The age of digital medicine is here

As technology and traditional healthcare converge, some trends in cutting-edge digital health innovation are emerging.

Andrew Thompson, CEO of Proteus, made a bold claim in his opening keynote at the recent Frontiers Health conference, stating that the FDA approval of Abilify MyCite, combining his company’s digital tracking technology with Otsuka’s schizophrenia medicine, represented the biggest revolution in medicine in over 30 years.

He told the audience at Berlin’s historic Funkhaus venue in November that he believes Proteus is driving the birth of an entirely new industry, called ‘digital medicines’, in the same way that Genentech launched the now ubiquitous biotech industry with the approval of the first synthetically-manufactured human insulin, back in 1982.

Some could contest his claim that in time every therapeutic intervention will be digitally-enabled, and time will tell whether Proteus remains the leader here, but it’s hard to ignore the paradigm shift happening in front of our eyes. Based on what I saw in Berlin at Frontiers Health here are my three key conclusions on where digital medicine is heading.

• Read the article in full in pharmaphorum's digital magazine Deep Dive