5 ms·

I just looked at your profile and saw what your company is working on. Very interesting! My wife and I were recently in a situation where I'd wondered why the

by kelp 5y ago

I just looked at your profile and saw what your company is working on. Very interesting! My wife and I were recently in a situation where I'd wondered why the hospital didn't have such a thing! My wife has T1D and we just spent 3 days in the hospital for the birth of our daughter. The most scary and frustrating part of the whole process was my wife's diabetes management. She uses a Tandem T:Slim and a Dexcom G6, and generally has very tight control. But the hospital insisted on taking over during active labor, and we had a very tense conversation with a tactless perinatologist about it. They wanted to put her on an (IIRC) intermediate acting insulin drip, and rely on finger pricks. We were very worried that they would basically be following a canned script and would end up yo-yoing her blood glucose during labor. We ended up getting our OB to convince the completely tactless perinatologist that we'd define "active labor" as actually pushing. So we delayed getting her off her pump/CGM and self management for quite a while. And by then we'd also fortunately convinced our nurse who was responsible for the insulin that we knew what we were doing. So she consulted with my wife (literally between contractions and pushing) on any insulin delivery. They adjusted the plan in real time based on what my wife said they should do. Had they just followed the script/protocol the hospital had, we probably would have seen them give my wife way too much insulin. Then for the rest of our stay, the hospital insisted on checking her blood glucose with finger pricks, though she was self treating with her pump. It really felt like it was for their benefit and not hers. It was really clear that literally every person we interacted with (except maybe the tactless perinatologist) knew less about T1D than we did. They are much more setup for poorly managed gestational diabetes. Watching the hospital try to manage her T1D made us feel like we were jumping back in time a decade or two. And this was one of the big, nice, (and expensive) hospitals in San Francisco. If she would have had a c-section or some other situation where she wasn't able to help direct her diabetes management, I'm kind of afraid of what could have happened. It really made me wonder why there wasn't an artificial pancreas type system for hospitals. Now I see that someone is actually working on that!

idealmedtech 5y ago
Sorry to hear about your terrible experience, which is unfortunately all too common when it comes to glucose control. We're on _exactly_ the same page. When people really get what we're doing, often times the reaction is "wait, that doesn't exist yet?" The reasons are complex, and there's lots of hurdles to overcome (IMT was formed in 2014, in development since 2007, we're only just now starting human trials), but we believe that there are millions of people every year who, like your wife if you hadn't spoken up, slip through the cracks and suffer from poor glucose control in the hospital. Glucose control has the potential to be the next penicillin, in terms of how broadly applicable it is, and how drastically it reduces mortality across a whole range of conditions. We're pretty excited about it!
Guidii 5y ago
Sorry to hear about hat - it must have added a huge amount of stress. I had a similar experience thirty years ago, after being hospitalized for ketoacidosis. (Fun fact: As a DKA patient, I found myself next to an attempted suicide, and noticed that med staff treated us both with disdain. Seriously bad way of managing health outcomes. But I digress.) The experience in question was a doctor-prescribed insulin injection that the nurse insisted on injecting. I objected, but was unable to be heard. I calmly demanded that the nurse return at 11PM with orange juice to counteract the reaction that was inevitably coming. She did, and the crisis was averted. The next day the doctor prescribed that I could manage my own dosage. Diabetes management is remarkably complex, and few medical folks know how to do it.

by kelp 5y ago

idealmedtech 5y ago

Sorry to hear about your terrible experience, which is unfortunately all too common when it comes to glucose control. We're on _exactly_ the same page. When people really get what we're doing, often times the reaction is "wait, that doesn't exist yet?" The reasons are complex, and there's lots of hurdles to overcome (IMT was formed in 2014, in development since 2007, we're only just now starting human trials), but we believe that there are millions of people every year who, like your wife if you hadn't spoken up, slip through the cracks and suffer from poor glucose control in the hospital. Glucose control has the potential to be the next penicillin, in terms of how broadly applicable it is, and how drastically it reduces mortality across a whole range of conditions. We're pretty excited about it!

Guidii 5y ago

Sorry to hear about hat - it must have added a huge amount of stress. I had a similar experience thirty years ago, after being hospitalized for ketoacidosis. (Fun fact: As a DKA patient, I found myself next to an attempted suicide, and noticed that med staff treated us both with disdain. Seriously bad way of managing health outcomes. But I digress.) The experience in question was a doctor-prescribed insulin injection that the nurse insisted on injecting. I objected, but was unable to be heard. I calmly demanded that the nurse return at 11PM with orange juice to counteract the reaction that was inevitably coming. She did, and the crisis was averted. The next day the doctor prescribed that I could manage my own dosage. Diabetes management is remarkably complex, and few medical folks know how to do it.