Tackling Emotional Barriers to Medication Adherence with Michael Oleksiw Pleio

Michael Oleksiw is the CEO of Pleio, a company focused on addressing the emotional barriers to patient engagement and medication adherence that medical professionals often overlook. Emotional barriers like loneliness, fear, and stigma can impact patients of all ages and backgrounds when they are facing a health challenge. Pleio uses technology and a peer-to-patient model to personalize interactions with empathetic humans, provide ongoing patient support, track emotional patterns, and bring pharmacists in to work with patients taking multiple medications or with chronic conditions.  

Michael explains, "Our focus on the emotional barriers is meant to complement what’s out there today. The bulk of the focus when it comes to engaging patients and supporting patients is really on supporting the transaction, ensuring that a patient can get their medication, that they can get it cost-effectively, that they can pick it up, that it gets into their hands. But once they’re at home, everything gets real really fast and they’re faced with a variety of emotions such as loneliness, stigma, fear, etc. The American Medical Association recognizes that five of the eight major barriers to adherence are emotional, as I mentioned. So we try to stay in that swim lane and connect with the patient to target those barriers as a complement to all the stuff already being done out there."

"You can say that we break White Coat syndrome in that we get the patient to focus on what’s important to them. Many times, patients don’t know or are intimidated by their healthcare professionals and don’t know how to engage in conversation. So one of the things we do is instill confidence so they can engage in fruitful conversations with their pharmacists and the like. So, the best way to think of it is we’re an extension of the pharmacy. We bring that trust and the care in the pharmacy into the home with what we call a peer-to-patient model where patients engage in conversation with people just like them to complement the baseline they received at the pharmacy."

"Technology helps us be more efficient in terms of the patients we target, the words we choose, and the times we call. So, our view on technology is we use technology to support human interaction and make it better, optimize it, and make it more efficient, but not replace it. So, we don’t use technology to pretend to be human. Humans do a good job at that. I think humans could own being human. Technology is meant to support the human to be more efficient, make things more personalized, and take that step back to see the big picture and address trends over time."

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