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Patient Compliance Enhancement System Wins Columbia Business School Outrageous Business Plan Competition

According to With This Plan, Everyone Wins, a system for packaging a patient’s medication by dosing schedule (e.g., instead of dispensing a month’s supply of the patient’s five different medications each in its own bottle, the pharmacist would repackage the medications into that patient’s prescribed doses – 1 tablet each of medications A, B, and C on awakening, 2 tablets of medication D with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and 1 tablet of medication E at bedtime) was adjudged the best entry in the Ninth Annual Outrageous Business Plan Competition,¹ an honor accompanied by a $4,575 award.

The referenced post goes on to note that

Prescription noncompliance costs billions in healthcare dollars and thousands of lives each year. Geoffrey Reed ’09 saw the problem first-hand last summer when his grandfather mixed up his medications and ended up in the hospital. Now Reed and Eric Chesin ’09 have come up with a way for pharmacies to organize medications that increases the chance of compliance. The idea, Bluepak, recently won CBS’s 2008 Outrageous Business Plan Competition; their elevator pitch is below.

Commentary

As was the case with the MIT Yunus Challenge award,² it is heartening to find patient compliance recognized as a problem worthy of the efforts of student competitors at these elite universities.

And, I think the idea is reasonable and and worthy of a trial. I am, however less certain a medication repackaging scheme warrants the “outrageous” tag.³ Hospitals have used this strategy for years, and some pharmacists have long provided the service for some patients. Heck, I’ve suggested this idea myself without one person in the audience retorting “That’s outrageous.”

More to the point, Bluepak appears similar to onePAC, a service featured recently on this blog,⁴ and the questions I asked about onePac (see previous posts) would apply to Bluepak. ⁵

Happily, being outrageous or even original, is not a prerequisite for a clinical valid, commercially viable program to enhance medication compliance. Those of us with vested interests in treatment adherence will be interested to see how Bluepak, onePAC, and similar ideas fare in the real world.

Footnotes

1. From the Columbia Business School press release: To enter the competition, teams comprised of at least one Columbia MBA or EMBA student, submit an executive summary of their business plan and tape a two-minute elevator pitch. A panel of judges, comprised of executives from venture capital firms as well as several entrepreneurs who developed their own successful ventures while students at Columbia Business School, evaluated the pitches and narrowed the field down to five teams. In the final round of competition, each team delivered a formal 10 minute presentation to the judges and the audience. Based on these presentations, the judges decided how much money they would award each venture.↩
2. See Yunus Challenge Award Focuses On Patient Compliance and CellCentives Reconsidered – Still Not DOTS↩
3. According to the previously noted Columbia Business School press release, “The competition, organized by the Columbia Entrepreneurs Organization and the Entrepreneurship Program, encourages students to develop and present creative entrepreneurial ideas that are sufficiently ambitious in scope and scale to be considered “outrageous.”↩
4. See Individualized Dose Packets Simplify Medication Adherence, Answers To Questions About onePAC, and More Answers To Questions About onePAC↩
5. I have, in fact, emailed those queries to the Columbia Business School.↩