SweetSpot Diabetes Care, a Portland, Ore.-based company, will remotely monitor blood glucose levels in veterans with diabetes, beginning with a pilot in Dayton, Ohio. An award from the Department of Veteran Affair's industry innovation competition, known as VAi2, will pay for the initiative aimed at improving care and reducing complications.
Telemedicine is a focus of the VAi2 competition. The VA invites innovations that use technology to remotely serve veterans who have barriers to visiting major VA health centers including the 41 percent who live in rural settings.
VAi2 identifies, prioritizes, funds, tests, and deploys the most promising solutions to the VA's most important challenges. To date, 36 projects have been announced from approximately 10,000 entries.
With SweetSpot, veterans with diabetes can stay at home and send data from their blood glucose testing devices to VistA – the VA's electronic medical record system. Healthcare providers can monitor this data and will be alerted when readings indicate a patient may be headed for complications that arise when glucose levels are poorly controlled. SweetSpot's presentation of a patient's blood glucose data can also help a patient get care in a local setting with support from a specialist – lowering the cost of care while preserving the quality and improving convenience for the veteran.
"Our mission is to improve the lives of patients with diabetes and we are especially eager to do so for veterans," said Christopher Logan, chief executive officer of SweetSpot, "The VA is a leader in using information technology to improve healthcare while looking for efficiencies. We are excited to be working with them and look forward to serving the nearly one million veterans with diabetes."
SweetSpot Diabetes bills itself as a health data company focused on improving the use of data in the treatment of diabetes. The company specializes in turning raw output from patient devices into powerful information for researchers, health care providers and patients.
"Cloud computing holds tremendous promise for a huge, distributed medical system like the VA," said Adam Greene, SweetSpot founder and chief technology officer, "We look forward to being one of the first cloud technologies to be certified to operate by the VA."
