Kakao Healthcare rolls out glucose monitoring service ‘Pasta’

Kakao Healthcare released its new, real-time glucose monitoring service designed to help patients keep their glucose levels in check by providing constant, personalized data.

Kakao Healthcare CEO Hwang Hee introduces its new real-time glucose monitoring service "Pasta" at Kakao's headquarters in Gyeonggi on Thursday. [KAKAO HEALTHCARE]

Kakao Healthcare released its new, real-time glucose monitoring service designed to help patients keep their glucose levels in check by providing constant, personalized data.

Dubbed “Pasta,” the service plans to roll out overseas over a couple of years in nations including Japan, the United States and the Middle East.

The most imminent release overseas is in Japan, where Kakao's digital health care subsidiary aims to launch the service by the end of this year.

“Diabetes, hypertension and hyperlipidemia are all chronic diseases which can lead to cerebral apoplexy or myocardial infarction if not treated properly,” said Kakao Healthcare CEO Hwang Hee at a press event to introduce the service at Kakao’s Pangyo headquarters in Gyeonggi on Thursday. “Diseases like those can be delayed from worsening with just a few, small changes to the patient’s daily routine. Such tweaks can have a dramatic effect on halting the disease, even as much as the patient taking one or two additional medicines.”

The service consists of an app that monitors a person’s glucose levels based on what they consume and tracks their movements through a continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) sensor that users attach to their arms. Pasta stands for personalized, accessible, supportive, tech-enabled and affordable service.

CGM sensors are available through Kakao Healthcare’s partnership with Dexcom and i-SENS.

“Improving one’s lifestyle habits is the start of managing your glucose levels,” Hwang said. “Even with the sensor patched on, there are limits to what the patients can do with the data, but Pasta helps them manage their health conditions by providing aggregated data on what they should do to prevent their glucose levels from going up, how it should be treated, and measures that one should take in post-treatment.”

Kakao Healthcare also formed a partnership with Novo Nordisk last year to integrate Novo Nordisk's Mallya Smart Sensor — which is connected to conventional insulin pens to automatically collect and log daily insulin injection data — with Pasta. With Pasta's official release, the two services aim to become connected by the second quarter of this year.

The software itself — all the data that Pasta gathers, real-time monitoring and daily reports — is free of charge, leaving users to only pay for the lease of the sensor patches. Dexcom’s G7 sensor costs 100,000 won ($75) per 10 days and i-SENS’ CareSens Air costs 150,000 won per 15 days.

“Patients who are labeled as Type 1 Diabetes and Type 2 Diabetes can receive a maximum of 90 percent reimbursement for medical purposes through their insurance plans,” Hwang explained. “That means patients would only have to pay 20,000 to 30,000 won monthly to utilize Pasta.”

Pasta’s current business model derives from the lease costs that the company shares with its manufacturers. Business models for overseas are likely to be different from Korea, said Hwang.

“In the U.S. and the Middle East regions, service profitability may be different from that of Korea,” Hwang said. “A subscription-based model might be one possibility. What I can tell you for now is that our strategy for Pasta will be different from the Korean market because there are other competitors already out in respective countries.”

BY LEE JAE-LIM [lee.jaelim@joongang.co.kr]