Taiwan-based Health2Sync, an online diabetes management company, has announced their partnership with Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare in a move that brings the web and app-based offering nationwide.

Health2Sync’s offering is a multi-part patient management platform that includes a patient-facing app, a cable that connects various types of glucometers to a smartphone, and a data analytics engine that creates automated, personalized recommendations from each patient’s data.

Taiwan’s single-payer National Health Insurance system is fairly comprehensive, but diabetes and its complications have always been costly to the system. Additionally, diabetes education in the country has been lacking – Health2Sync’s CEO Ed Deng told MobiHealthNews earlier this year that the certified diabetes educator to patient ratio is about 1:900. By using Health2Sync’s hardware-agnostic software, providers can reduce the time and expense of administering remote diabetes care, and it has been used by more than 30 hospitals and clinics in Taiwan to provide real-time tracking and immediate feedback to patients. The company also has blood pressure and weight-tracking tools.

Dr. Jason S-T Tu, President of the Taiwanese Association of Diabetes Educators, said the partnership is helpful to many stakeholders.

“While empowering patients is critical, we are constantly seeking tools and methods to further equip diabetes educators,” S-T Tu said in a statement. “What MOHW and Health2Sync have done is the first step to closing the loop of patient self-monitoring and providing feedback.

Using the Health2Sync platform, the Ministry of Health and Welfare hopes to  control diabetes on a large scale, as well as motivate patients to self-manage their condition.

“To extend the principles of diabetes shared care service, and to allow patients and care providers to battle diabetes together, we want to leverage digital technology and data analytics to provide patients and care providers a mobile app and web management platform that can raise the effectiveness of diabetes management,” Hsiu-Mei Chen, Section Chief, Department of Nursing and Healthcare, Ministry of Health and Welfare, said in a statement.

Health2Sync CEO Ed Deng said the company “commends the initiative” taken by the Ministry of Health, and the company plans to expand similar offerings in Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand. Of the estimated 415 million globally who live with diabetes, about half of them are in Asia.

“Health2Sync is excited to be assisting one of the best diabetes care programs in the region, scaling it through technology, and we hope to build on this experience to bring similar models to other countries in Asia,” Deng said in a statement.