Meet Emma, Your New Pharmacist
4 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // June 22nd, 2007 // 12:52 pm
For a mere $200 a month, you can purchase a spiffy new box for your kitchen counter that will dispense your meds whenever you need them - and it will send gentle reminders in the form of beeps that resemble your microwave oven, or perhaps a two-year-old’s favorite toy. Better yet, it’s FDA approved.
The gizmo - which its manufacturer affectionately named Emma - is supposed to allow a pharmacist, nurse or doctor to monitor your meds remotely. Dosing changes. Titration. Emma does it all. And all you have to do is periodically load Emma with a tray of pills, which come in blister packs, and wait for the beeping to start. And it beeps if you forget one, too. At least, that’s what INRange Systems, Emma’s parent, claims.
Emma “will help take away some of the confusion patients can experience when taking prescription medications, and allow care providers to more closely monitor their patients’ medications between office visits,” says Dan Schultz, who heads FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, which hopes the bread box will cut down on the burgeoning number of medication errors.
Curiously, INRange’s press release makes the same point, but backs it up by citing data that discusses hospital med errors, as opposed to screw-ups in the home. As John Mack studiously notes on Pharma Marketing Blog, “if physicians prescribe the wrong medication in the first place, this device will continue to dispense the wrong medication unless someone tells it differently.” Hmmm….
Nor does Emma come cheap. “Currently, we do not have reimbursement, so the patient would have to pay unless they are part of a capitated plan such as the Veteran’s Administration,” INRange president Chris Bossi writes Pharmalot. How many third-party payors - private or public - want to underwrite millions of beeping Emmas isn’t yet clear.
For that much money, perhaps Emma should include tunes from iPod, free downloads of new movies and teleconferencing. Or at least have a real conversation. Anything can beep.
Melody
If we, as consumers/patients allow Big Pharma and its adjuncts and enablers to continue “dumbing down” the population, I guess we will be getting no more (or less) than we deserve. Eventually Big Pharma can dispense a daily dose of “mind control” medication, and we will more quietly serve our corporate masters as “ultimate consumers.”
John Mack
Ed-
Thanks for quoting me.
The way the company plays upon our fears of medication errors and carefully crafts the BS to make a bogus benefit statement is reprehensible, IMHO.
Besides, this device is hardly the iPOD of telemonitoring! What we need is a Steve Jobs in the medical informatics arena!
Brent
I see this as yet another object of control for medical professionals to divert accountability. As soon as the maker incorporates “download” capabilities, doctors can require patients to bring “compliance results” to their next office visit. If the patient hasn’t taken his medication EXACTLY AS PRESCRIBED, the doctor can shift responsibility directly to the patient for less than optimum outcomes. (”You forgot your a.m. statin last Wednesday–that’s why your cholesterol is still so high!)
Doctors have long used A1c tests to divert responsibility for poor treatment and poor insulin choice back onto the shoulders of the non-compliant diabetic. The advent of downloadable monitor results further encouraged doctors to berate diabetic patients for poor compliance. Doctors–like Big Pharma–are always looking to blame the disease or blame the patient.
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