Novo Nordisk, the world’s largest supplier of diabetes drugs, is joining with digital health company Glooko to develop personalized digital products for diabetes management.
The deal, announced early Monday, gives the Danish pharmaceutical company a consumer-focused technology platform to build on. In return, Mountain View, California-based Glooko gains access to Novo Nordisk’s extensive customer base and deep library of educational content.
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“We will add that [content] to our mobile platform,” Glooko CEO Rick Altinger told MedCity News.
“The vision is to leverage data to drive better and faster decisions to help patients and their caregivers get to better outcomes,” Altinger explained.
“Diabetes is a data-driven disease,” Altinger said. “You shouldn’t take the same dose day after day. You should titrate your insulin.”
Glooko has data on about 1 million patients in more than two dozen countries and counts more than 4,800 health systems as customers. Novo Nordisk has access to millions more people around the world.
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Glooko also offers Novo Nordisk an easy way to integrate diabetes information into electronic health records. “Health systems can pull in data from Glooko, into workflows and integrate with EHRs if they want,” Altinger said.
“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. Working in partnerships will furthermore enhance our ability to demonstrate the real-world value of our portfolio of diabetes treatments.” Christian Kanstrup, Novo Nordisk’s senior vice president for strategy, access and marketing, said in a press release.
Indeed, the pharma company has other partners to bring into the nonexclusive Glooko deal, and Glooko works with many diabetes device companies, including Roche.
Novo Nordisk already has a partnership with IBM Watson Health, and the drug company will leverage that relationship while working with Glooko, Altinger said. “We’ve already had joint meetings with them,” Altinger said of IBM’s Watson team.
In 2014, Novo worked with digital healthcare agency emotive to develop a diabetes education game based on Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Microsoft Kinect technology.
Altinger didn’t offer many details on the products in the works, but he said the two companies were “looking into” adding a digital component to the pharma company’s NovoPen Echo smart insulin pen.
What Glooko did say is that every product the two new partners co-develop will enable “personalized support” for people who have diabetes. Expect to see something on the market before the end of 2017.
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