Have Diabetes, Will Travel

I’m pleased as punch to be representing ASweetLife this weekend at the Stanford Medicine 2.0 Conference! Besides the fact that Stanford is a beautiful campus and the sun is shining this weekend, the conference draws a fascinating intersection of scientists, techies, start-up entrepreneurs, doctors, and patients– so lots of good people all around.

The first day was a less formal “Summit,” with panels from a number of speakers representing each of the different contingents at this conference. A quick list of some things I found interesting:

• Why aren’t more doctors pursuing connected solutions to care management? A big part of it is the pricing model, according to Wendy Sue Swanson of SeattleMamaDoc: “The way we have defined it right now, there’s a doctor, and there’s a patient, and if they’re not in the same room together, we can’t bill for it.”
• A reoccurring theme is that technology uptake in medicine lags behind in part because of a risk-averse culture: “I would say medicine is slow because it is conservative,” said David Gaba, Associate Dean for Immersive and Simulation-based Learning at Stanford.
• Yet, according to Sean Handel of Epocrates, over 85% of doctors use smartphones, and, even more surprising: “Over 20% of physicians are carrying around iPads and using them.” And that number looks to be growing rapidly!
• Speaking of iPads, Apple totally owns this conference. iPhones, iPads, and MacBook Airs everywhere.
• Peter Binfield, publisher of the Open Access scientific journal PLoS ONE, predicts that in five to ten years, all scientific content will be open access (that is, published for free use, archived, and licensed for reuse). I’m a fan of what PLoS ONE is doing, but as Peter showed charts of the exponential increase in the number of journal articles being published, all I can think is, “Heavens! Who is going to curate all of this?” So, considering a career in data mining? Please forge ahead!
• A few members of the Crohn’s disease and Irritable Bowel Disease communities are here, representing their patient communities and their interest in connecting patients. Autoimmunity unite!

And, with some degree of pride, I’d like to lay claim to the fact that, despite having my iPhone out, I still use pen-and-paper. So, yes, this is about me:

And, finally, because I’m at Stanford, and it would be inappropriate to say this in the conference room, I’ll let it out here: Go Bears!

Karmel Allison

Karmel was born in Southern California, diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at the age of nine, and educated at UC Berkeley. Karmel now lives in San Diego with her husband, where she is loving the sunshine, working in computational biology at the University of California, San Diego, and learning to use the active voice when talking about her diabetes.

Karmel Allison

Karmel was born in Southern California, diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at the age of nine, and educated at UC Berkeley. Karmel now lives in San Diego with her husband, where she is loving the sunshine, working in computational biology at the University of California, San Diego, and learning to use the active voice when talking about her diabetes.