Blue Cross to Pilot Diabetes Smart Phone Application

260 patients will be a part of the program and I guess they will all need to have or will be supplied a cell phone to participate, information goes to the physician and to the payer for study of the results and may connect to a live person who is assigned to coach and connect immediately upon troubled information...it will remind you to enter the information and the information on the patient readings goes to the phone from the Blue Tooth device used to create the readings...and if things are out of line a virtual coach comes on immediately with additional information to contact your physician or will provide formatted help on how to avoid a reoccurrence. The virtual coach will also give you immediately nutritional reading material on suggested diet habits as well..this product is focused for patients with diabetes 2...looks good in design, but how much information will this phone shove in your direction and how much will be read by patients, in other words is there a balance between helpful information and perhaps an overload for what one can deal with per incident...I guess the pilot program will give the answers....and of course this will cut costs for healthcare...as stated by the web site...BD

Owings Mills, Md.-based CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield will conduct a pilot study in which it will offer 260 patients mobile phone-based diabetes management software from WellDoc Communications Inc., Baltimore. The 12-month study seeks to evaluate the effectiveness of such disease management software on reducing Ac1 hemoglobin levels of patients with Type 2 diabetes.

The application enables diabetic patients to enter their blood sugar readings into their mobile phone and receive real-time feedback on what they should eat and other ways they can help stabilize it. The software also can alert patients when they need to test their levels. Further, the application sends the data to the vendor's servers, where it is analyzed and can be accessed by the patient's physicians and disease management case workers. It also can support glucose meters that can send data via Bluetooth wireless technology.