Over the past decade, the uptake of smartphones has resulted in a revolution in the way people receive information and make decisions. Whether traveling from one place to the next, managing finances, ordering delivery food, or checking the weather, people have become accustomed to the way technology can simplify decisions and tasks in their lives. Increasingly, consumers are bringing these same expectations of technology to their health information and healthcare decisions.

To meet those expectations, pharmaceutical companies are evolving their approach to health care by integrating technology with their medicines, but they can’t do it alone. That’s why pharmaceutical companies, which have traditionally focused on the discovery and development of medicines to help people manage their health, are partnering with technology and digital health organizations to develop new solutions that integrate medicine with technology to transform chronic disease management.

At Lilly, we’re focused on bringing the most innovative solutions to people with chronic conditions and recognize the opportunity in front of us. We are partnering with technology and medical device companies to integrate their most advanced technologies with the medicines we’re developing. We are connecting software, devices and medicines together in our efforts to deliver new, best-in-class solutions.

Diabetes is one of the many chronic conditions we’re focused on treating. We’ve teamed up with other companies who share Lilly’s core value of making patients’ lives better. We’re combining our 100-year history of expertise in diabetes management, insulin pen development and the regulated health environment with our partners’ knowledge about connected devices, software and data analytics to bolster and advance innovative solutions to simplify many aspects of living with diabetes.

One of these solutions is our personalized diabetes management system, currently in development to advance the management of diabetes. The system will integrate connected insulin delivery devices, software and algorithms. These components are designed to analyze blood glucose trends in response to insulin doses and people’s behaviors, such as eating and exercise, to equip people with diabetes and healthcare providers with actionable insights to help with diabetes management.

We’re integrating our own expertise with that of our partners to create a pen-based platform and a pump-based platform within the system. We’re working with Dexcom to incorporate their Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) system into our platforms. Through this collaboration, we’re working to use the data collected from the CGM to provide real-time glucose data alongside insulin dosing data on a smart device to help people make more informed insulin dosing decisions. We’re also working with DEKA Research & Development Corp. to co-develop a unique insulin pump for our pump-based platform, drawing from DEKA’s knowledge and expertise to integrate a control algorithm into the platform.

While technology alone can’t cure every health condition, we believe it can help transform the way we develop and deliver our medicines, as well as transform how people manage their own health. Integrating these many components into one system that is able to meet our high bar for patient safety and quality is a rewarding challenge. We’re tackling that challenge head on alongside our partners in our aim to deliver the most integrated solutions in the industry.