An estimated two-thirds of Americans are currently under doctor's care with a prescription drug to moderate or improve their health. Yet approximately 50% of these patients do not take their medications as prescribed. This behavior is known in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry as "medication non-adherence"(MNA).
Wellth went to market with an innovative technology solution: utilizing artificial intelligence to reduce medication non-adherence. And our platform’s net benefit improves member health, saves lives, and reduces financial waste in the healthcare sector.
Six years after our founding, we are thrilled to share the news that Fast Company Magazine recently selected Wellth among its list of World Changing Ideas in the category of Artificial Intelligence.
At the heart of our business, Wellth is a behavior change company that influences motivation and habit formation in patients with chronic health conditions. Backed by the science of behavioral economics, we are changing the world's standard of care by financially motivating patients to adhere to their prescribed medical plans and complete daily check-ins—using our custom-developed artificial intelligence to make it all happen.
We endow the progress upfront by giving patients a set amount in rewards at the start of each month, and every day that they fail to use their cell phone camera to submit their daily check-ins, they lose $2 for the day. By endowing the payment upfront and framing it as a loss, we are twice as successful in changing behavior and encouraging patients to take their medications.
Previously, reviewing thousands of submitted patient photos was a manual task to ensure drug adherence visually. However, Wellth has since developed artificial intelligence's power to replace manual counting processes and detect anomalies in the over 1 million photos that Wellth has received through daily member check-ins.
Wellth's award-winning A.I.looks at every picture we receive and draws virtual boxes around objects it identifies in the image: pills, injectors, inhalers, device screens, digits on screens, and more. Our deep learning model was trained on tens of thousands of hand-labeled images submitted by our users.
Training on this large proprietary data set allows us to achieve high accuracy at finding and counting pills in the images we receive, as well as reading values off of the screens of connected devices such as glucometers and blood pressure meters.
With this information, we can automatically verify that our members are completing their prescribed care plan every day—and even detect when their behaviors or metrics change, allowing us to prioritize resources and alert their care team for follow-up.
The addition of artificial intelligence has allowed Wellth to scale the service to reach thousands of additional patients. For example, for Arizona Complete Health, the benefits included improved health outcomes through increased medication adherence, long-term healthy habit creation, and enhanced member engagement and experience. Wellth’s solution has already demonstrated approximately 90 percent of members adhering to their medication treatment therapy, which will help keep them healthy and improve their quality of life.
Since applying for the FastCompany award, Wellth is continuing to expand our platform to support other key care plan behaviors—including preventative care nudges, kidney dialysis and other appointment reminders, and more.
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