OMRON Healthcare revamps its telehealth offerings with unique features

New Delhi: OMRON Healthcare India, the leading player in digital home blood pressure monitoring segment, is all set to strengthen its presence in the telehealth & remote patient monitoring domain via provision of advanced digital experience to users based on unique upgrades in its mobile app.

The company has introduced a suite of innovative features in its existing app “OMRON Connect” used by lakhs of people across the country using OMRON Digital BP Monitors and Body Composition Monitors. The enhancements include introduction of a unique Health Gift programme and an online & sophisticated BP-diary to reward the ones who are doing monitoring with useful goodies and further inculcate the habit of BP monitoring at home in a convenient & articulate manner. It also includes an upgrade in the data management capacity of the application plus capabilities to make interface with other companies’ healthcare applications possible.

Health Gift aims to make the monitoring more engaging & valuable. The feature encourages regular tracking of health stats using OMRON blood pressure monitors and body composition monitors with rewards like health coins & tickets (with each measurement) that can be exchanged for useful & varied gifts & vouchers. The BP Diary, allows users to record their blood pressure in accordance with their lifestyle helping to recognize trends for more customized and effective BP management.

Patients with non-communicable diseases like hypertension & diabetes rely a lot on home healthcare data for periodic measurement & right treatment. However, it becomes challenging for many as they are not tech savvy, the devices are not connectable, the historical data is not easily accessible and the real time sharing between the patient and the physician is complicated. An advanced application like OMRON Connect with capabilities to fetch data from even non-connected OMRON BP monitors devices via OCR function is a great value-add to make the experience of OMRON device users useful and bring in more users to the platform.

Speaking about this launch, Masanori Matsubara, MD, OMRON Healthcare India comments, “Out of a base of around 350 million hypertensive patients and 135 million people struggling with weight management, many of them shy away from regular monitoring and use the applications as they find the whole experience cumbersome. In the current scenario, led by the global health crisis, OMRON believes telehealth has immense possibilities in store to benefit the people via enabling more regular & efficient home healthcare monitoring. OMRON aims to take bigger leaps in this sphere via introducing significant improvements in our owned digital assets and also by becoming a part of the ecosystem through collaborations with remote healthcare services providers.”

With teleconsultation witnessing almost 500% rise during pandemic (between March & May 2020), reports indicate a strong change in health consumers pattern in the telehealth sphere.  A 2019 study on the use of mobile health apps highlights the importance of user experience factors like data collection efficiency and app interface for encouraging routine use of tracking features. This indicates the need for improved telehealth app features that benefit the consumers.