Diabetes is a serious and painful disease, and its rapidly increasing prevalence is a significant cause for concern. In 1985, an estimated 30 million people worldwide suffered from diabetes; in the year 2000, the figure had risen to over 150 million. By 2025, the figure is expected to rise to 380 million. In many cases (all type I patients and part of type II ones), treatment is based on creating exogenous insulin in-taking routines aiming at keeping blood glucose levels within the normal range; the great challenge comes from the adherence to the treatment. In case treatment fails or the compliance is not optimal, there is a high risk of complications related to vascular and nerve affection.
In spite of the risks, keeping 24h proper track of their disease is not an easy task for diabetics. Between other, it is really hard to keep consciousness of a routine task to be performed every 2-3 hours along lifetime, and, as in any other chronic illnesses, very often the patient may forget to take insulin. This also becomes of great importance for people in charge of diabetics when very young or very old to keep full control of their disease, and for which miss-treatment can be more dangerous.
According to the Health and Food Safety department of the EC, diabetes causes very high direct costs in national health systems, ranging between 6.4 % (Sweden) and 13.2 % (Portugal) of all health expenditure, due to the hospitalization costs related to complications. Indirect costs caused by loss of productivity (disability, sick leave, retirement and premature death) are around five times bigger than direct costs. Improving diabetics’ adherence to treatment would result in a better quality of life for them, reducing complications, and in an immense economic saving in Europe.
The overall goals of our innovative business project are:
1. To help diabetics worldwide to better adhere to their treatment via insulin pens, preventing hospitalization and serious complications and adjusting to nowadays living styles.
2. Assist their caregivers, especially for children and elder, for whom miss-treatment could have worse consequences and find it harder to stick to the routine of insulin shots.
3. Help medicine practice, since specialists could have access to extensive and accurate data to be able to give better advice and adjustment of therapies.
4. Reducing health costs. There have been a number of analyses of the effect of adherence on costs, which prove an inverse correlation between them (up to $1500 saving per patient with proper adherence).
5. Collaborate with the pharmaceutical sector by early alerting diabetics when they need to buy more insulin, and improving the service offered by current pens.
6. Partner with insurance companies, who up to now have found great difficulties in giving health coverage to diabetics due to uncertain heavy costs. With a system capable of guaranteeing the adherence to treatment, insurance companies can offer advantageous prices and service offer.
It can be therefore concluded that we have completely achieved the objectives set out in the project and the overall goals of our innovative business project are more than ever closer to be achieved, improving diabetics’ quality of life, which has been our leitmotiv from the very beginning.
