Digital health medication management company Mango Health has announced a partnership with EnvoyHealth, the pharma services division of Diplomat, the US’ largest independent specialty pharmacy.
Mango Health will create a custom white-label version of its app, which Envoy will deliver to patients to complement its traditional hub services.
Why it matters
This is one of the first partnerships of its kind, and could represent a new model for digital engagement in specialty pharma.
“We have been in this space for almost 10 years and really in the last year we’ve taken our strategy on the path that is representative of the Mango partnership, in that we believe … that manufacturers need to engage their patients in a much improved way," Derek Cothran, SVP of client strategy and development at EnvoyHealth, told MobiHealthNews. "They really do deserve to own a relationship with the patient, because they’re bringing lifesaving technologies to them. ... They just need someone to connect them in a fluid, user-friendly manner. And the technology that Mango presents, as well as the services that Envoy Health has been providing and will continue to provide for manufacturers, is a great fit.”
The partnership will focus on high-needs patients taking expensive specialty drugs.
“We’re talking about patients who are dealing with extremely difficult conditions like cancer, multiple sclerosis, cystic fibrosis, Crohn’s disease. Life-altering conditions,” Mango Health CEO Yadin Shemmer told MobiHealthNews. “These patients need help and support every single day to manage their condition and stay on track. We think the status quo of calling these patients every few weeks or every few months isn’t good enough for patients and it isn’t good enough to deliver outcomes for the health system.”
While the focus of the partnership is improving the patient experience, Shemmer and Cothran said a lot of value will also reside in the data created by the app.
“Beyond just linking up the clinical teams with the technology on the front end, we think there’s a very interesting data play here, which is, if you look at the data that exists today in clinical systems, like in the [EHRs] or in claims data, that data doesn’t paint a full picture of the patient journey,” Shemmer said. “And one of the things that we’re so excited about in our partnership is that, by virtue of the fact that we touch patients every single day, we can illuminate parts of the patient journey that have been hard to see up until now.”
“The platform does give us real-world insights, and the vision is perhaps real-world evidence into how patients experience the product, experience the service,” Cothran added. “And that data could be of use to not only help manufacturers better support patients, but they could take it to payers, they could take it to how they develop products, how they focus their messaging, all the while making sure that the right patient is getting the right drug.”
What’s the trend
Mango Health started out in the direct-to-consumer world, but it has shifted its focus to the enterprise, working with both payers and pharma companies.
“We’re focused really on two markets," Shemmer said. "One is the payer market where we have a large partnership with ExpressScripts, and two is with manufacturers. And we think the interests of patient, physician, payer, manufacturer come together in the case of the partnership that we just announced with Envoy, where if a patient gets access to the meds that have been prescribed and they stay on those meds, everybody does better and everybody’s interests align.”
As for Diplomat, the company has had at least one high profile digital health partner before. It created one of the first round of watch faces for Fitbit’s smartphone line, focused on helping cancer patients manage their medications and prescriptions with reminders.
