Five years from now, when a patient visits a clinic complaining of migraines, multiple sclerosis, obesity, or just about any condition you can imagine, the doctor will suggest a new kind of treatment plan that includes both pharmaceutical-based medications and prescription digital therapeutics. Accessed through the patient’s smartphone, the digital therapeutics will deliver personalized, evidence-based interventions to treat the patient’s symptoms through daily lessons and game-like interfaces guided by sophisticated algorithms. Medication and digital therapeutics work together to deliver the best outcomes, an approach established by extensive evidence and recommended by clinical guidelines.
This future is unlikely, but inevitable: the only questions are when and who will lead the way in digital therapeutics becoming the standard of care.
I first recognized the potential of software in treating disease when I coined the term “digital therapeutics” back in 2012. Now, I believe the industry is at a tipping point, ready for widespread adoption of prescription digital therapeutics. Driving forces are the emergence of a new generation of technologies developed with the rigors of traditional medicine, the need for new business models in an increasingly burdened healthcare system, and the rapidly growing power and availability of AI.
Prescription digital therapeutics offer broad access to the latest behavioral, cognitive and skill-based interventions, democratizing treatments traditionally limited to patients with access to specialists and academic centers. More advanced applications also offer neuromodulatory mechanisms of action to safely target specific neural pathways inaccessible to biopharmaceuticals. Their continued use retrains the brain to establish new connections, delivering lasting results and delivering therapeutic benefits while minimizing side effects.
What is needed are leaders who will step up and seize this opportunity to shape the patient journey of the future – and those leaders need to come from the pharma industry, not the tech industry.
The pharmaceutical industry is uniquely equipped to deploy these new therapies at scale and effectively in a way that is best for patients, and prescription digital therapeutics are a key part of the future of AI in pharmaceuticals – how the industry will win the race to bring AI to patient care.
The move to prescription digital therapeutics requires players who put evidence first, have strong commercial and regulatory arms, and the deep expertise to shift the standard of care to embrace new therapies. Pharma checks all the boxes. With proven prescription digital products backed by compelling evidence in hand or in development, pharma will have no trouble getting payers, policymakers, and prescribers on board. They have done so before when new therapeutic categories emerged, such as biologics in the 1980s, immunotherapy and CAR-T in the past decade, or gene therapy today. Pharma must stop viewing prescription digital therapeutics as a digital health project, an area where they have historically struggled to succeed. Instead, they must embrace it as a new therapeutic program in which pharma is undoubtedly an expert.
Efforts to use AI to make operations more effective and efficient are happening everywhere. And that’s a good thing. Companies are trying to apply AI and machine learning to drug discovery, manufacturing operations, commercialization campaigns, and clinical trials. But these efforts are about efficiency, not about products. Efficiency is a bare minimum. Products are the bet that will drive future growth.
So pharma companies might be asking themselves, “What’s our killer idea? What’s the equivalent of ChatGPT?” The answer is prescription digital therapeutics.
These are key to achieving all that the pharma industry wants to achieve with digital, for three reasons:
First, prescriptive digital therapeutics deliver AI-driven outcomes to the end user – the patient. Prescriptive digital therapeutics are highly adaptive and personalized for each user, aligning with pharma’s goal of putting the patient at the center of care. By securely collecting data, prescriptive digital therapeutics use AI and machine learning to not only engage patients, but also modify and individualize treatment, resulting in truly personalized care and better outcomes.
Second, AI-powered digital biomarkers, captured by prescription digital therapeutics via increasingly sophisticated sensors on patients’ smartphones, provide insights that can be used to quantify the effectiveness of drugs and treatments. Digital biomarkers enable clinicians to better understand patients’ disease experiences to facilitate personalized support, and developers can use the information and predictive power they provide to transform how care is delivered.
Finally, prescription digital therapeutics drive the longitudinal, high-quality data collection that is essential for AI to benefit pharma companies. Leveraging prescription digital therapeutics to gain insights into real-world data can help pharma companies inform portfolio planning and enable the development of more effective treatments. Without prescription digital therapeutics to drive direct patient relationships, the data pharma companies have access to will always be indirect and incomplete. Real-time, high-fidelity insights are essential to healthcare’s value-based future.
If the pharmaceutical industry does not act now, this moment will be missed by the industry.
In June, Apple announced that its iOS 17 update for iPhones would include new mental health and vision companion apps. Amazon and Google are also moving into this space, with Amazon through its acquisitions of RxPass, PillPack, and One Medical, and Google extending its Vertex AI suite of tools into healthcare, including a recently announced partnership with Mayo Clinic. Big Tech’s growing interest in AI-based healthcare solutions signals that the software ecosystem that will define the future of healthcare is now taking shape. If pharma misses the opportunity to take the lead in introducing prescription digital therapeutics into clinical care, they risk becoming just another cog in Big Tech’s future data-driven patient journey.
In that future, patients will miss out on the clinical rigor that pharmaceutical companies bring to the table. Pharmaceutical companies will also suffer. The industry cannot thrive by waiting for the next blockbuster; it’s an unsustainable market strategy as payment shifts to a value-based, outcomes-driven approach. The AI-enabled pharmaceutical company of the future is a holistic patient care provider focused on outcomes, not just prescriptions.
Prescription digital therapeutics will unlock that potential and closely align pharma capabilities, patient interests, and future economic needs. Companies that continue to think of digital therapeutics as a “nice to have,” a commercial add-on, or a companion app will be left behind. A pharma company without prescription digital therapeutics is one without a truly AI-enabled future.
Pharma companies that wait for others to achieve the first commercial success in this space will likely miss out. Big tech companies are positioned to enter the fray, which could lead to a proliferation of digital solutions that lack the clinical rigor of pharmaceuticals. Health systems, electronic health record providers, and digital health companies that use the big tech companies’ expanding portfolios of AI tools will become the primary owners of AI in patient care. In other words, if the big tech companies remain the only players in this race, pharma companies may never realize the AI-powered benefits that prescription digital therapeutics can bring. And tomorrow’s patient care will increasingly be in the hands of algorithms that pharma companies did not create or have insights into.
Prescription digital therapeutics work. Pharma companies need only invest in these as meaningful new pipeline assets to ensure success through strong relationships with providers and disease area experts, expertise with payers, and commercial infrastructure. Pharma companies doing the heavy lifting now can get a head start on AI-enabling their products and pipelines. Keeping up in the software world will not be easy. Act now or you will be left behind.
David Benshoof Klein is CEO and co-founder of Click Therapeutics. He is also a visiting professor at the Columbia University Biotechnology Program, the Stern School of Business at New York University and Columbia Business School, and served as a Managing Director at Opus Point Partners, a senior consultant to Pfizer, and a strategic advisor to several public and private life sciences companies.
