Not only that, the new monitor hooks into the mobile world: It’s an attachment for iPhones and iPads. The iBGStar is a one-inch-wide version of Sanofi Canada’s BGStar standalone monitor. It plugs into the Apple gadgets, and delivers results via an app that tracks and graphs blood-sugar levels, and can collect relevant information about carb consumption, exercise and insulin doses. Patients can check out interactive reports and email the whole shebang to their doctors.
Today, Sanofi is launching an accompanying website, StarSystem, that offers the usual educational articles and videos found online, but also provides health coaching for patients using the company’s glucose monitors. There’s 90 minutes of telephone counseling, plus 6 months of online coaching. The idea is for patients to come up with a plan for diet, exercise, and so on, and to track their activities over time.
Sounds a lot like the approach Ernst & Young has been exhorting pharma to adopt. Companies need to be more ”patient-centric” rather than product-centric, using technology to ”build enduring relationships with their customers,” the firm says. And just this week, a Forbes column urged pharma to refocus on health outcomes rather than on tracking down elusive new blockbusters, much like IBM did when it remade itself.
From wordsbynowak.com
Believe it or not, there are still some people who think smartphones are only good for updating Facebook statuses and playing Angry Birds. But even the staunchest of hold-outs are likely to have their minds changed as some real health benefits of internet-enabled mobile devices make themselves clearer over the next few years.
To that end, French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi on Thursday is launching its StarSystem diabetes management platform, which connects to iBGStar, a glucose-monitoring app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The StarSystem platform is a web-based resource that provides personalized education and health information in the form of online articles and videos, as well as over-the-phone coaching from experts.
The iBGStar is more interesting, though. It’s a $65 attachment that plugs into the bottom of an iPhone or iPod Touch that can analyze a diabetic’s blood samples for glucose levels. The app features a dashboard that tracks and displays levels over time. Moreover, the user can also email the results to his or her doctor.
Sanofi says the iBGStar is the first such mobile device for diabetes, although other health sensors – such as the iHealth blood pressure dock – do exist.
Taken together, such devices are the first steps toward the fledgling health care revolution, where regular people will have much more personalized – and accurate – information about their bodies. With better data, we’ll be able to detect problems before they occur and more accurately treat them when they do happen.
It’s a fascinating revolution that’s well documented by Dr. Eric Topol in his book The Creative Destruction of Medicine, which I’m currently in the middle of reading. Topol argues that while the internet and digital technology have completely revolutionized almost every industry, medicine and health care are still stuck in the relative dark ages. Slowly but surely, the industry is being dragged into the modern light of day. When it finally gets there, we’re going to experience some profound benefits to our collective health.
Smartphone sensors such as the iBGStar are only the tip of the iceberg, however. Things are going to get really interesting once injectable nanosensors, which will monitor us around the clock without any of our own conscious effort, become more commonplace.
From Fierce pharma
Nyhetsinfo
www rd DiabetologNytt
