Oleocare, a new platform from Oleo, which provides an array of medicinal cannabis products to the Irish market, allows patients to monitor their treatment in real time.
Irish attitudes towards cannabis continue to evolve. A poll conducted in 2019 by Red C on behalf of The Journal.ie found that 93 percent of respondents favoured the availability of medicinal cannabis for patients who need it, while almost 40 percent expressed support for full legalization.
It makes sense that people are finally beginning to understand how cannabis has been demonized and misrepresented; its medical benefits are clear. Cannabis and cannabis-based medicines have been shown to relieve pain, reduce inflammation, prevent seizures, and reduce nausea, among myriad other uses.
Just last month, a study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine found that cannabis may help people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, peripheral neuropathy, and multiple sclerosis.
In recent years, the establishment of the Medical Cannabis Access Programme (MCAP) has been a major step forward for Irish patients. The MCAP allows patients to access cannabis for treating conditions such as refractory epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, intractable nausea, and vomiting associated with chemotherapy. It was launched on a pilot basis for five years in 2019.
Another step forward
In 2023, Ireland is seeing yet another progression on the medicinal cannabis front: patients benefitting from the MCAP can now monitor their symptom relief and well-being with an easy-to-use app.
OleoCare allows patients currently accessing cannabis under the MCAP to document all their symptoms and dosages, as well as any side effects resulting from their medication.
Once the patient has filled in all the relevant details, their doctor can look at how they’re responding to treatment in real time. It’s that straightforward.
“Our new platform makes things easier than ever for doctors and their patients who are accessing cannabis-based medicines under the MCAP,” explained Richard Creagh, co-founder of Oleo, which was established in 2019 with the goal of providing cannabis-based products to Irish patients and their doctors.
In 2021, Oleo began offering cannabis-based products for the treatment of chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting, which were added to Schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2021. These days, Oleo also offers a Panacea Inhaler, so patients can vaporize their medicine and inhale it. Both products can be reimbursed through the drug payment scheme.
The OleoCare platform is Oleo’s latest innovation.
“The OleoCare platform even includes a doctor-facing web-based Portal and a patient-facing mobile application,” says Creagh. “In practical terms, this means we can reduce risk for patients and give their healthcare provider access to invaluable data. They can even see trends in things like dosages, side-effects, and symptoms on a convenient, user-friendly dashboard.”
Not everyone in Ireland is aware of the benefits of medicinal cannabis – Oleo has made it their mission to let clinicians and their patients know.
Making your job easier
With OleoCare, it’s easy for clinicians to look after patients remotely, as they have access to real-time patient information. This makes prescribing safer and more reliable, and has the added benefit of reducing hospital footfall, says Creagh. “Our platform helps with clinical research too,” he says, “because all the data we collect is streamlined and analyzed.” There are further plans for the platform, too.
OleoCare will soon integrate with other health apps to provide better insight into overall quality of life measures such as changes in sleep patterns, activity, medication plans, and side effects.
Creagh says that all of this is offered with one thing in mind: empowering patients and their doctors and leading to higher-quality clinical encounters.
“We have also been working with doctors, patients and researchers to find out exactly what kind of user data would be useful and how it should be best displayed,” says Creagh.
“It was so important to us that we had the input of clinicians when we were developing this platform.
We’ve also taken a lot of steps to make sure that the data of every single patient is completely secure on all our servers, so they don’t have to worry about anyone other than their doctor seeing their data.”
