Mountain View, California-based Glooko is collaborating with Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk to develop a digital diabetes management platform.
The non-exclusive partnership, developed and branded by both companies, will combine Glooko’s digital capabilities and Novo Nordisk’s deep knowledge of diabetes. Glooko offers a mobile, cloud-based platform for people with diabetes to track and manage their condition, and the app syncs with data from most diabetes and exercise devices. Novo Nordisk makes several diabetes drugs and delivery devices, and has been integrated with IBM Watson Health since December 2015 to improve diabetes care based on data collected from its devices and treatments.
“This is really exciting for us, because there has been a need for an agnostic platform that launches better data driven decisions,” Glooko CEO Rick Altinger told MobiHealthNews in an interview. “From our standpoint, we can help patients on a global basis, and this also allows us to focus more on core technology while Novo Nordisk brings that vast set of educational content and clinical research that they have developed over the years.”
Together, the companies will build on Glooko’s existing mobile and web platforms to improve population health reporting, plus create personalized digital services to support people with diabetes in areas like medication adherence and blood glucose management.
“We are excited to partner with Glooko and to take another step towards delivering digital health offerings that help people with diabetes to improve their blood glucose control,” Christian Kanstrup, Novo Nordisk’s senior vice president of Strategy, Access and Marketing, said in a statement. “Working in partnerships will furthermore enhance our ability to demonstrate the real-world value of our portfolio of diabetes treatments.”
Glooko’s platform is used in over 4,800 health systems across 27 countries. In September, the company merged with Swedish diabetes management company Diasend to expand their technological capabilities and establish a greater global footprint.
Vikram Singh, Product Analytics and Marketing Manager at Glooko, said it shows pharma’s growing embrace of digital platforms as a means of gaining more insight and feedback into how their products and treatments are performing.
“Everyone wants to know what’s happening in the wild, and a lot of companies are now running robust studies because they haven’t had the feedback loop that any software company does,” Singh told MobiHealthNews. “We can do that, and Novo Nordisk and others have recognized that partnering with a company like Glooko means they can work on that and provide better treatments.”
Altinger pointed to the increase of outcomes-related data by Glooko and other digital diabetes management platforms that has caught the interest of device and treatment companies.
“There is increasing momentum around diabetes,” Altinger said. “It’s a costly disease; one of the most expensive chronic conditions if not only for private health plans but for government insurance plans and pharma to pay for outcomes data. Now, they are embracing that partnerships have the technology to facilitate that.”
