Wireless devices up category’s value

While diagnostics may be a $1.1 billion business at retail, the value inherent in that business, especially within the sale of blood-pressure monitors and blood-glucose meters, can be so much more. Those businesses may lend themselves to new disease management revenue streams as products that can wirelessly upload readings to the cloud are accessed by remote healthcare professionals for review, depending upon the user’s permission settings.

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“The drug store chains can be disruptive in terms of ... how they connect and use this new relationship,” Jim Taschetta, iHealth chief marketing officer and head of retail sales, told DSN. “[Retailers] can now create a relationship with this user through this device and software. There’s an opportunity for the entire industry to think differently about blood-pressure monitors, blood-glucose meters and even scales. This is the time to disrupt.”



“There’s an opportunity there, [but] nobody’s really jumped on it yet,” said Ranndy Kellogg, COO of Omron Healthcare. “[But today] there’s no single cloud-based service that gathers [all the data into one place]. ... The market is too young yet to understand who will win that race.”