Roche Hooks Up with Qualcomm to Improve Patient Monitoring

Qualcomm Life has signed up another company, Swiss pharmaceutical and diagnostics company Roche, to use its 2net technology for patient monitoring.

The Basel, Switzerland-based biotech giant and the San Diego, CA-based communications company jointly announced that Roche would use the technology made by Qualcomm subsidiary Qualcomm Life to improve remote monitoring and management of chronic disease patients.

The first people covered in the deal will be those who use Roche's anticoagulation meters. Qualcomm's 2net platform will capture data from the meters and transmit it to Roche's cloud-based, back-end services so the patient's care team can reduce therapy complications and total cost of care, the companies said.

Less than a month ago, Qualcomm announced a similar partnership with pharmaceutical company Novartis, which chose the technology to upload patient data from medical devices during clinical trials.

Novartis will employ Qualcomm Life's 2net technology to collect and aggregate biometric data from medical devices and transmit them securely via a cloud-based platform to the Novartis study coordinator. The technology will allow patients who suffer from chronic lung disease to remain in their homes during the study, which will not involve drugs, the company said.

There is also an agreement to use the same technology to connect Walgreens' mobile and Web applications to the medical device and care coordination parts of the drug store chain's customer loyalty program.

Qualcomm Life introduced its 2net platform in 2011. Designed to help capture and transport data, the 2net system can be used with Class I, II, and III medical devices. The 2net cloud-based platform has grown from 40 to more than 250 device manufacturers and other companies in technology roughly one and a half years.

The 2net platform can collect data from multiple sensors through a 2net Hub that can be plugged in at a home or office, or through Qualcomm's 2net Mobile that can run off a mobile phone or tablet, or through a cellular-enabled medical device or a partner service application. Qualcomm Life has established pathways for each gateway to extract data from the medical device and input it into the 2net Platform's cloud-based data center.

The company isn't satisfied with its own research, either. It issued a call for entrants to its Tricorder XPRIZE contest in 2012, which is designed to spur the development of innovatice consumer-facing medical devices. Ten finalist teams are vying for the $10-million, global competition to develop a mobile device capable of diagnosing and interpreting a set of 15 medical conditions and capturing five vital health metrics, a real-life version of the Star Trek medical device.

Teams will compete in both diagnostic experience evaluations and consumer testing, slated for mid-to-late 2015. The final judging and awards ceremony will take place in early 2016. 

Nancy Crotti is a contributor to Qmed and MPMN.

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