Initiating and continuing behaviour change over the long term is at the core of Atlantis' business, with an approach founded in psychology. Their unique approach applies principles of health psychology and uses them to address non-adherence to their prescribed treatment plan by targeting a patient's belief systems.
Hamish Franklin and Michael Whittaker, who both remain involved with the business, established the company 15 years ago in New Zealand.
Atlantis remains a New Zealand- based company with offices here and in Australia, Germany, Spain, Britain and the United States.
Atlantis' programmes work through a combination of psychological modelling to assess medication beliefs and illness perceptions across a patient population. Specialist health psychologists then work to develop highly targeted programmes that engage patients and work to change the way they think around managing their illness. As many as one in three patients never fill their prescriptions for medications and nearly three out of four don't take their medication as directed.
"We're all about behaviour change: putting together programmes which understand why people behave in the way that they do, figuring out what the desired behaviours we would like patients to be exhibiting are and how to close the gap between those two things," Grogan says. "What fundamentally underpins our approach is that if you don't understand the reasons why people behave in the way they do which are often entirely logical, you haven't got much of a chance of changing them."
Research from the University of Auckland's Professor Keith Petrie shows that as many as 60 per cent of women struggle to keep up with their ongoing breast cancer treatments, particularly in the face of a barrage of side effects. According to Atlantis' own research, by the third year of treatment, more than a third of patients have discontinued their treatment entirely.
The results speak for themselves. After 12 months, those enrolled in the programme saw persistence rates for medication use at almost 90 per cent, while those not enrolled had persistence rates under 70 per cent.
Improving adherence to breast cancer treatment regimes is one of more than 80 programmes which Atlantis offers to their patients.
"Lots of medications are prescribed to patients and they are perfectly safe - they have to be because otherwise they wouldn't have got FDA approval or regulatory approvals," Grogan says. "Broadly speaking, these medications have a good safety profile, but in a lot of cases the bottle has a multitude of warnings and a skull and crossbones on it, giving the impression that drugs are inherently dangerous.
"The logic they're applying makes complete sense to them, but it's not producing the health outcomes the drugs are designed to address."
Continuing expansion is heading up the agenda for Atlantis, which now has offices in six countries after setting up shop in the US in early 2012.
"A stake was taken in the business by a private equity company three years ago and that capital coming on board enabled expansion as we opened up offices in Spain, Germany and the United States," Grogan says. "Most of those openings were opportunistic, where we were working with a client in other markets and the client looked to work with us in a new market which we used as a trigger to set up elsewhere - which had huge benefits as we were starting up with a project to work with."
In 2013, Atlantis saw their income from Britain contribute the majority of its earnings for the first time, reflecting the size of the market and a comparative ease of accessing other international markets from the European headquarters in London.
Atlantis provides unique, patient-focused, adherence and self-management programmes for patients and clinicians, which address the issue of treatment non-adherence.
Healthcare costs as a percentage of GDP are growing (unsustainably) globally.
Atlantis is therefore focused on delivering improved patient outcomes, at the same time as improving health outcomes for all stakeholders in the health system, through reducing wastage in medical spending.
