Less than a month after announcing its partnership with Novartis, Qualcomm is adding another big pharmaceutical company to its list of 2net partners: Roche, who will use Qualcomm Life's 2net platform to capture patient data from connected devices, starting with anti-coagulation meters.
“This collaboration marks a significant milestone for Roche as we launch a new generation of point-of-care solutions that enable healthcare professionals to better keep in touch remotely with patients, whenever and wherever they are,” Jeremy Moss, senior vice president of Point of Care at Roche Professional Diagnostics said in a statement. “By combining Qualcomm Life’s leadership in powering connected health solutions with our point-of-care expertise, we are taking an important step forward to realize our connected care strategy; ultimately enabling physicians to improve the overall quality of life for patients.”
In addition to its pharmaceutical business, Roche's Point of Care product suite includes back-end testing systems for anticoagulants, blood glucose, blood gas and electrolytes, and urinalysis. The partnership will initially focus on anti-coagulation meters but could expand into these other areas as well.
"Connected chronic care management and remote management solutions can enhance patient care, enabling providers to asynchronously communicate with their patients in a high-tech, high-touch model minimizing risk of errors in result reporting," the companies wrote in a joint release. "While many remote patient monitoring and management solutions today require patients to communicate results to their healthcare professionals in manual, time-consuming and non-digitized channels, Qualcomm Life and Roche are working together to deliver an improved process for sharing health information between health care providers and their patients."
Roche hasn't worked with Qualcomm before, but it has used partnerships to make some of its products connect to patients' smartphones. It has worked with both Glooko and Glucose Buddy-maker Mylestone Health to make its Accu-check glucometers connect to apps, and another Accu-check product was one of the first to attain Continua certification.
Qualcomm’s 2net is a cloud-based telehealth system that connects a variety of third-party home health monitors to make biometric data available to doctors and care providers at a distance. It launched at the end of 2011, and Qualcomm already works with a number of medical device vendors and mobile health startups through the platform. Lately, it's been focused on larger partners.
Earlier this month, Novartis selected Qualcomm Life as a partner for its global Trials of the Future program, in which Novartis is endeavoring to use more mobile technology in its clinical trials and to provide connectivity for future Novartis products. Novartis will use Qualcomm Life’s 2net platform and various connected devices to collect medical data directly from trial participants in their homes.
The first trial in that partnership has already begun, evaluating the use of mobile devices for patients with chronic lung conditions. The trial is observational and doesn’t involve any Novartis products or other pharmaceuticals. According to Qualcomm, the study “leverages 2net mobile-enabled smartphones and 2net Hubs to seamlessly collect and aggregate biometric data from medical devices and transmits this data to the cloud-based 2net Platform, which securely sends the data to the study coordinator.”
