Millions of people use MyTherapy to manage their medications, with users engaging with the app around six times per day on average. Between them, MyTherapy users have scheduled over 13 million reminders, resulting in over 1.3 billion confirmed intakes. Keep reading to check out a few insights we found when looking at some of the data collected within MyTherapy and how pharma can benefit from a platform that is proven to engage patients.

MyTherapy Users Have an Average of 2.1 Medications Scheduled

People use MyTherapy to manage everything from acute illnesses to chronic diseases. While many people use the app to manage a single medication (around 75% of users), thousands of users have six or more different medication reminders scheduled. The average number of medications per user falls at roughly 2.1.

Not surprisingly, those living with chronic diseases tend to have the most reminders scheduled. Users with asthma medications scheduled have an average of 2.6 reminders. For those taking multiple sclerosis (MS) drugs, the number increases to 3.9, while users taking psoriasis medications have 6.7 reminders scheduled. You can read more about these examples here:

• Engaging People Living with MS: Why We Are Designing for ‘Users’, Not ‘Patients’
• Why Pharma’s Digital Patient Support for Psoriasis Often Fails to Engage Users
• Asthma Patient Support: Understanding Asthma Patients with Real-World Data

Users Confirms 3.5 Items Per Day

Reminders in MyTherapy can be set up in a variety of different ways to suit users’ needs. Users can create items to be recorded spontaneously when needed or schedule reminders when following a fixed regimen.

‘Every day’ is by far the most common frequency used, accounting for roughly 80% of scheduled reminders. The next most common is ‘Every X hours,’ ahead of ‘Given days,’ ‘Every X days,’ and ‘Cycle’ (e.g. 21 days on, 7 days off).

Because ‘Every x hours’ is the second most common frequency used for reminders, many people are taking a single medication multiple times per day. Additionally, users can record intakes spontaneously without reminders. As a result, the average number of intakes falls at roughly 3.5 per day.

Most Schedulers Have No End Date

When scheduling a medication reminder, users have the option of selecting whether or not they want to choose an end date. If an end date is chosen, it can be created as a relative end date (e.g., two weeks from today) or as an absolute end date. Less than one-fifth of scheduled reminders are created with an end date, with 11.5% having a relative end date and 7% having an absolute end date. The remaining 81.5% of scheduled reminders are perpetual.

Usage Peaks in the Morning

We have discussed in a previous blog post how MyTherapy’s backend needs to cope with hourly spikes, as most people schedule reminders on the hour.

This spike is particularly noticeable in the morning, with 6 am and 7 am being by far the most common times for people to schedule their reminders. In 2022, we have already seen nearly 400,000 confirmed intakes recorded at 7 am, more than the total for the entire of 2021.

A smaller spike can be observed over lunchtime and a slightly bigger spike between 5 pm and 7 pm. Unsurprisingly, the hours of 1 am to 4 am are the least popular times for intakes to be confirmed; nonetheless, over 100,000 intakes have been confirmed at 2 am so far in 2022.

Pharma: Building on MyTherapy to Deliver Global Patient Support

These insights were uncovered by our data science team looking into the huge quantity of information generated by MyTherapy users over the last 8 years. The data is completely anonymous and cannot be used to identify any individual user; however, we are able to use it to understand how people use MyTherapy. In this instance, the data science team created a dashboard that included details of the different types of schedulers people use, different intake patterns, how many scheduled reminders have end dates, and many other charts and graphs. The data can be filtered by aspects such as platform (iOS or Android), language, and region.

Digging into this data doesn’t just uncover interesting tidbits, it reveals information about users living with certain diseases, taking specific medications, and living in different countries.

This information helps us work together with our pharma partners to deliver effective and engaging digital patient support on our MyTherapy platform. In doing so, patients can benefit from the broad range of features MyTherapy has to offer, along with tailored drug- and disease-specific support. If you want to speak to us about the data we collect with MyTherapy and how you can provide leading patient support to your patients, don’t hesitate to get in touch.