Corrected on August 23, 2017
A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the AdhereTech "smart" bottle glows red if a patient has missed a dose. As AdhereTech CEO Josh Stein tells NPR, the bottle does not do that.
With respect to the distribution of AdhereTech's bottles, Stein says they are being widely distributed and marketed, mostly in the U.S., but also in countries on three other continents.
With respect to the cost of AdhereTech's bottles, AdhereTech sells them to pharmacies, hospitals and other health care providers, who also get access to real-time information about the bottles' usage. The costs vary depending on the services that customers purchase, Stein says. The bottles are not sold directly to consumers. As to their cost, an analogy was earlier made to cellphone prices and service contracts. The analogy was meant to refer to the structure of contracts, not to the actual prices of AdHere's products and services, which Stein says are far less than those for cellphones and related services.
The data that Stein cites showing AdhereTech's bottles improved patients' adherence to their medication regimen by an average 24 percent are based, he says, on information from "multiple thousands" of bottle users with different types of diseases or conditions, from different clients.
In the audio version of this report, a large-scale evaluation of different bottle technology is cited. To be clear, that evaluation did not include tests of AdhereTech's bottles.