Video Chats Helping People Fight Diabetes.

reports on Virta Health, “one of a new crop of high-tech companies that have designed programs aimed at helping people prevent or even reverse their diabetes” through diet and drug recommendations. Daily, “patients use an app to upload their blood sugar levels, blood pressure, body weight and other measurements” that are monitored by a registered dietitian who checks in by phone or email. Initial results that examined the program’s impact on 241 Type 2 diabetics, published in the journal JMIR Diabetes in March, “found that 56 percent had lowered their blood sugar to nondiabetic levels after 10 weeks,” while about 90 percent had reduced or stopped their use of insulin altogether. Omada Health, another San Francisco start-up, targets the 86 million Americans who have pre-diabetes, training people to follow a diet and exercise program that “was shown in a large clinical trial sponsored by the National Institutes of Health to lower the risk of progression to diabetes by 58 percent.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/well/live/tackling-weight-loss-and-diabetes-with-video-chats.html