Roche forms strategic partnerships over diabetes care with Indian businesses

Mumbai: Roche Diabetes Care (RDC) India recently entered into a strategic alliance with Indian partners to fulfill its commitment of providing true relief to persons with diabetes (PwD) through integrated Personalised Diabetes Management (iPDM) solutions. These are part of the company’s public-private-partnership model to create a holistic eco-system of care for PwDs by joining hands with like-minded partners.

The company has partnered with emerging Indian business such as Phable, Wellthy Therapeutics and PharmEasy to bolster its outreach to the PwDs. Through its partnership with Phable, women with GDM using Accu-Chek meters will now have access to a healthcare practitioner (HCP) to monitor their diabetes closely and make necessary therapy titrations via the PhableCare app. This helps improve clinical outcomes and leads to deliveries with fewer complications.

Renewing its existing partnership with Wellthy Therapeutics, the company is now offering its Accu-Chek Active users remote access to personalized coaching from highly skilled diabetes educators, round-the-clock support based on individual needs, and implementation of goal-and-condition based diabetes management plans to improve self-care behaviors for better health outcomes.

Through the partnership with PharmEasy, RDC India has enhanced customer service by addressing key customer pain points. The new start up ecosystem has brought in process agility, thereby creating customer delight.

To strengthen and optimize its distribution channels, the company has partnered with Udaan, a B2B e-commerce platform that enables retailers and businesses to source merchandise from manufacturers, brands, white labels, importers, etc. across the country, on a single platform. The tech-enabled national distribution model of Udaan will help RDC India bring agility and transparency in managing their primary and secondary distribution.  The model will be implemented throughout the country in a phased out manner.

Earlier this week Roche Diabetes Care India inaugurated the kit assembly site with Parekh Integrated Services Pvt. Ltd. (PISPL). This new kit assembly site is best in class facility compliant with Roche Global Quality & Safety standards and will assemble and pack blood glucose monitoring kits to fulfill India sales demand. As a strategic partner, PISPL will provide quality manpower and management system for the site.

Speaking about the developments, Omar Sherief Mohammad, Country Head, Roche Diabetes Care India, said, “At Roche we are committed to provide Persons with Diabetes (PwD) comprehensive diabetes management through innovative Integrated Personalised Diabetes Management(iPDM) solutions. In this journey we have chosen to partner with like-minded Indian companies who are doing path-breaking work to create innovative platforms that enable optimal personalised diabetes management and improve therapy outcomes. I am confident that together we can bring true relief to PwDs so that they can spend more time in range.”

The current pandemic and lockdowns have limited patients’ access to healthcare facilities, thereby limiting their proper management and care. Persons with diabetes with uncontrolled blood sugar levels are at a higher risk due to lower immune response^2,3. Hence, it is extremely important for persons with diabetes to remain vigilant about their sugar levels and maintain a good glycemic control⁴.

Through these partnerships, RDC India hopes to empower patients to manage their diabetes better while enabling access to uninterrupted care. Given the increased adoption of digital health solutions in India, RDC India believes the collaboration of like-minded industry partners will be crucial to the overall disease management ecosystem.