FDA Approves First Digital Pill to Track Medication Adherence

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a pill equipped with a sensor that is capable of digitally tracking whether or not patients are adhering to their medications; this is the first drug in the United States with a digital ingestion tracking system.

According to the FDA, patients do not take their medications as prescribed in about 50% cases. In fact, 20% to 30% of new prescriptions are never even filled at the pharmacy. These actions have consequences; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that non-adherence to prescribed medication results in 30% to 50% of chronic disease treatment failures as well as a staggering 125,000 deaths each year in the United States.

The repercussions of not adhering to prescribed treatment regimens do not stop there—according to experts who recently spoke with the New York Times, noncompliance to medication can result in $100 billion a year, mainly due to patients growing sicker and requiring additional treatment or even hospitalization.

“When patients don’t adhere to the lifestyle or medications that are prescribed for them, there are really substantive consequences that are bad for the patient and very costly,” William Shrank, MD, chief medical officer of the Health Plan Division at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center told the news outlet.

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