STICKING TO THE PLAN
HOW A NEW ZEALAND HI-TECH AWARD WINNER IS BUILDING A GLOBAL DIGITAL HEALTH BUSINESS
In the third instalment of our Hi-tech heroes series, Concentrate talked to Garth Sutherland, Founder & Executive Director at Adherium, winners of the Most Innovative Hardware Product category at the 2017 Hi-Tech Awards.
Developing medical technology products is not for the faint-hearted. You can’t usually escape the need to prove clinical efficacy, a complex and laborious task. Let alone the need to localise products across global markets, build high quality support and find channels to market amongst the behemoth pharmaceutical and medical companies.
Adherium have stuck to their own plan for over 14 years, and are starting to reap the rewards. A ‘medication monitoring system’ called the Smartinhaler™ is the first commercial incarnation of their work, comprising a connected platform of sensors, apps and cloud technology that work with a patient’s asthma inhalers to help them and their care providers to ‘adhere’ to their medical regimen.
Adherium has proven that by enabling people to better ‘adhere’ to their prescribed medicines, they are likely to experience better health outcomes – hence the company name.