Pharma giant Roche is adding a new remote-patient-monitoring tool to its Diabetes Care Platform. The new tool is specifically targeted towards patients who require more doctor-patient interactions.

Through it, doctors and care team members can enroll their patients in the remote-monitoring program and then personalize the tool for each patient. Specifically, clinicians can control the length of the program, the frequency of data uploaded, and the hyperglycemia trend or standard deviation. 

The new system can give clinicians alerts if there are irregularities in the data the patient is uploading or in the trends over time. Doctors can use the platform to send secure messages if there is an issue. If an irregularity is spotted, a healthcare professional can reach out and directly communicate adjustments to the treatment plan. 

WHY IT MATTERS 

According to the CDC, 34 million patients in the U.S. have diabetes, and 88 million have prediabetes. But diabetes is a growing problem worldwide. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that 422 million people worldwide have the condition. 

Roche is positioning this as a tool help manage a patient’s diabetes outside of the doctor’s office. It is also pitching the tool as a way to cut down on in-person care during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Monitoring people with diabetes outside of conventional care settings can be part of the solution to this challenge. Diabetes is well-suited to remote care, and our goal is to seamlessly connect healthcare professionals and people with diabetes,” said Marcel Gmuender, head of Roche Diabetes Care. 

THE LARGER TREND 

Roche has been in the diabetes space for some time. In fact, its Diabetes Care offering is made up of three brands that include RocheDiabetes, Accu-Chek and mySugar. 

As far back as 2015, it launched the Accu-Chek connected app. From the time of the launch, it included a prescription insulin bolus calculator called the Bolus Advisor. The Accu-Chek has had a number of recalls since its launch. Its sixth was in October of last year.

The diabetes offering expanded in 2017 when the Swiss pharma company acquired diabetes-management app mySugar.