Case Study

Creating a holistic chronic disease management platform for auto-immune diseases

S3 Connected Health worked with a leading pharma company to develop a global service for patients with autoimmune conditions, including multiple sclerosis (MS) and rheumatoid arthritis (RA).

The ambitious goals included:

  • Developing a digital health platform to support patients and clinicians

  • Creating a data lake strategy to capture clinical and health economic outcomes
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Enabling patient self-management and coordinated clinical care

We created a holistic chronic disease management platform for auto-immune diseases – beginning with MS and RA – that was designed to empower patient self-management and enable more coordinated clinical care.

The patient-centric solution enabled patient engagement and compliance with their treatment and provided multisource monitoring data for healthcare professionals, who could then review and assess a patient’s status and progress remotely or during a visit.

This facilitated medication recording and tracking, patient-reported outcomes (PROs), capture of data via connected devices (including a range of existing fitness trackers), and the provision of educational, motivation, and behavioral support, reminders, and interventions.

The app asked patients to respond to adherence notifications. Along with providing continual educational content, a behavioral model was created to support patients who were not responding to adherence notifications.

Understanding the patient experience

Chronic disease management is about more than treatment of the disease itself.

It’s important to understand the entire patient journey, from their first contact with the healthcare system, through diagnosis, and onto regular chronic care, clinic visits, clinical patient support, and clinic finances.

To do this, we engaged with patients, healthcare professionals, and key opinion leaders around the globe.

 

Clinical engagement

We conducted primary research with patients and healthcare professionals in clinical settings and controlled interview facilities. This type of meaningful engagement early and throughout a project is critical for successful development and rollout.

By engaging KOLs in the US, Germany, Ireland, Spain, the UK, and the US, our teams developed a comprehensive view of the unique approaches and challenges within healthcare systems in different countries.

These insights were also used by our behavioral scientists to map out the unmet needs for patients, clinicians, and health systems, which informed the design of a unique solution to address the very different priorities of each of the user groups. We then created specific care-plans to optimize the platform’s ability to meet the clinical and economic design goals. In practice, this meant identifying key priorities for the MVP.

 
Clinical engagement case study

Developing the cloud-based platform

We then created a comprehensive platform, patient app, and portal using an agile IEC 62304 development process, to enable delivery of services to MS and RA patients through. The platform was therapy agnostic and driven by the standards-based care plans co-created with KOLs. Key elements included:

 

 

The platform helped provide more personalized care plans for patients and better decision support for clinicians

The care plans developed with global KOLs and healthcare professionals were central to the platform and service delivery.

Clinicians could decide the appropriate monitoring, treatment, and management services for their patients. They choose standard-of-care templates from their own clinics or create and share their own.

They could personalize the care plans for their patients, deciding on treatment regiment, digital services to offer, and monitoring devices to recommend. Triaging services could be performed by clinic nurses or managed by the clients’ clinical call centre. Clinicians were alerted when patients were outside parameters and the care plan could be adjusted.

Clinicians had access to extensive scientific content to help them with their decisions. All the data from the service could then be anonymized and exported to the data lake, enabling comparison of data across different patient cohorts.

 

Learn more about digital health solutions for chronic disease management

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