Why Novartis Is Going Big on Digital Health

The Swiss pharmaceutical giant made big news last year when it came to its partnership with Google to create glucose-reading contact lenses. But it turns out the company has plenty of other digital health initiatives underway.

Chris Newmarker

Swiss pharmaceutical and medical device giant Novartis has made a major push into the digital health arena under CEO Joe Jimenez, according to a recent Bloomberg profile of Jimenez.

Novartis digital health projects and products include pills and inhalers with sensors to warn patients when they've missed a dose. (The company has had partnerships for years with Proteus Digital Health.)

There are also clinical tests that measure walking speed and balance of multiple sclerosis using Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing technology, which Microsoft uses with Xboxes.

Then there is the partnership Novartis' Alcon eye care division forged with Google last year to in-license Google's "smart lens" technology for all ocular medical uses, including contact lenses able to read glucose from tears.

"Novartis 10 years ago would not have embraced the team that brought that deal forward," Jimenez, an American who joined Novartis in 2007 and has been CEO since 2010, told Bloomberg.

On top of that, Novartis and San Diego-based telecommunications giant Qualcomm are providing $100 million to fund startups working on mobile health. Novartis has chosen Qualcomm Life's 2net technology to upload patient data from medical devices during clinical trials.

Novartis' moves make sense because the U.S. government through Medicare is incentivizing health providers to be more concerned about how efficiently and effectively they manage patient populations--versus the former fee-for-service model's focus in which they counted how many devices, procedures, and services they are able to sell.

Health trackers including wearables will likely be more in demand, while medical devices in general will have to demonstrate that they are helping the overall healthcare system save money. Telehealth will likely be more in demand, too.

It is worth noting that the United States isn't the only place where such virtual health devices are in demand, either. The United Kingdom's National Health Service plans a "huge rollout" of such devices as part of a "revolution in self care," Sir Bruce Keogh, the NHS's top doctor, recently told the Guardian.

Jimenez thinks drugmakers will increasingly have to prove to health providers that their drugs are actually improving patients' conditions, and digital health allows a company such as Novartis to do just that.

"We would go in with a package of services including the pharmaceutical, the technology that will help that patient comply, a warning system that showed if that patient was not complying," Jimenez told Bloomberg. "We will have to partner with companies that have like interests in the tech space."

Chris Newmarker is senior editor of Qmed and MPMN. Follow him on Twitter at @newmarker.

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