Roche Diabetes Care expects to take its non-communicable diseases (NCD) monitoring and management model to more states in the country, company top-brass said. The multinational presently has a two year programme underway in Madurai, Tamil Nadu.
The project would help create a mandate to expand the programme across the State and provide a template for other States, said Omar Sherief Mohammad, Roche Diabetes Care Cluster Head (India, Middle East & Africa). In fact, there is already a proven and successful model in Africa and Thailand, for example, he told businessline.
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The Madurai model to monitor and manage NCDs involves three programmes, and Roche has inked a partnership with VinCense, a digital health monitoring offering from MedIoTek Health Systems to implement them.
A Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the two companies, earlier this month to screen one lakh individuals over two years for diabetes, hypertension, obesity etc; intervene in the case of uncontrolled diabetes management and intervene for tuberculosis - diabetes co-morbidity management, Roche said.
The partnership will enable registration of vital health details like an individual’s height, weight, BMI, pulse rate, oxygen level, blood pressure, ECG, and blood glucose, on a centralised digital platform, the multinational said.
“The information will then be used to generate customized dashboards to facilitate detailed understanding of health situations hence improving outcomes,” it added.
Roche and VinCense had conducted a pilot between December 2022 and September 2023, along with the Directorate of Public Health, Tamil Nadu, focusing on NCD screening and management in the Madurai Corporation Urban Primary Health Centres (UPHCs). The pilot phase saw the screening of 67,370 individuals across Madurai district out of which 16.6 percent were identified at risk for diabetes and attached to the public healthcare system.
Further, it pointed out, patients identified with diabetes mellitus and tuberculosis-diabetes comorbidities would be brought under comprehensive care to help manage their condition.
The Roche executive clarified, the data would reside in the domain of the Government and VinCense, and Roche would not collect any of this data. Roche is involved with the screening (through its devices), education and awareness and providing a solutions platform to communicate the data, he said. And the care would be through the Government health centres.
Sharmila Devadoss, Managing Director of MedIoTek Health Systems, added that a central repository of individual medical data, offered a conducive environment for disease control thus enabling early diagnosis and care leading to better community health status.