed schedule. DoseTap received validation about its initial usage and received encouragement from various medical professionals. DoseTap is also going to launch various other variants of the product targeting younger population & other segments.
With a Total Addressable market size of 258 mn patients there is a huge opportunity to tap. There are several players e.g. Wise Pill Technologies, Healthcare at home etc trying to address this market though only DoseTap is equipped to address remote patient monitoring, Medication adherence data generation & Scalability across therapies at affordable price. Current business model is B2B2C, wherein DoseTap has partnered with the pharmaceutical industry and the healthcare organizations to drive patient access to technology, while providing doctors and industry partners with actionable patient insights.
