PharmaSecure Opens Office in NYC to Study Patient Behavior in Emerging Markets The Economic Times Business News.htm

New York, NY (PRWEB) August 09, 2013

In 2007, Nathan Sigworth went to India, fresh out of Dartmouth College, hoping to do something about the problem of fake medicine in that country. After protecting the distribution of 600 million packs of medicine to date, his company PharmaSecure is expanding and opening an office in New York City.

The office will focus on using the data generated by patients registering those uniquely identified packs to improve health outcomes in India and other emerging markets. Their first project will be fighting the spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB) in India. Projects based in the rest of the world, including the U.S.A., are also in the pipeline.

India has 20 percent of the worlds TB patients, and 50-80 percent of them seek treatment from private doctors, who often prescribe incorrect dosages and combinations of TB drugs, says Garrett Simpson, a member of the New York-based team. In such an environment, multiple drug-resistant TB is increasing at an alarming rate.

The past couple of years weve focused on establishing our technology platform that lets consumers check their medicines are real by texting us the unique alphanumeric code we print on the package, says Sigworth, the CEO and cofounder. Now the sheer volume of data we generate means were starting to get a glance into aggregated patient behavior. Were going to learn what factors prevent patients from completing their antibiotics courses, and see if we can increase adherence through various mobile phone-based interventions. We believe that while doing this, we can simultaneously educate doctors, so that they are prescribing the right drugs in the right amounts in the first place.

Sigworth says the decision to set up this office in New York was strategic. Being in New York allows us to collaborate more closely with our customers and partners as we build our team with great talent in healthcare and data analysis, Sigworth says.