Electronic Health Reporter

GlucoMe enhances the way diabetes patients and medical teams work together by changing the traditional face-to-face diabetes care paradigm with an AI-enabled digital diabetes clinic.

Elevator pitch

The number of diabetes professionals has remained flat over the last decade. Conversely, the population of those with diabetes is growing. GlucoMe makes it possible for diabetes professionals to successfully manage this growing population by treating the right patients, at the right time, at the right cost, no matter their location and provide effective and continuous care to up to 10X more diabetes patients than with the current standard of care. The solution encourages a combination of face-to-face in-clinic and digital (virtual) visits enabling ongoing communication, treatment changes as necessary and immediate intervention as required.

Founder’s story

GlucoMe was established by Dov Moran and Yiftah Ben-Aharon.

Dov Moran is one of Israel’s most prominent hi-tech leaders, entrepreneurs and investors. He is known as the inventor of the USB memory drive (sold his company M-systems to SanDisk for $1.6B). In addition, Dov was the Founder and CEO of Modu, which developed a revolutionary modular phone (acquired by Google in 2011.  Modu’s assets are the basis for Google’s modular phone Project Ara).

Yiftah Ben Aharon is a technology executive. He was head of R&D for the machine learning investment fund and led software development at Modu after serving in the IDF’s elite 8200 intelligence unit.

Moran is diabetes T2 patient and faces the challenges of diabetes management daily.  Ben-Aharon has a parent with diabetes. He is a primary caregiver and is deeply involved in the diabetes monitoring loop.  One day they were discussing how it was possible that in the era of smart technologies, diabetes patients were still facing the challenge of clinical data availability. Some of the smart monitors that were available in the market were expensive and practically available to only around 25% of diabetes patients globally. That was the starting point for solving the connectivity issue to ensure the continuum of clinical data for professional analysis and for all patients.

Moran and Ben Aharon started with developing smart monitors for their own use. They shared their invention with others. The feedback was so encouraging and enthusiastic that they started a company.  GlucoMe began with providing clinical data, thereafter analysis functions and later  developed its AI platform. Today GlucoMe is an end-to-end solution that includes diabetes monitors, a mobile app and a digital diabetes clinic with software for healthcare professionals.

Marketing/Promotion strategy

GlucoMe provides healthcare providers and insurance companies with new digital capabilities to easily review and assess massive quantities of data – real-time information, trends, analysis, treatment recommendations – and treat for up to 10 times more patients than they could with only face-to-face office visits.

Market opportunity

In 2017, diabetes expenditure came to some $727 billion, and is expected to increase to around $776 billion during the coming two decades. In 2017, an estimated 8.8 percent of the adult population worldwide had diabetes. However, the number of healthcare providers worldwide has either not increased at all in certain areas or not increased nearly enough to provide adequate attention to the growing number of patients who have diabetes. Until now, it’s been an uphill battle. GlucoMe’s technological advances have made it possible to make this ratio work.

Who are your competitors?

GlucoMe has several competitors on different aspects of the solution whether is it software or hardware. Companies like Glooko, Livongo, One Drop and alike can be considered GlucoMe’s competitors. All are US companies, which are for the most part not currently active outside of the US.

How your company differentiates itself from the competition and what differentiates GlucoMe?

Some of the competitors are mostly the device companies and some are coming from the software direction. There are several parameters that can differentiate GlucoMe from competition: affordability of the GlucoMe’s monitors, their universality, simplicity of operation and connectivity (GlucoMe’s BGM is the only one to transfer data to both iOS and Android through its microphone. It does this using audio connectivity), in addition to several software features where GlucoMe is leading the way.

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