Passion will cure diabetes

Passion will cure diabetes.

But before that happens, that same kind of passion is already driving one father from Indianapolis to develop a remarkable online tool that’s helping people with diabetes better manage their health. Simply put, his start-up business empowers patients to effectively oversee their diabetes decision-making at no cost and gives doctors, hospitals, medical suppliers, and insurance companies a way to cut costs and be a part of that strategy.

Jim Jordan started s5health for his daughter Courtney, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes just before her 4th birthday a decade ago. Through the years, he’d become increasingly frustrated with how the existing management tools and software didn’t allow him to condense all of the data from different devices into one spot and easily understand where her trouble spots were. But it wasn’t just the numbers to this dad – it was knowing how he could help Courtney better manage her health.

About a year ago, he learned that his 12-year-old daughter’s kidneys were actually functioning at the level of a 25-year-old. That opened his eyes, and he soon began using his 30 years in the health care business intelligence market to come up with a way to help his daughter. Soon after, s5health was born and that led to its public launch early 2010.

Using a Business Intelligence platform, Jim – through his company Strategic Data Management – has launched a new web-based portal designed to help diabetics combine all of their insulin pump, blood meter, and CGM data into one place online and get that to their doctors quickly and efficiently. The company tagline is that this online tool “combines clinical, social, and behavioral aspects” in a way that hasn’t been done before. Specifically, this new is a day-to-day online management tool that helps diabetics understand their blood sugar numbers and how insulin, food and exercise affect those numbers. The portal supports all blood meter and pump types, which is something that isn’t currently out there because most are limited to particular company products. Both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetics can securely communicate with their physicians and nurses while also interacting online with other diabetics within their community or across the country. As the name hints, the portal is simple, strategic, smart, social, and self management - all in one place.

For the Jordan Family, the s5health resource has led to Courtney better managing her diabetes and being more “in range,” which means better overall health and less risk for complications in the future. She saw a decrease from being 83% high in the morning to 23% high, and from 70% high in the afternoons to 65% high. Her Hemoglobin A1c test that shows a three-month average of blood sugar level tests decreased by nearly an entire percentage point.

The point: s5health works.

“Managing diabetes is 90% information, so looking at the available information is critical to successfully managing this disease. This portal is just that,” Jim says. “Patients are excited about the easy-to-understand dashboards and reports, the secure communication between patient and physician, and the social aspect of connecting with one another to share stories.”

As someone who’s lived with Type 1 diabetes now for 26 years since the age of 5, I’m impressed by what s5health is doing. It crosses the lines we typically see created by companies who want to sell their own products and stop People with Diabetes from merging everything in the most efficient way. This makes doctors’ jobs more complicated and results in our needing to take up more of their time, effectively increasing the amount of claims our insurance carriers must shoulder and overall hiking up the costs of health care.

To me, s5health hits an unfilled-need of giving doctors a way to get all of that merged data in an efficient format that doesn't have to change based on the patient. But it’s about More Than Numbers, and allows everyone to more efficiently interact and pave the way to better health. The health care industry has a huge chance here to be a part of that.

s5health operates on a business model of selling this to the medical and service providers, to the device manufacturers, to the payers, but being free for the consumer. The vision is to work with providers and be able to use the system to submit a claim for the work that a doctor is doing on the portal as far as reviewing and managing data - since it's basically "free time" now built into general overhead costs. This would fall under telehealth rules of diabetes management preventive maintenance, and it'd help them get paid for their time.

Personally, I want my doctor and insurance company to use this. Most endocrinologists who treat diabetics spend only about 15 minutes with them every few months. They aren’t able to adequately review those months of data, and instead only see a snapshot of what might be happening in that patient’s D-Management. Compounding the issue is that each physician has a different system for patients sending in their information, and many still don’t receive it online but instead through paper logsheets that can be difficult for patients to use.

That is not good enough and we need a better way to communicate regularly with our physicians, particularly at a time when we’re experiencing significant decreases in the amount of endocrinologists and Certified Diabetes Educators nationally. That all means our current medical professionals are even more overbooked as diabetes grows, and we all need to help them.

We have another aspect to this all, too, one that deals specifically with the age-old struggle of getting Kids With Diabetes and even Adults With Diabetes to catalog their results. This was the toughest part for me growing up and even into adulthood, since I didn’t like writing my results down by hand and couldn’t find a software program to display that information in a way I could understand. This was counterproductive for me, since the more I see the numbers and can track the trends, the more accountable I am to myself and feel like I’m taking more ownership of my diabetes and overall health. As a way to get at that behavioral aspect and nudge the logging, s5health has been working to offer ways to “encourage” good behavior with rewards. For Courtney, Jim Jordan gave his daughter an iTunes song if she uploaded her blood test results adequately each week. Four weeks of results = four songs, costing this dad about $4. Plus a priceless reward of his daughter’s better health. A similar system is being worked into s5health for the future.

s5health is largely about Managing Numbers. But that’s a means to an end, and it goes beyond that data and even beyond diabetes to all other avenues of health care. This portal is about creating an online tool that connects all aspects of the management world, and empowers everyone to be a part of improving health and effectively managing costs and resources. To me, it’s about More Than Numbers – it’s about better health.


Michael is a 31-year-old writer and Diabetes Advocate who’s been living with Type 1 diabetes since the age of 5. By day, he is a newspaper journalist in Indiana. But in his spare time, he focuses his time and effort on Diabetes Advocacy operates a personal blog, The Diabetic’s Corner Booth. He also volunteers with local, national, and worldwide diabetes-related charities and initiatives and tries to help fellow diabetics better Live With Diabetes. His personal and professional worlds aren’t connected, except that Michael takes on both roles in whatever time is available in a given day. This is how he became involved with s5health, in which Michael now writes for a little each week in a strictly volunteer capacity. Originally from the Southeast Michigan area near Detroit, Michael and his wife Susanne have lived in Indianapolis since 2004.