Top 20 team in the 2019 High School Utah Entrepreneur Challenge at the University of Utah. https://lassonde.utah.edu/hsuec

1. Little Healthcare
Supporting families to improve children’s drug adherence.

2. Problem
As the CDC notes, in the US up to one in 5 medications are never filled, and approximately 50% of those are taken
incorrectly, often in regard to timing. This issue of non-adherence has grown to $100-300 billion dollars in
healthcare costs annually, primarily because of chronic diseases. However, few products are commercially used
and adopted across the US, and of these almost none are targeted towards pediatric populations, whose needs
and difficulties are fundamentally different than the adult population. Families introduce a dynamic that
complicates the issue of who is responsible for ensuring medication is taken, and, especially in younger children,
their developmental state presents unique issues in terms of motivation.
Furthermore, non-adherence has significant impacts even in children. Medically speaking, non-adherence is highly
correlated with recurrences of disease, and financially such recurrences result in costly re-admissions. In addition,
adherence to medication in children is surprisingly low, only 50-88% depending on condition. Thus, there is a
need for a device or system that targets this population to provide effective increases in drug adherence rates.

3. Solution
In order to effectively improve pediatric drug adherence, we propose a novel medical app targeted at families with
children. A host of factors are involved in non-adherence, including the difficulty of a particular regimen,
resistance from the child, the belief in the need for or effectiveness of the treatment, affordability, and relationship
with healthcare professionals (HCPs). Some of these, such as cost, are systemic to the medical industry. However,
we are able to combat others through our app. Our app provides reminders in addition to a central and user-
friendly place to see medication information. Furthermore, it is the first app of its kind to provide a specific
interface for children, which allows them to self-report to engage in their medical care.
A highly important aspect of our app is the gamification and reward strategy. So that the child better remembers
and takes their medication, we use a variety of rewards including virtual in-game rewards and physical rewards set
up with the parent. Also, the child must report if they've taken their medication in order to play the game,
providing a view of adherence that can be medically useful to the parent or to their physician.

4. Market
Our product targets users are families with children (or a child) aged 6-12 years old with a chronic medical
condition. While designing the app we are focusing on those children with epilepsy and acute asthma, as these
are conditions where adherence can be as low as 40 or 50%, and daily oral medication is often required. There are
over a million children in the US with these conditions; furthermore, our app is easily expanded to children with
other conditions.
It is not feasible to derive a revenue source straight from the consumers, so we identify three possible partners:
insurance companies, who want to low the number of re-admissions due to non-adherence; pharmaceutical
companies (e.g. Merck) who wish to increase drug sales due to more refills corresponding due to adherence; and
pharmacy companies (e.g. CVS) who likewise would like to increase drug sales. For any company that we partner
with, we plan to charge a per user/per month charge, and utilize a software as a service model, wherein the
partner pays us to maintain the software for the customers, which ensures long term revenue. Our competition is
minimal: there exist no other commercial apps targeted at improving children's drug adherence.

5. Prototype