It’s very interesting to read the corporate version of disease management and compare that to my experience over the past several years. Going beyond meters and strips, my team was recruited to develop diabetes programs by several payors who were dissatisfied with traditional diabetes programs like the ones described in your interview.

These traditional programs have their place but for many people and the payors saddled with the bill, the impersonal nature of top-down patient management is falling short. Issues like privacy and phone calls from strangers walking the patient through a self-care checklist fall short of imparting education, understanding, causality, problem solving skills, reinforcement and encouragement. At least that’s what the participants in our healthcordia diabetes programs tell me.

If our experience is any indicator, there is a new model of diabetes care which will focus on a patient-centric information technology dashboard for simplified analysis and feedback. What’s cool is the patient really never even sees the dashboard – it’s just working in the background.

These programs will also include connectivity to a virtual social-support network of the patient’s choosing which relies on technology to connect diabetes teams much like you see in Weight Watchers or exercise partnering programs but without having to go anywhere.

Another glimpse at the future of diabetes care is simply to understand the impact of credible, decentralized D blogging and figure out how we can distribute that same community effect to the ‘offline’ population at large.

Also, a recent article from the Washington Post suggests that HIPPAA violations are seldom, if ever, enforced, suggesting that we have to do more to fix what already exists before we engineer new systems designed to make access easier for others to get their hands on our medical data.

Thank you!