CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
Amy Carpenter Aquino
September 2017—Can data move the dial on diabetes? That’s the thinking behind Roche Diabetes Care’s new partnership with Accenture, and it’s how some labs and health care systems are already driving diabetes care to a whole new level.
“At Roche Diabetes Care, we want to create a leading open digital diabetes ecosystem,” says Yan Beynon, head of digital and health solutions. To do so, the company will use Accenture’s existing Intelligent Patient Platform to build a core data platform that gathers “vital pieces of diabetes information,” he says. The data will be categorized, analyzed, and transformed into “powerful insights to support improved therapy routines and outcomes.”
Within this ecosystem, Beynon says, blood glucose, insulin, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels, along with co-medication, physical activity, food intake, and other information, will be collected and analyzed and put into context. “Having all therapy-relevant data in one place and the smart algorithms to perform the analyses will help to improve therapy adaptation and results,” he says.
Laboratories, too, have had their eyes on a data-driven path to better diabetes management, with one—Regional Medical Laboratories in Tulsa, Okla.—launching a Diabetes Home this fall.
Beynon
C. Terrence Dolan, MD, president and CEO of RML, says a recently published study concluded that diabetes is responsible for 12 percent of U.S. deaths, even though only 3.3 percent of U.S. death certificates indicate diabetes as the underlying cause of death.
“I think they’re right, based on our clinical experience,” Dr. Dolan says of the study’s authors.
Dr. Dolan’s perspective on the number of Americans dying from diabetes is based on the massive amounts of data generated by 2.4 million RML patients. Dr. Dolan can access nearly 20 years of patient data through the regional lab’s Enterprise Data Warehouse. (See “Big gain theory—data warehousing pays off,” CAP TODAY, November 2014.)