Personalized AI health app VerilyMe is visualizing expanded eye health education in a new partnership with eye health-focused drugmaker Bausch + Lomb.
The companies are joining forces in an initial collaboration focused on dry eye disease, a common but underdiagnosed condition that impacts some 150 million U.S. adults. Through VerilyMe’s digital platform, the partners offer expanded information about dry eye disease risk factors, symptoms and treatment options with new content that launched on the app in June.
Bausch + Lomb chose Verily as its partner on the digital front to continue its mission of helping patients better understand eye health, seeing evolving technology and AI capabilities as “critical” for patients in making health choices, Bausch + Lomb’s SVP and general manager, North America Pharmaceuticals Yolande Barnard explained in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
VerilyMe, meanwhile, is a free digital wellness app rooted in preventative healthcare strategies. The app launched last October and emerged from beta mode in February, and works by offering access to speedy, accurate health insights by connecting users to licensed clinicians who can provide secure health recommendations based on their medical records.
On Verily’s side, “we couldn’t think of a better partner” from the pharmaceutical industry to help drive forward eye care information that can “guide people to have a better life,” Verily’s chief physician executive Vindell Washington, M.D. added.
Although dry eye disease is prevalent, it’s a “very complex” disease with a significant “need for information,” Barnard said, pointing to a dry eye disease survey that found that 78% of patients desire greater educational resources.
Dry eye disease is just the starting point for the collaboration between VerilyMe and Bausch + Lomb. Vision problems is one in which patients “really suffer” without appropriate care, Barnard explained. However, eye conditions can often be brushed off as a natural offshoot of aging or as something that may not require as much immediate attention.
“Think about the impact of patients’ quality of life when we are suffering through eye conditions,” Barnard said. “This is certainly something that motivates us to make a difference.”
To her point, Bausch + Lomb’s latest State of Dry Eye survey found that one in five dry eye sufferers reported that the symptoms impact their confidence (22%) and emotional wellbeing (20%), as well as increasing stress and anxiety levels. However, 59% marked improved emotional wellbeing upon using a prescription treatment.
With VerilyMe, Bausch + Lomb can not only help improve eye health but quality of life for patients who may be suffering from vision concerns and eye diseases.
“It closes these gaps. It helps a patient easily navigate ‘hey, what is going on with me? What could this be?’” Barnard said of the VerilyMe collaboration.
Verily has embarked on similar collaborations in the past surrounding medical devices and other specific disease types, but its work with Bausch + Lomb is unique in that it can help provide more personalized information and focus specifically on distributing information to a curated group of people “most in need” of specific health information, Washington said.
For Bausch + Lomb, meanwhile, the partnership is the company’s first large collab on a digital platform.
“There is a huge amount of information out there, but for a patient to truly understand what is accurate, what is specific – this is where it becomes quite challenging,” Barnard explained. “So this is a one stop shop where they know that this is accurate, personalized information.”
At the intersection of health and AI, Verily keeps patient safety top of mind, including a “series of guardrails” and being mindful of keeping up standards that wouldn’t present “unsafe environments.”
“Although we plan to advance our AI more and more in the future, we’re going to advance it under this umbrella of respect for patients, patient safety and efficacy,” Washington said.
Barnard and Bausch + Lomb agree: “there is no compromise” around patient safety, she emphasized.
For Verily, the partnership solidifies a new chapter for the company after splitting off from Alphabet in March, transitioning to its own corporation more than ten years after its 2015 inception as a moonshot of Google X. Meanwhile, Bausch + Lomb is embarking on the new technology-driven path as an expansion of its dry eye expertise, with leading eye drop Miebo and its other dry eye products picking up a total haul of $1.1 billion last year.