BaseHealth, Labco Sign European Partnership

By Bio-IT World Staff 

 

December 8, 2014 | BaseHealth of Redwood City, Calif., has announced a partnership with the European diagnostics network Labco to deploy BaseHealth’s Genophen platform to thousands of physicians across Europe. Genophen combines an integrated personal health record with personalized lifestyle advice and predictions of disease risk. In addition to clinical measurements and lab records, the platform is also built to store and use genetic information and data from activity trackers. Genophen focuses on preventable, chronic diseases, which are major health burdens that can be addressed on an individual patient level.

 

The agreement with Labco opens up a large market for BaseHealth, whose business model relies on individual user subscriptions, but also requires physician-patient interactions to introduce new users to the platform. Labco, which incorporates local labs across Europe and allows lab managers to become part-owners of the corporate parent, serves over 50 thousand physicians and 25 million patients — millions of whom purchase tests directly from Labco collection centers.

 

Labco’s laboratory information management system will be directly integrated with Genophen, so that tests performed in the Labco system will automatically appear in users’ Genophen profiles. “This is a way for [Labco] to engage their customer base in a much deeper way,” says BaseHealth CEO Jorge Velarde, whom Bio-IT World has previously interviewed on the subject of using genomic data in personal health services. “We are creating a physician portal so the physicians… will have clear lists of what tests have been done for each individual, and the individuals will have clear access to the tests through our platform as well.”

 

Under the terms of the partnership, Labco will market and sell the platform to its patient network, while BaseHealth will provide the platform, integrate with Labco’s systems, and create a mobile app giving users access to their test results and health assessments. Depending on each country’s regulatory environment, Labco may market Genophen directly to patients at its collection centers, or work through physicians to reach users. The plan is to begin rolling out Genophen in Spain in 2015, gradually expanding to other countries; Labco also operates in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Portugal.

 

Users pay subscription fees to enroll in Genophen, and BaseHealth is at this time unwilling to estimate how many will sign onto the platform through Labco. “It’s early to tell what that adoption rate will be, but we’re very confident that it’s going to be a very large number,” says Velarde. Users can also pay for genotyping or whole genome sequencing, to be provided by Labco, and this genomic data would be incorporated into their profiles.

 

BaseHealth plans to eventually use the patient information it gathers to conduct internal research, refining Genophen’s personalized health recommendations, once a critical mass of users enrolls in the platform. “The first priority is going to be showing the impact of the platform,” says Velarde. “We’re confident that, when we have engaged users, we’ll be able to publish studies that show how we’re taking these at-risk populations and moving them away from those risk points.”