In our latest interview series we spoke with Dr James Burnstone, CEO from Elucid mHealth, a Manchester based company supporting patients to take their medication properly. We asked James a few questions:
Could you tell me a bit about yourself and your organisation?
Elucid mHealth is a digital health company started in 2013. Our main product is the Pill Connect system. It’s a patented smart medicine bottle where dispensing is controlled by a mobile application. It supports patients to better manage medicine use whilst providing real-time adherence and engagement data to clinicians. The idea is to digitise medicine dispensing. This makes is it a measurable data point whilst eliminating some of the common difficulties associated with medicine management. Having accurate, real-time data on when a patient is engaging with their medicine and when they have not taken a dose is valuable for data quality and analysis in clinical trials which is our target market.
Since 2017 I’ve been the CEO of Elucid. Before that I was brought in by the founders in 2014 as CTO; which was a fancy title for being the only developer! I was in France working for a global software company when the founders approached me through Manchester University.
It actually didn’t take any convincing to leave the sun for Manchester again! For me it was a dream opportunity to be involved in an innovative healthcare start-up so early and as the technical lead. Prior to that I had just completed my PhD at Manchester where I had developed novel face recognition technology for mobile phones which is currently in a patent application. Though my degree was in electronic engineering I had always been interested in healthcare & economics and building new technologies.
Outside of work I love to travel with my fiancée, gardening, the movies, and to spend as much time as possible with our 7 month old Golden Retriever, Walt.
What is the most significant achievement for your organisation in the past 12 months and what will be over the next 12 months?
We’ve recently completed a successful first trial of our system with healthy volunteers. We’ve been developing the bottle and apps for nearly 5 years so it was a great feeling to finally see them being used. For the whole 2 weeks we were glued to the monitoring screens watching the live dispense data come in!
Throughout development we placed an emphasis on high patient acceptance which I think for an medicine adherence tool is critical. We’ve run human factor studies in the past to bring the patient’s voice into our development so we were really happy to see that all the subjects found the system simply to use and we had a high product satisfaction rate.
As this is a completely new way of accessing medicines we needed to see how it would perform in the real world. Fortunately, the core of how the smart bottle works performed really well; showing that this could one day be a way people dispense medicines. There were some technical defects but we’ve been able to identify the causes and have a fix in place which is now being tested in 2 upcoming trials.
Over the next 12 months the target is to win our first commercial trial. The intention being that our system proves valuable information to the sponsor’s clinical trials by improving their patient adherence and engagement data. It’ll be a fantastic achievement for the team when this is used in a real trial helping people taking medicines.
What problems and challenges are there to overcome?
The main challenge we face as a very novel technology and early stage start-up is how slow large pharmaceutical companies can be in accepting digital change. This is somewhat true for the NHS but is starting to improve. The reasons are understandable and it has pushed us to produce a better quality product but it’s a long process.
Aside from that, our three key challenge areas we focus on are patient acceptance, technical robustness and meeting regulatory requirements.
What do you think is the biggest technology challenge?
Our biggest technical challenge is ensuring we balance the intended outcomes of the technology solutions in the system with the effect they may have on patient acceptance. In medicine adherence, the patient is already having difficulties and it’s not because they don’t have a technical or digital solution for them to use. The problems are complex and human. No matter how smart or interesting a new technology is, if it doesn’t support the patient then it probably won’t be an effective solution. We saw in our trial that patient acceptance was negatively affected when the system had a problem which made its use a bit more difficult or time consuming. Therefore, we need to ensure the highest level of robustness whilst also making sure the UI & UX are easy and initiative for many different types of users. This comes with public involvement studies and trials like we’ve just run.
What advice would you give to other organisations or professionals?
If I was speaking to early stage start-ups like ourselves I would say involve patients as soon as possible. Even before you’ve built anything. If you’re using an agile methodology then it’s easy to bring patients in to evaluate the design at multiple stages.
The next thing would be to look to partners to collaborate. Health care doesn’t need another vertical silo of data sat working alone. There are plenty of incredible digital health companies and by sharing data you also increase the value of your own business whilst getting better answers to health problems.
What is next in your space?
I think virtual clinical trials should become more mainstream. We need to validate and ensure that digital health tools are safe and that data is treated correctly but once frameworks and new regulation is in place I think digital platforms and tools will transform the accessibility to clinical research. Widening the net of who can provide clinical data will greatly improve the analysis of conditions and treatments and hopefully this will lead to more prevention of diseases.
What are you working on at the moment?
We took the results and feedback from our first trial and we’ve developed an updated version of our system to be trialled in a hospital in the Netherlands next month and with the NHS in Manchester in August.
In addition to the trials we’re implementing new features to make the medicine reminder system more intelligent based on the patient’s previous engagement data with their bottle. This was a major point we took from subject interviews in the last trial. We hope to test this in the NHS trial. We’re also looking into gamification which complements our bottle really well.
