PHRQL (freckle) is focused on shifting wellness care from the clinic to the community. Our Connect & Coach product helps supermarkets deliver nutrition counseling and diabetes education to their customers in the store, and receiving reimbursements for their services from insurers. We’re also taking it one step further; by tying our programs into stores’ customer loyalty programs, consumers can receive rewards and incentives for eating healthier, and retailers can measure how the services are changing consumer shopping behavior. It’s a win for everyone, leveraging a delivery model that shows potential to reach a vast amount of consumers, including the 100 million people with diabetes or pre-diabetes.

We haven’t always been focused on this approach. PHRQL started in 2011 as a research project at Carnegie Mellon University. Our initial research was directed at finding patient-centered solutions for improving diabetes self-management. We learned there were a number of success factors that were pretty consistent: people need to know their numbers, they need to know how to manage those numbers, they need a support network of family and friends, and they need regular access to a health professional, like a diabetes educator. We found 23 connections that were important in a patient-centered model, and 17 were functioning poorly or not at all for most people.

Many of the weak or broken connections could be reinforced using technology, so this is where we started. Initially, we designed and developed mobile applications to help people collect their numbers (Blood Glucose, Carbs, Activity, and Insulin), see the relationship between them, and share them with their support network using our “Share & Compare™” feature. We conducted a pilot study using this application with a group of adolescent and young adults with T1 diabetes. One interesting finding from the study was a positive correlation between improvements in blood glucose control and how socially connected a participant was.

But we still didn’t have an effective way to connect individuals with an educator or dietitian. To help us do this we partnered with Flipside Media. Flipside developed both Chronicle Diabetes and AADE7, the two diabetes education electronic record systems used by the American Diabetes Association and the American Association of Diabetes Educators respectively. Working with Flipside we developed an electronic health record system designed to deliver nutrition counseling and diabetes education. Now we could close the loop between the health professional and their patient. The technology enabled sharing of data and communication for ongoing counseling and coaching. We called the system Connect & Coach.

In our original research, we discovered weak or missing links in a typical self-management program. Our technology was now capable of repairing many of those links, but we needed a way to deploy it. Delivering nutrition counseling and diabetes education services in retail supermarkets and pharmacies seemed like the perfect solution. We learned that retailers were hiring registered dietitians and certified diabetes educators to deliver services to their customers. This was a way for the retailer to participate in the growing demand for health & wellness services, differentiate themselves, improve customer loyalty, and drive purchasing of healthy food.

Unlike the clinic, the retailer did not have legacy information systems to manage this kind of service. We worked closely with one of the countries largest supermarket chains to adapt our system to fit their specific workflows and information needs. Our technology, designed to meet the needs of a health professional and their patient now also met the needs of a supermarket retailer. This included a connection to their customer loyalty program, integration with their web site, specific features to support in-store education activities not available in a clinical setting, and more.

Connect & Coach is ready to help any of the 36,000 supermarket stores around the country deliver quality nutrition counseling and diabetes education to their customers, get reimbursed by insurers, and measure the change in consumer purchasing behavior and health outcomes. This is a sustainable delivery model, because reimbursement is available, but the real value to the retailer is improved customer loyalty and increased consumption of higher value healthy food items. It creates convenience for consumers as well—the supermarket is convenient, it’s a place they already frequent, and parking is free. Finally, it doesn’t matter where you get your education or nutrition plan, you will eventually end up in the food aisles of your local grocer, facing 30,000 food choices. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had your personal dietitian there beside you to help navigate the choices and implement your plan for a healthier lifestyle?

About the Author

Paul Sandberg is the CEO of PHRQL. Paul was an original member of the PHRQL team at Carnegie Mellon University, and he brings an outside perspective to health care efficiency improvement.

This year’s challenge asked innovators to think creatively about how best to harness data to address diabetes in the US. The Data Design Diabetes process is geared toward fast learning, and we saw the five finalist teams make progress at lightening speed throughout the course of the Challenge. It was exciting to watch the teams present an incredibly innovative group of diverse solutions that showed potential to improve health outcomes for people living with diabetes. It’s amazing how much ground the teams were able to cover in the span of just a few months.

The CDC estimates that by the year 2050, one in three Americans will have diabetes, and an epidemic this massive in scale calls for unprecedented levels of rapid innovation. Connect & Coach™ has shown tremendous potential to impact diabetes care by shifting nutrition counseling to the communities where it is needed most. I was impressed by the team’s mission to not just create an app, but an ecosystem for improving health outcomes through its platform at both the clinical and consumer level. I’m eager to watch as the team continues to cultivate its solution.

This year’s winner announcement marks another milestone for Sanofi US in supporting entrepreneurship to foster innovations in diabetes. Past winners of Data Design Diabetes, Ginger.io and n4a Diabetes Care Center, have achieved enduring growth and success following their participation in the Challenge. I’m confident that Connect & Coach™ will be no different, and look forward to watching their next steps.

Join me in congratulating Connect & Coach™ as they continue to make improvements in data-driven diabetes care! Stay tuned to the blog for the story behind their solution.

ABOUT Michele Polz

As Head of Patient Insights US Diabetes, Michele is respon­si­ble for iden­ti­fy­ing and understanding the true needs of people living with Diabetes. She specifically focuses on insights that can be tested and validated through existing solutions: Marketing, Value Added and Commercial solutions. Michele is an advo­cate for putting the patient first.

In 2011, Michele launched Data Design Diabetes, a next-generation innovation chal­lenge that brings together the rich­ness of open data, the values of human-centered design, and the leading-edge method­ol­ogy of the top inno­va­tion accelerators.

Prior to her career with Sanofi, Michele served mul­ti­ple roles with Lexis-Nexis, over­see­ing client devel­op­ment mar­ket­ing, busi­ness analy­sis and per­for­mance man­age­ment, and direct mar­ket­ing. She is thrilled to bring an out­side per­spec­tive to the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and healthcare indus­try.

Spradlin started off the day’s events by quoting Kurt Vonnegut, who said, “I want to live out on the edge, because out on the edge, I can see things you can’t see from the center.” He went on to note that the HDC engages in challenges because, in his words, “They keep us on the edge.” Spradlin thanked Sanofi US for sponsoring the challenge, noting that challenges like Data Design Diabetes live at the edge of innovation, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in healthcare.

Sara Holoubek, CEO of Luminary Labs, then moved to the stage, beginning by noting that, “We’re living in a time in which the actors in our healthcare system can be both the beneficiaries and the benefactors.” Never has the ecosystem been more ripe for innovation, with an abundance of resources and new ideas to drive lasting change. Holoubek then dropped an impressive fact on the crowd: Past participants of the Sanofi US Data Design Diabetes Innovation Challenge have collectively raised $23MM in capital. Wow!

Allazo Health was the first finalist team to hit the stage. Cliff Jones, CEO, explained how the team uses data to predict which patients won’t take their medicine and determine the best way to encourage those patients to follow a prescribed routine. He noted that non-adherence is a $290 billion problem today, and that the team combines big data and analytics with industry expertise to create an individualized analytics service. The Allazo Health Adherence Forecast predicts the future behavior of any patient by learning directly from that patient and from data about other patients with similar demographics and behavioral profiles. Jones noted that while the team’s solution targets middle-aged and elderly patients, the team spent time learning from people who had Type I diabetes as children, to learn about they could apply their technology to children and their caregivers as well.

Paul Sandberg, from Connect & Coach, was up next, and started by posing a question to the audience, “Would you prefer to meet your personal trainer at the gym or at the hospital?” The answer is simple. We should be sending people who need nutrition counseling to the supermarket, he asserted, noting that in a recent survey, 30% of supermarkets indicated that they actually want  to be providing nutrition counseling to their customers. Connect & Coach does just that; as Sandberg described, the team’s solution shifts nutrition counseling out into the community. In his words, “we have more than an app, we have an ecosystem,” for keeping people engaged with their nutrition and health.

MediSapien followed up next, with James Maisel, MD, starting off by noting that, ”There is no population that needs more data than diabetic patients.” The team indicated that 1.2 billion unstructured health records, are “dark matter” that is inaccessible to drive new insight to help patients. MediSapien’s clinical data repository unlocks this data, making sense of it, in order to identify people with symptoms of diabetes who are undiagnosed, giving critical data about those people to healthcare providers who can intervene with resources to delay the onset of diabetes.

Nuduro was the next team to present, and began by sharing the team’s three-pronged approach to improving diabetes care: take control, get personal, get connected. Nuduro’s web and mobile platform fits seamlessly into someone’s life, allowing patients to self-report energy level and glucose level prior to a meal, tying this data to food consumption to help people make better choices and lead healthier lives. It’s the “Pandora of Food”. Nuduro follows up post-meal with a text message, as a non-obtrusive way to collect data, to help patients understand what foods work well for them. Finally, the team noted that it’s often tough for patients with diabetes to find people in their lives who can relate to the unique challenges they face. Nuduro connects patients with people who can help celebrate their successes and overcome struggles. The team closed by sharing that they are focused on partnering with healthcare systems, doctors and dieticians to create positive health outcomes.

GoCap’s James White closed the finalist team presentations, describing how the team hopes to make diabetes treatment more efficient and effective. White noted that in the EU and US, over 10 million people living with diabetes use insulin injection pens, often injecting multiple times per day. White asserted that tracking data around when and why the patients use insulin injections is currently a cumbersome process, that relies on manual reporting methods. Data that could often be incredibly valuable to healthcare providers is lost during this process. To solve this problem, GoCap is the first wireless tracking monitor for insulin injection pens. Injection data is passed to a patient’s mobile phone from the insulin pen cap for real-time monitoring and data trends that can be shared with clinicians.

Throughout the presentations, judges {insert names + links to Twitter handles} were at the ready, asking tough questions that kept the finalist teams on their toes, probing for more information about each solution. Twitter was abuzz as hundreds of people tuned into the livestream and people watching along at Health Datapalooza shared insight from the presentations.

The energy around Demo Day is just getting started. Help decide the Fan Favorite by sharing your favorite team by text or Twitter to cast your vote. Voting will remain open on June 3rd until 6:00 PM EST:

• TEXT: 22333 the name of your favorite team

• TWEET: @poll the name of your favorite team: AllazoEngine, ConnectCoach, GoCap, MediSapien, Nuduro

The excitement continues tomorrow morning when the Fan Favorite is announced, and the overall winner of the 2013 Data Design Diabetes Innovation Challenge – Prove It! is announced and awarded $100,000 to further develop its solution. Follow www.redesigningdata.com/ddd to stay tuned for the news!

The teams have been immersed in their solutions over the past several months, collaborating with mentors, attending an Innovators’ Bootcamp, and perfecting their pitches. All the action of Demo Day is right at your fingertips – watch live online as they reveal their data-driven solutions to improve diabetes care at the nation’s premier healthcare innovation event.

Watch Online

Visit www.datadesigndiabetes.com to tune in to the event livestream beginning today at 10:10 AM EST. Watch the excitement of Demo Day right from your home or office.

Follow on Twitter

Join the conversation on Twitter by following @DDDiabetes and the challenge hashtag, #DDDiabetes, for live updates on the presentations throughout the event.

Vote for the Fan Favorite

Your vote counts! Help decide the Fan Favorite by sharing your favorite team.

Two ways to cast your vote:

 1) TEXT: 22333 the name of your favorite team

 2) TWEET: @poll the name of your favorite team

AllazoEngine
ConnectCoach
GoCap
MediSapien
Nuduro

Voting will remain open on June 3rd from 11:00 AM EST to 6:00 PM EST.

Following Demo Day, on June 4th, one winner will be announced and awarded $100,000. Be sure to check back in on the Data Design Diabetes website and follow Data Design Diabetes on Twitter for Challenge updates!

One of the most valuable aspects of Data Design Diabetes is the opportunity for the finalists to work with a team of expert mentors to hone their solutions leading up to Demo Day. The finalists also attended an Innovators’ Bootcamp for three immersive days of rapid iteration with a focus on human-centered design.

From April 26 – 28, the finalists gathered in San Francisco to participate in a series of workshops and presentations. The weekend kicked off with several exercises to encourage teams to think critically about different methodologies that incorporate empathy and human-centered approaches into product design, and to ask the right questions to identify the best features for an ideal user experience. Members of each team worked in pairs and small groups during these activities, enabling all of the finalist teams to interact with each other, and exposing everyone to different perspectives.

Participants also had the opportunity to hear from design experts and people living with diabetes. The speakers shared insight into the best ways to incorporate data and design to advance their products; Jennifer van der Meer (Luminary Labs) explained how to translate knowledge into action, highlighting the fact that “data is not a business model,” and David Fore (Lybba), a leader in interaction design, talked about the importance of the design process in advancing healthcare. During several poignant sessions, people living with diabetes relayed their experiences about their everyday realities and the biggest challenges they face in managing diabetes.

Finally, the teams took part in a round-robin exercise, during which each team met with an adviser for 20 minutes to discuss their concept and receive feedback, before moving on to the next adviser. Teams were quick to incorporate the feedback from one adviser into their pitch with the next. After the round-robin, the teams gave a final presentation to the entire group, during another interactive feedback session.

In just a short period of time, the teams made tremendous progress in developing their concepts. Despite the fact that the finalists are ultimately competing for the grand prize, it was incredible to witness the sense of community developed among the teams in the spirit of entrepreneurship.

All the hard work pays off on June 3, 2013! Join us in Washington, DC or tune in to www.datadesigndiabetes.com to watch the finalist teams present their concepts to the judges on the mainstage of Health Datapalooza IV.

Since April, each team has participated in a 3-day Innovators’ Bootcamp in San Francisco, and has collaborated with expert mentors to accelerate the development of its solution. Demo Day features high-stakes startup pitches and passion for healthcare, showcasing each team’s data-driven solution to help improve diabetes care in the United States.

Join us as we discover how each concept has evolved over the past two months, and enjoy a unique glimpse into the innovative approaches each team is using to potentially help millions of Americans living with diabetes. There are so many ways to get involved!

1. Attend in Person

There’s still time to register for Health Datapalooza IV, the nation’s premier healthcare innovation event. Demo Day will take place on the mainstage on the first day of the conference.

When: June 3, 2013 (Demo Day presentations: 10:10 – 11:10 AM)

Where: OMNI Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC

RSVP: http://healthdatapalooza.eventbrite.com/

 2. Watch Online

Can’t attend in person? Tune in to www.datadesigndiabetes.com to watch a livestream of the presentation from your home or office!

3. Attend a Viewing Party

Capture the in-person excitement by attending a Demo Day Viewing Party, joining other people in your city to watch as the finalists present. Follow the Data Design Diabetes blog to learn about viewing parties happening near you! Interested in hosting a viewing party? Email info@datadesigndiabetes.com.

Following Demo Day, on June 4th, one winner will be announced and awarded $100,000. Be sure to check back in on the Data Design Diabetes website and follow Data Design Diabetes on Twitter for Challenge updates!

Reality DDD: Behind the Scenes with the Finalists

A lot goes on between the finalist announcement and the culmination of each team’s hard work on Demo Day. Reality DDD will showcase what’s happening in the background during each stage of the challenge, through individual interviews with the finalists that convey the motivations that inspired their concepts and continue to fuel their ambitions to improve healthcare. Get to know more about each team and their workspace through self-filmed videos, and learn more about each team’s unique perspective on the problem they’re solving. Teams will share the entrepreneurial toolkits they’ve relied on throughout the challenge to hone their solutions, providing context around the progress they’ve made over the last several months, and what they’ve learned along the way.

POV: Ask the Data Entrepreneur Series

The POV video series will launch in August 2013, featuring original video content from leading thinkers on the state of entrepreneurship in health – answering questions about data, design, and diabetes, among other topics and pressing issues. Stay tuned to get inspired!

Data Design Diabetes is taking a closer look at what happens behind-the-scenes to shape healthcare innovation. Visit http://www.datadesigndiabetes.com to join the conversation!

Everything has been building up to this day—don’t miss out on the exciting opportunity to see the teams’ top-quality, high-stakes presentations. Since April, the finalists have been hard at work while collaborating with expert mentors to refine their concepts.

There are a number of ways to participate in Demo Day:

1. Attend in Person

There’s still time to register for Health Datapalooza IV, the nation’s premier healthcare innovation event. Demo Day will take place on the mainstage on the first day of the conference.

When: June 3, 2013 (Demo Day presentations: 10:10 – 11:10 AM EST)

Where: OMNI Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC

RSVP: http://healthdatapalooza.eventbrite.com/

2. Watch Online

Can’t attend in person? Tune in to www.datadesigndiabetes.com to watch a livestream of the presentations from your home or office!

3. Attend a Viewing Party

Capture the in-person excitement by attending a Demo Day Viewing Party, joining other people in your city to watch as the finalists present. Follow the Data Design Diabetes blog to learn about viewing parties happening near you! Interested in hosting a viewing party? Email info@datadesigndiabetes.com.

Following Demo Day, on June 4th, one winner will be announced and awarded $100,000. Be sure to check back in on the Data Design Diabetes website and follow Data Design Diabetes on Twitter for Challenge updates!

The breadth of this year’s mentors’ expertise spans business, healthcare, technology, and open data. We’re truly fortunate to have such prolific industry leaders on board. So without further ado, meet the mentors!

Aaron Goldmuntz, Senior Director, Business Development and Strategy, West Health

Aaron is the Senior Director, Strategy & Ecosystem Engagement for the Gary and Mary West Wireless Health Institute.  Aaron led business development for CardioNet Inc., which became a public company in 2008.  At Guidant Corporation, now Boston Scientific, he focused on applications of heart failure management.  He also has worked as a healthcare management consultant, helping improve profitability for acute care institutions.  Aaron received a BA in Biochemistry from the University of Colorado, a MHSA from the University of Michigan School of Public Health, and an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

Aaron’s areas of expertise are business planning, business development, and strategy. He also has healthcare-specific experience with standards, regulatory pathways, and reimbursement.

John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer, Sage Bionetworks

John Wilbanks is the Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks and a Senior Fellow in Entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. He has worked at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the World Wide Web Consortium, the US House of Representatives, and Creative Commons. John is a past affiliate of MIT’s Project on Mathematics and Computation and also started a bioinformatics company called Incellico, which is now part of Selventa.  He sits on the Advisory Boards for Boundless Learning, Genomic Arts, Curious, GenoSpace, Patients Like Me, and Genomera, and is Special Advisor on the Research Commons to the University of California San Francisco’s Clinical Translational Science Institute. John holds a degree in Philosophy from Tulane and studied modern letters at the Sorbonne.

John’s areas of expertise include open content, open data, open innovation systems, entrepreneurship, and bioinformatics.

Paul Penta, Director, Joslin Center for Diabetes

Paul is a leader in healthcare IT strategy and management with a strong focus in diabetes and chronic disease. Currently, Paul leads the efforts of Joslin Diabetes Center to use technology to help more people with diabetes. This initiative, Joslin Everywhere, is a broad concept that incorporates clinical assessment, proprietary analytical algorithms, and targeted clinical response. As project manager, Paul expertly develops the direction and necessary relationships to bring to market a novel healthcare IT platform with a sustainable business model.

Paul’s areas of expertise include business modeling and strategy, diabetes care, and patient experience.

Glen Moy, Senior Program Officer, Better Chronic Disease Care Program, California Healthcare Foundation

Glen is a senior program officer for the Foundation’s Better Chronic Disease Care program, which focuses on improving clinical outcomes and quality of life for Californians with chronic diseases. He manages projects that expand adoption of health information technology to improve care and promote greater efficiency in the health care system. Moy has extensive experience with health information technology, including health information exchange, interoperability, electronic health record systems, and electronic prescribing systems. He previously served as director of health informatics for the California Prison Health Care Receivership, where he was principal solution architect for the receivership’s health information technology efforts.

Glen’s areas of expertise include electronic health records, data integration, and health information exchange and interoperability.

Andrew Schechterman, User Experience Architect

Andrew Schechterman, Ph.D. is a user experience architect, designer, researcher and strategist with a secondary proficiency in healthcare (medical psychology, behavioral medicine). His expertise is uncovering, understanding and designing for core human variables (intellect, emotion, behavior) that determine how people adopt products and services in the context of their daily lives. Serving as a teammate, mentor, manager, director or principal, he’s collaborated with organizations such as Black & Decker, Campbell’s Soup Company, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mercy St. John’s Health and TriZetto. His human centered methods and case studies have been presented at conferences, published in design management journals, and cited in articles written by his peers. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Kansas, graduate studies and internships-residencies at Ball State University and the University of Utah.

Andrew’s areas of expertise include design planning and strategy for integrated products and services (analog-digital). His secondary expertise is medical psychology and behavioral medicine.

Their mentorship, in combination with the exceptional passion and talent of the finalist teams, promises to make a fantastic set of presentations at Demo Day. To keep up to date with the latest Data Design Diabetes news, follow the Challenge on Twitter and Facebook, or visit www.redesigningdata.com/ddd!

AllazoEngine

Allazo Health is a healthcare analytics company that solves the problem of medication non-adherence for people with diabetes. The AllazoEngine leverages existing member data to both anticipate which patients will not take their medications and to predict the most effective interventions to influence each of those patients to take their medication.

Connect & Coach™

Connect & Coach™ enables cost effective regular interaction between Registered Dietitians (RD) and Certified Diabetes Educators (CDE), and their clients. Designed for the retail supermarket or pharmacy setting, Connect & Coach™ is the first hybrid clinical & consumer application for RD’s & CDE’s to perform Diabetes Self-Management Education (DSME) and Medical Nutrition Therapy (MNT) services in the community where it’s needed.

The GoCap is a replacement pen cap for prefilled insulin pens that can read dose amounts and times, and communicate wirelessly via Bluetooth to a mobile phone or connected glucometer. The information can be used for personal learning moments, high-level trend analysis, and population-level analyses that may benefit healthcare at the organizational level.

MediSapien Diabetic Clinical Data Repository

MediSapien, an enterprise-class web-based platform, accepts isolated silos of unstructured data including dictation, transcribed text, legacy data, and semi-structured EHR text, and converts it into fully-coded structured data. MediSapien empowers healthcare analytics for case management, pharmaceutical studies, biosurveillance, trend analysis, and academic research and is highly customizable for diabetes management.

Just as Pandora chooses songs for customers based on their learned musical tastes, Nuduro will provide home and on-the-go meal recommendations that match customers’ taste and lifestyle with their unique nutritional needs, allowing them to improve their health without sacrificing their personal relationship with food.

The Challenge judges selected each finalist team based on their solution’s ability to demonstrate evidence-based outcomes, provide a data-driven tool to members of the healthcare ecosystem, enable data-driven decision-making, and utilize the latest methodologies in the field of data science to achieve these ends.

Last year’s Demo Day was one of the most exciting aspects of the Challenge – healthcare enthusiasts from across the nation held viewing parties in Boston, Cincinnati, Tempe, San Antonio, and Washington, DC to watch the finalists present their concepts. Crowds were glued to the livestream with eager anticipation, Twitter was flooded with reactions and commentary on the finalists, and some parties even cheered throughout the entire event. This year, we’re taking Demo Day to the preeminent healthcare event of the year, Health Datapalooza IV in Washington, DC on June 3, 2013.

In the coming weeks, as they prepare to take the mainstage at Demo Day, each finalist will be teamed up with expert mentors to help refine their concept. In addition, they’ll learn the art of a human-centered approach to problem solving during the Innovators’ Bootcamp, a three-day accelerator program at the end of April in San Francisco. To continue to track the excitement, follow the challenge on Twitter or Facebook, or visit www.redesigningdata.com/ddd!