AstraZeneca is going all out for its new Farxiga kidney disease label: This year, it’s already started a new DTC campaign for the drug, and it more recently highlighted the “silent” nature of the disease in a new survey campaign.
Now, AstraZeneca’s Taiwan unit is turning to Health2Sync, a digital chronic disease management platform, to “provide its first digital solution for chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients in Taiwan,” according to a statement.
The new partnership is set up to deal with the problem of diagnosis. Some 37 million people in the U.S. have CKD, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but AstraZeneca says only around 10% have likely received a diagnosis.
That’s a huge untapped market that AZ, which has marketed Farxiga for diabetes since 2014 but last year added CKD to that label, wants to uncover. The drug made $3 billion last year, but AZ hopes the CKD label will help further boost its blockbuster credentials.
Enter Health2Sync. The pair will now work together to get earlier diagnosis of CKD patients and “optimize the quality of everyday chronic kidney disease care” through the smart detection feature on the Health2Sync patient management platform, which is currently used by more than 400 medical institutions worldwide.
The platform has already been used in diabetes for nearly a decade, and the hope is that this can now be translated into CKD.
It aims to do this by automatically filtering and categorizing patients into various groups according to their lab results and notifying the healthcare professionals as well as patients for early intervention, which may prevent disease progression and reduce the risk of complications.
Once the platform identifies a patient’s CKD risk levels, their doctor can review the data and act (or prescribe a CKD drug) as need be.
Patients themselves can also tap a user-friendly app to consult their care providers if they need to change up their meds.
“With over nine years of experience in diabetes management, we are excited to see that our continuous efforts have helped patients with diabetes improve their HbA1c after usage of the Health2Sync app,” said Ed Deng, co-founder and CEO of Health2Sync.
“These achievements have proven that data integration and digital intervention can be further applied to other chronic diseases since Health2Sync has one of the industry’s largest datasets of self-monitored and examination data”
“By working with Health2Sync, we hope to assist primary care physicians in the early identification and better management of chronic kidney disease, ultimately alleviating the healthcare expenditure by slowing down disease progression and preventing debilitating complications,” added Claudio Longo, president of AstraZeneca Taiwan.