Newly Launched Epilepsy Care Management Company, Nile, Aims to Create a Predictable Patient Journey

UCB has announced the launch of a new company, Nile, that will offer a digital platform consisting of a patient app and a health care professional portal through which health care professionals and patients can interact. The formation of Nile is based on the observation that the intersections in epilepsy care, whether between patient and treatments, prescribers, monitoring services, and community supports are often limited to single points in time. The patient journey, however, is a continuum with no single intersection or relationship defining a person's quality of life or how they can get their epilepsy under control. The mission of Nile will not be to replace any current aspect of epilepsy care at those single points in time, but rather to bring them all closer together in a collaborative manner. For example, Nile aims to use that collaboration to eliminate some of the long waits between milestones in epilepsy care (eg, seeing an epileptologist, starting or changing treatments, monitoring seizures digitally, consulting neurosurgeons, or considering lifestyle changes).  

Leo Petrossian, PhD, chief executive officer for Nile said, “The problem around epilepsy care management goes far, far beyond individual interactions, in part for the positive reason that there are hundreds of organizations working to improve pieces of the puzzle that is the epilepsy journey. We see the opportunity to accelerate the formation of relationships that occur along the journey of an epilepsy patient, interconnecting them as a way to unify improvement efforts. Among the challenges we hear over and over from patients is the uncertainty and isolation that can come from having epilepsy. Through this platform, we hope to create a predictable flow of patient care that eliminates some, if not all, of that uncertainty.”

Although the initial funding and values of Nile comes from UCB Pharma, Nile is a wholly independent company with overlap only at the governance level to avoid any potential conflicts of interest. 

Nile has been created as a patient-centric organization that is building a foundational platform for epilepsy care management with the expectation that from this, solutions for epilepsy care that will be of value to health care organizations and payors will be developed into for-sale products. At this time, however, the core goal is to follow the UCB mantra of “inspired by patients, driven by science,” and use that to digitally coordinate and unify improvement efforts and develop a predictable flow of care for people with epilepsy.  

Nile is currently testing the platform in usability studies with the Massachusetts General Hospital and Michigan State University Healthcare and expects to make the app and portal widely available later in 2021.