One Drop: We are at LAUNCH!

We were invited to come and present at LAUNCH on March 4, 2015 and we are excited to show everyone what we've been working on.

We've been asked a few questions and I thought it would be helpful to share them:

Briefly, what are you making?

One Drop is a diabetes management platform that helps people navigate diabetes together.

Why this problem, and why are you the right person to solve it?

Health care is one of the last areas to benefit from democratized data. It's time to change this. Diabetes, in particular, is the largest and the most expensive societal health problem we have today - it affects 30 million Americans (or, 9.4% of the US population), and 345 million people worldwide. It costs Americans about half a trillion dollars per year. But today, healthcare delivery is more akin to "sick care." When you're sick they treat you, but they don't really do much to support you to make better choices that keep you well. With diabetes this is a disaster: The most important factors for care relate to behavior modification and making better choices before someone has an adverse incident. For me this problem is a personal one. I was diagnosed with Type 1 LADA diabetes about 18 months ago. Given the rise of quantified-selfers, the Internet of Things, more and more big data, and the wearables movement, my first thought was that there must be people working on all kinds of modern, efficient, and lifestyle-oriented gear to help people measure, track, and manage their lives with diabetes, as well as share the health data with everyone else. I've had a long career in digital transformation and our team has deep experience in big health data analytics. Drawing on that, we created One Drop to empower people to make better choices with real health data. By providing gear, supplies, and a mobile management platform, we hope to radically simplify their lives in the process, One Drop at a time.

Once this is out in the world publicly, what are you hoping to learn or achieve?

Once we launch we want people to sign up for access at onedrop.today, and then, of course, we want to see people using the platform and immediately benefitting. Hopefully, our solutions are delightful, beautiful, empowering, and keep people mindful of how their choices impact their health. But I'm certain we have lots to learn and we're dedicated to relentlessly improving the platform and finding ways to make living life with diabetes easier. We're hoping people will help us do that. We think that data-driven self-care and the idea of empowering people with crowdsourced, real-life, health data will be key in the movement toward more accountability and personal choice in consumer-oriented care. We also think we'll be able to apply what we learn about managing diabetes to other chronic care diseases in the future, hopefully helping everyone become more motivated and empowered to live healthier - and ultimately happier - lives.