Digital Pharma: Novo launches insulin dosing app
pharmafile | September 17, 2010 | News story | Medical Communications, Sales and Marketing | Digital Pharma blog, Novo Nordisk, app, diabetes, iphone
Novo Nordisk has launched an iPhone app for US healthcare professionals that enables to them look up dosing guidelines for their patients with diabetes.
The Novo Dose app is only the second diabetes app for healthcare professionals from pharma, and offers product-specific dosing information for Novo’s range of insulin analog agents – Levemir, NovoLog and NovoLog Mix.
The insulin analog product range is an important one for Novo. In 2009 the three products’ combined sales grew 24%, playing a significant part in helping the company’s overall sales and profits to double-digit growth.
The new iPhone app provides details on when and how to dose Novo’s insulin analog agents, how to titrate and information on patients’ blood glucose goals.
“This is where modern medicine is headed,” said Anup Kumar Sabharwal, an endocrinologist at the University of Miami Clinics’ Diabetes Research Institute.
“The app can save time for primary care physicians and hospitalists, who may not have the experience dosing analog insulins, and may help them to calculate doses from their iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad.”
The company says the release of its free app is inline with a trend for physicians to use hand-held devices such as smart phones when treating their patients.
Early this year a study of 2,000 US physicians by Manhattan Research found 70% said their PDA/smart phone was “essential” to their practice and 81% said they wanted more apps related to their specialty.
“Physicians are embracing the internet as part of how they practice medicine – from accessing clinical trials online to networking with peers across the country through sites like SERMO, most physicians agree that access to information online is an asset to their practice,” said Camille Lee, VP of diabetes marketing at Novo Nordisk.
“We’re taking that one step further with NovoDose by literally putting that information in the palm of their hands,” she added.
It’s the Danish pharma company’s second iPhone app, following the launch in February this year of its HbA1C Converter app, which was the first big pharma diabetes app for healthcare professionals.
That tool helps doctors in the UK calculate patients’ HbA1c values following changes in 2009 to the units used to express their value.
Patient group Diabetes UK has more information on the change here, and an HbA1c calculator of its own that’s supported by Bristol-Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca.
Meanwhile, other diabetes iPhone apps available include Merck’s Vree For Diabetes, (a US patient app), Sanofi-Aventis’ Finger Hoop (an international disease awareness app) and Abbott’s Diabetes Mapp (a German diabetes services search app for patients).
There is more information on these and other apps from big pharma in my iPhone app series from earlier this year:
• Big pharma’s iPhone apps (part one)
• Big pharma’s iPhone apps (part two)
• Big pharma’s iPhone apps (part three)
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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