Zhixing Health and MSD Forge Strategic Partnership to Extend the Value of Internet-Based Glucose Management Model

Amid the high prevalence of diabetes and suboptimal treatment management in China, information technology and medical big data may lead diabetes management towardPrecision Medicineand the Next Stage of Health Management.

On November 8, at the 3rd China International Import Expo (CIIE), MSD and Zhiyun Health leveraged their respective service advantages to launch a comprehensive strategic partnership focused on diabetes management. Through initiatives including enhanced patient–physician education, research on diabetes medications, chronic disease management for diabetic patients, medication benefit programs, and diabetes insurance, the two companies jointly initiated the “MSD–Zhiyun Health Nanjing Community Hospital” collaboration and the “Real-World Follow-Up Study of Sitagliptin in Community Patients” project.

MSD aims to collaborate with Zhiyun Health to create a digital innovative governance model and establish a medical consortium platform for diabetes blood glucose management with hospitals at all levels, thereby expanding the availability of MSD’s glucose-control medications to more local hospitals and benefiting a greater number of patients with diabetes.

Meanwhile, through this collaboration, Zhiyun Health will also support MSD in completing a real-world follow-up study of community patients using sitagliptin, helping to further improve and upgrade the drug, and providing reference for government regulatory authorities in evaluating the drug.

“Extended” Internet-Based Blood Glucose Management Model: Advantages in Precise Connection and Matching Among Physicians, Patients, and Pharmaceuticals

China’s diabetes prevalence remains persistently high, with awareness, treatment, and control rates all far below those in developed countries; notably, the control rate is more than 10 percentage points lower than that of developed nations.According to the latest data from the International Diabetes Federation, there were as many as 116 million adult diabetes patients in China in 2019. Moreover, the number of diabetes patients has been increasing year by year, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.5% in the number of diagnosed diabetes patients from 2011 to 2018.

The 2017 “Chinese Expert Consensus on Glycemic Management in Hospitalized Patients” explicitly calls for accelerating the development of hospital information systems, including those related to glycemic data management. The latest clinical guidelines also recommend using internet-based systems for the信息化 management of blood glucose levels in hospitalized patients.

Through its in-hospital management system, Zhiyun Yihui, iCloud Health has entered 50 community hospitals in Nanjing to collect, organize, and analyze data on the use of diabetes medications in primary care institutions. This initiative helps MSD understand the utilization patterns of oral antidiabetic drugs in Nanjing’s primary healthcare settings. Furthermore, by providing more precise data analytics, iCloud Health enables physicians and patients to better recognize the therapeutic advantages of sitagliptin, thereby highlighting the product’s efficacy. This approach facilitates smoother integration into the blood glucose management process for community-based diabetic patients, empowering the general population to more effectively control disease progression and ultimately improving diabetes control rates across China.

Kuang Ming, Founder and CEO of Zhiyun Health, stated that internet-based glucose management indeed offers advantages in improving glycemic control rates among hospitalized patients, reducing the incidence of hyperglycemia and average length of hospital stay, improving prognosis, enhancing patient satisfaction, boosting the work efficiency of healthcare professionals, and increasing patients’ awareness of diabetes-related knowledge.On this basis, physicians, patients, and medications are more precisely connected and matched to enhance the accuracy, safety, and efficiency of medication use, enabling more physicians and patients to truly recognize the value of high-quality drugs. This represents an extension of the value of internet-based blood glucose management models.

In the long-term treatment and management of chronic diseases, the value and significance of tiered diagnosis and treatment are substantial.The patient capacity of large tertiary hospitals is highly limited. Encouraging patients to return to community hospitals, where they can receive timely and effective management of their health conditions locally, is a crucial component of the "Healthy China" initiative. This collaboration focuses on community hospitals and establishes a medical consortium platform for diabetes blood glucose management, enabling shared patient data with higher-level hospitals, remote consultations with specialists at those institutions, and two-way referral systems.

From MSD’s perspective, merely developing an innovative drug is far from sufficient; it is essential to explore effective pathways to deliver these innovations to more patients and ensure effective diabetes management.

Reaching 500 million chronic disease patients in China, breaking down the barriers to real-world study data

In addition to bringing innovative medicines to more patients and improving diabetes control rates in China, this collaboration will also focus on real-world follow-up studies of sitagliptin in community patients, providing pharmaceutical companies with drug development data.

Prior to market approval, clinical trials for drug development are conducted under highly controlled conditions regarding study samples and sample sizes to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the medication. In contrast, real-world studies are non-interventional and do not impose artificial restrictions on patient enrollment criteria, age, or treatment regimens. The resulting findings hold significant guidance for clinical practice, facilitate further optimization of the drug, and support governmental evaluation of pharmaceutical products.

However, the large and fragmented population of diabetes drug users makes real-world follow-up studies extremely challenging to conduct.

Kuang Ming explained that chronic diseases such as diabetes are long-term conditions, and real-world studies involve long-term cohorts with continuous, uninterrupted, and repeated data collection.In pre-marketing clinical trials, a sample size of 2,000 to 5,000 participants is considered large. However, for medications such as those for diabetes, hundreds of thousands to millions of patients use them once they are on the market. If such a vast sample size can be collected from real-world settings, it would further enhance the quality of data in drug development.

The high coverage rate of the patient population provides pharmaceutical companies with the possibility and convenience for conducting real-world studies.Over the past six years, Zhiyun Health’s self-developed hospital SaaS system “Zhiyun Yihui,” pharmacy SaaS system, and internet hospital platform have expanded their coverage to over 90% of regions across China. Zhiyun Health’s chronic disease management system has been implemented in nearly 2,000 hospitals and 100,000 pharmacies nationwide, enabling its internet hospital platform to reach approximately 500 million chronic disease patients in China.

Kuang Ming believes that this is a major advantage of Zhiyun Health. Without digitalized coverage capabilities and without establishing a "data highway," it would be extremely costly for pharmaceutical companies to obtain large-sample, long-cohort data, with uncontrollable data quality.The high coverage rate of the Zhiyun Health system will enhance overall efficiency and data quality when conducting data collection, acquisition, and analysis.

This marks only the beginning of the collaboration between Zhiyun Health and renowned pharmaceutical companies in providing data for pharmaceutical R&D and digitalization. MSD hopes to seize this opportunity to extensively collaborate with outstanding partners, deepening cooperation not only in digital chronic disease management but also in areas such as internet healthcare and innovative insurance services.

This article is sourced from IYIOU. Original article by Xiang Xue. For reprints or collaborations, please click here.Reprint Notice, unauthorized reproduction will be subject to legal action.