Partners Connected Health And UCB Announce Collaboration To Develop Innovative Healthcare Solutions To Better Support People Living With Epilepsy

BOSTON, Oct. 11, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Partners Connected Health and UCB today announced an exciting and innovative collaboration to explore and develop novel digital health solutions to further improve the lives of people living with epilepsy.

The collaboration will focus on addressing unmet needs currently faced by some of the three million Americans living with epilepsy. The ultimate goal is to provide better connectivity between patients, healthcare providers, and payors, delivering improved experiences and better treatment outcomes.

"Addressing patients' unmet needs is an important opportunity to create insightful, patient-focused and evidence-based digital health solutions to help people with epilepsy live healthier lives," said Kamal Jethwani, MD, MPH, Senior Director, Innovation, Partners Connected Health. "This collaboration combines UCB's world-class epilepsy expertise with the unique focus and experience of our User-Centered Design team, as well as direct access to our providers, patients and caregivers within the Partners HealthCare network. We are confident we can build compelling and effective new care-based solutions, which could improve the standard of care in epilepsy."

This project will leverage UCB's experience in epilepsy and extensive ethnographic research, which focused on understanding the lived experiences of people with epilepsy and their families, to develop solutions to improve outcomes and quality of life.  

The project team will work to improve four key areas identified within UCB's research, which can present challenges for people with epilepsy:

• Life in between: Living with epilepsy encompasses a life of actively waiting, a life less lived.
• Complexity of control: Control for people living with epilepsy is the power to choose, not the medical definition of seizure control.
• Care is a family affair: Acknowledgement and understanding about the critical role family members and caregivers can play, along with patients and healthcare professionals, in the management of epilepsy.
• Welcome to the system: Tackling the complexity faced by patients when accessing healthcare, reducing information overload and improving healthcare system navigation.

This exciting initiative provides a unique opportunity to develop highly tailored solutions within a single healthcare system, while incorporating patient and caregiver feedback. This program will measure how novel models of care can deliver improvements such as reducing hospital readmissions for individuals diagnosed with epilepsy, better treatment outcomes, and improved patient satisfaction.

"Discovering, validating, and improving access to new and innovative solutions to support people living with epilepsy has been a core UCB mission over the last decade. We are committed to delivering value to people with epilepsy and to the people and services who support them," explained Mike Davis, Head of US Neurology Patient Value Unit, UCB. "By addressing real world patient challenges and embracing the lived experiences of people with epilepsy, we hope this collaboration will enhance patient care, ultimately delivering value to people living with epilepsy."

Partners Connected Health
Partners Connected Health, at Partners HealthCare, is leveraging information technology ? mobile phones, tablets, wearables, sensors and remote health monitoring tools ? to deliver quality patient care outside of traditional medical settings. Partners Connected Health programs are also helping providers and patients better manage chronic conditions, maintain health and wellness and improve adherence, engagement and clinical outcomes. The Connected Health team creates and deploys mobile technologies in a number of patient populations and care settings, and is conducting innovative research studies to test the effectiveness of mobile health technologies in various clinical applications, including medication adherence, care coordination, chronic disease management, prevention and wellness. Partners HealthCare, an integrated health system founded by Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of the nation's leading biomedical research organizations and a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. 

UCB
At UCB, everything we do starts with a simple question: "How will this make a difference to the lives of people living with severe diseases?" We have a passionate, long-term commitment to discovering and developing innovative medicines that transform the lives of people living with severe diseases. We do that by connecting with patients and their families around the world living with the physical and social burdens of severe disease. Those connections offer new perspectives, drive innovation, and offer the hope of a new generation of therapies that are helping to transform lives.

With a team of approximately 7,500 employees and operations in more than 40 countries, we are a global biopharmaceutical company investing more than a quarter of our revenue in cutting-edge scientific research to meet unmet patient needs. Global headquarters are in Brussels, Belgium, with U.S. headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. Additional U.S. UCB sites include global clinical development at our Research Triangle Park, North Carolina campus (UCB Biosciences, Inc.), and research supporting UCB's pipeline in Cambridge, Massachusetts (UCB Research, Inc.).

CONTACTS:

For Partners Connected Health                                 
Gina Cella                                                                  
T: 857-239-9198                                                        
Email: [email protected]                                  

For UCB, Inc.
Allyson Funk
T: 770-970-8338
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Partners Connected Health