One of Britain’s leading high street pharmacy chains is to offer customers “intelligent medicines” that will allow them to better follow doctors’ orders and monitor their health.

Lloydspharmacy has signed a deal with Proteus Biomedical, a Californian company, to sell pills containing edible microchips that communicate with a disposable monitoring patch attached to a patient’s shoulder, in a service costing about £50 a month.

The patch, which will receive signals from the swallowed microchip and monitor other bodily functions including sleep patterns, heart rate and posture, will transmit the information to mobile phones and computers owned by the patient or their carers.

The action marks the latest effort by healthcare providers to boost compliance with medical regimes and improve outcomes for chronic conditions such as heart problems and diabetes.

However, it could also raise concerns over privacy and raises the prospect for greater two-tiered provision of healthcare, with the package – called Helius – being paid for by the consumer rather than the NHS.

The initial package, set to be launched in September, will include a red placebo sugar pill containing a safe and soluble microchip developed by Proteus that patients swallow alongside their existing medicines; an adhesive patch to be changed once a week; and data support.

Currently, many patients are poorly treated for their diseases, in part because they fail to take their medicines as prescribed.

Some estimates suggest half of patients do not take their medicines correctly, causing unnecessary medical complications and waste of prescribed but unused drugs which costs the NHS alone nearly £400m a year.

Drug companies and health providers are increasingly trying to raise patient compliance levels through programmes including telephone counselling, nursing advice and patient support groups, but they are also starting to experiment with technological approaches.

Andrew Thompson, chief executive of Proteus, said: “Retail is no longer about putting a product on a shelf and hoping someone will buy it. It’s about customers shifting from purchasing products to services.”

Neither he nor Lloydspharmacy would disclose the commercial terms of the deal, but they said it would involve a sharing of costs and profits and was exclusive for the coming three years.

Steve Gray, Lloydspharmacy’s healthcare services director, said: “Our drive is to improve health and outcomes.”

While patients will initially pay for the package, he said several NHS units had expressed interest in using the service, notably for monitoring complex and costly treatments such as organ transplant rejection therapies.

Proteus has already signed a partnership with Novartis, the Swiss drug company, to place edible microchips onto its blood pressure drug Diovan, and has launched studies in the US and the UK for its application in diabetes, organ transplants, mental health and tuberculosis.

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