Next up in our coverage of semi-finalists for Sanofi’s Data Design Diabetes Demo Day is GreenDot, which used to be called Diabetes 3.0 (good idea on the name change, guys!)
GreenDot was started by two UCSF endocrinologists – Jenise Wong and Aaron Neinstein. We believe they’re the only doctor-originated company in this bunch. They were frustrated, and their patients were frustrated, with the overwhelming amount of data generated by pumps and glucometers. Data in its own format, and in nonstandard layouts, is challenging for patients to interpret and difficult for doctors to compare.
So they built GreenDot’s mobile and web app to collect, arrange and analyze diabetes data wirelessly, in realtime. High blood sugars are orange arrows, lows are represented by blue triangles … and normal sugar is … green dots. It’s easy to see trends, overlap blood sugar data with administered insulin doses, meals, and episodes of activity.
When the data is laid out like this, it makes it easy to come up with a plan. And they’ve developed algorithms to identify new trends — like if the blood sugar is consistently low over several nights, an alert to eat more or decrease the evening insulin dose pops up.
They gave examples for kids with DM I, and for adults with type 2 diabetes. The app doesn’t just focus on what you are doing wrong, but gives positive reinforcement as well, congratulating you for exercising to correct orange triangles. The team thinks this will help with between-visit care: it’s not just for endocrinologists but will be of use to primary care doctors (and maybe even us in the ED?)
GreenDot takes data from multiple devices already — and they’re working on more. The data is secure and stored, HIPAA-compliant, in the cloud. The data is output to web and mobile apps designed specifically for patients, or caregivers… or third parties. If you think that’s sinister, remember they are planning on scrutiny and FDA approval, and are working with qb3 to test the system and ensure quality. The founders also stressed that GreenDot is nonprofit – they have sought funding from UCSF and from competitive grants, and also expect help from insurers, and employers.
A questioner asked about the competition: a ton of apps in the iTunes store to chart fingersticks. But GreenDot answered that all these iPhone apps require manual entry. That makes the data less trustworthy for docs, and more of a hassle for patients. There are only a few competitors doing automatic data entry.
GreenDot’s presentation from Diabetes Design Demo Day:
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More at GreenDot…