Among all the semi-finalists for Sanofi’s Data Design Diabetes Demo Day, we think N4A Diabetes Care Center was the most unexpected and confusing. N4A dates back to 1960′s legislation on aging, and is a loose affiliation of state agencies around aging. N4A literally stands for Advocacy, Actions, and Answers on Aging.

As Sandra Mark Woods explained in her presentation, they’re not an app, not software, nor offering live streaming, but they are a data-driven organization and “high-touch” in diabetes management. N4A is a Title VI organization that has been providing services in communities for decades. They are involved in Meals-on-Wheels, depression counseling, transport of patients to providers, and chronic disease management services. Millions use it, they have 800 million patient records and a diabetes index with 30 million maps.

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Next up in our coverage of semi-finalists for Sanofi’s Data Design Diabetes Demo Day is LiveHealth.

LiveHealth CEO Chris Gay started off by showing data that demonstrates that diabetes self-management can really help compliance and health outcomes — but education necessary for proper self-management requires 15 visits in the first year alone, which is too much for many patients, especially those without reliable transport or means.

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We think the most ambitious idea among semi-finalists for Sanofi’s Data Design Diabetes Demo Day came from EnduringFX, which used to be called Activity-based Integrated Data Model (seriously? another good idea on the name change, guys!)

EnduringFX’s president and founder, Jim Stritzinger, looks a bit like a young Tim cook. He’s from South Carolina, and a lot of EnduringFX’s activity is focused so far in that state. He began his pitch noting that American obesity is driving the terrible numbers we’re seeing in diabetes, as well as CHF and arthritis … 42% of the population is projected to be obese by 2030. He showed a heat map for how much of the US South is at risk for diabetes.

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Next up in our coverage of semi-finalists for Sanofi’s Data Design Diabetes Demo Day is GreenDot, which used to be called Diabetes 3.0 (good idea on the name change, guys!)

GreenDot was started by two UCSF endocrinologists – Jenise Wong and Aaron Neinstein. We believe they’re the only doctor-originated company in this bunch. They were frustrated, and their patients were frustrated, with the overwhelming amount of data generated by pumps and glucometers. Data in its own format, and in nonstandard layouts, is challenging for patients to interpret and difficult for doctors to compare.

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First up in our coverage of semi-finalists for Sanofi‘s Data Design Diabetes Demo Day is iRetainRx. Previous coverage here and here.

iRetainRx’s founder and CEO, David Parpart, began the pitch boldly, by saying, “We are going to save 500,000 lives this decade.” He then went on to describe how their interactive mobile system will allow caregivers, patients and pharmacists to collaborate on care plans. See, for every 100 prescriptions, only a fraction are filled, and only a fraction of those are even taken correctly. This attrition is particularly difficult with diabetes, where the regimens are complicated, the effect of the drugs can be hard to notice, and yet: noncompliance leads to huge extra social costs.

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What do one of the most recognizable doctors in America and a rapidly growing electronic medical record (EMR) start-up have in common? Apparently, a commitment to public health and fascination with health data. This past weekend Medgadget was invited to observe Dr. Mehmet Oz, of The Dr. Oz Show, team up with Practice Fusion to screen a few hundred Philadelphians at the Temple University School of Medicine. Dozens of physicians and medical students were on hand to provide a “15-minute physical” consisting of BMI, blood pressure, and waist circumference measurements as well as lab tests including a lipid panel (HDL, LDL, and triglycerides) and blood glucose, made possible by Alere‘s mobile lab device, Cholestech LDX, which synced directly to Practice Fusion’s EMR. This allowed Practice Fusion to generate a real-time “report card” for Philadelphia, which Dr. Oz then presented to Mayor Michael Nutter in addition to taking the Mayor’s blood pressure (135/80) and waist circumference.

We had the opportunity to catch up with Practice Fusion as well as Dr. Oz and his medical unit’s clinical event director, Mike Hoaglin (pictured above with Dr. Oz), to ask them about the screening and what excites them about collecting city-wide data.

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During our recent tour of Northeast Indiana, we had the opportunity to visit F Cubed (F3), a startup supported by the Innovation Park at Notre Dame. F3 is developing a portable device that allows for rapid detection of DNA of harmful pathogens in under 30 minutes.

We’ve written about a number of similar lab-on-chip detectors, but what sets the F3 system apart is its biochip technology. F3′s biochip, which is smaller than the size of a thumbnail, allows for the detection of multiple pathogens without the use of expensive and complicated optical devices. According to F3,

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Back in February, we wrote about Altapure‘s adaptation of military sonar technology to sterilize clinical environments. During our recent trip to northeast Indiana, we had the opportunity to visit Altapure’s home on the campus of the University of Notre Dame.

Since our last mention, Altapure has been able to not only get their product on the market, but is already working on a newer version of the device that clocks in at 1/3 the size of the current model but has the same power.

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This past week, Medgadget was invited to take a tour of Northeast Indiana, a region of ten counties surrounding and encompassing the city of Fort Wayne. You might already know about Warsaw, about 30 miles from Fort Wayne, as the headquarters for DePuy, Biomet, Zimmer, and a number of other companies that make the city the leading orthopedic device leader in the world. However, the rest of Northeast Indiana has also been evolving into a thriving medical device manufacturing hub, as labor is available, land is plentiful, and the region is very open and friendly toward the medical device manufacturing industry. In fact, according to the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership, our host for the two day tour, the region has consistently been a leader in terms of dollars invested and jobs created in the industry. Over two days, we toured a number of different companies and talked to a number of executives about what makes their businesses successful and why they’re at a good place being in Northeast Indiana.

Our first stop was Micropulse, a contract manufacturer of implants and instruments for a number of large medical device clients. Micropulse was originally founded to produce parts for the automotive industry, but in the early 2000′s, founder and CEO Brian Emerick saw his business growing stagnant, and so he switched to medical devices and has never looked back since. What’s interesting about Micropulse is that its facilities are also headquarters to the OrthoVation Center, a new incubator for Emerick’s other medical product ventures. The OrthoVation Center currently is home to four companies: Del Palma Orthopedics, Nanovis, BioSpine, and Sites Medical.

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We here at Medgadget are huge fans of the innovative, but low-cost medical devices that undergraduate and graduate school students develop for their senior projects. We applaud the vision to distribute their devices to remote corners of the Earth to improve healthcare worldwide, but always wondered about how developing nations might best go about learning about these lifesaving technologies.

A group of students and researchers from the University of Michigan asked themselves that same question after realizing that no such comprehensive resource existed, and created the Global Health Compendium. The project is an open-source database hosted by popular wiki platform Appropedia, and focuses specifically on useful medical devices for developing countries. That means all the devices in the database are inexpensive and can be useful in countries lacking continuous electricity, replacement parts, clean water, and appropriate training. The devices in the database, approximately 100 so far, can be organized by disease treated, device status, and the region where the device has been tested or targeted.

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