February 4, 2011

New Study - Context Matters.

Who Would Have Guessed It?

Roche offered an opportunity to hear the results of a new research study on T2 and self monitoring. Dr. Andreas Stuhr was going to be presenting and being a fan of Andreas, I joining the conference call this afternoon.

This was a study of type 2 diabetics who do not use insulin. There were two groups studied. Both groups had similar access to testing equipment, doctors and heath care visits. The difference was one group used a paper based tool to put the data from blood test into context. Both groups lowered their A1C. So being in a study and having access to a meter and doctors lowers A1C. The group with a structure tool to collect data and talk about it with their health care team had a more significant drop in A1c than the control.

The tool is simply a paper form. It is available free here.  You don’t need a Roche meter to use it but you need a meter. The tool itself is not the conversations with a health care provider.  It may be a place to start.

So while it sounds a lot like "we hold there truths to be self evident" putting context around the data you collect can provide better results.

Context Matters.




/begin disclosureI have been to Roche’s diabetes social media summits. They pay my way. I speak my mind. I suspect there are still photos of my sign from last summer's conference floating around with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back to be used as evidence against me. (Feel free to link the photo in a comment if you have it, or Alice's Restaurant for the circles and arrows.  As a hint the sign was two words and the words had the same first letters as Blood Sugar.)  Roche invited me back - go figure. They doesn’t push product info at us. So much so that as a group we expressed and interest in hearing news from them. This call to the social media summit group was part of the sharing we asked for. 
/end disclosure

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