For a couple of days during the second week of April, Mariana and I had the opportunity to attend the 2016 Medtronic Diabetes Advocate Forum in Northridge, California, representing Diabetes Hands Foundation. This Forum is a yearly event where Medtronic invites a group of diabetes advocates and bloggers, from diabetes online community, to its headquarters to meet its diabetes team, and brainstorm with each other. For the first time, advocates from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Puerto Rico, Brazil and Colombia were side by side, participating in an event like this and learning more about the challenges of living with diabetes in other countries.
What we learned from the experience?
Although we had already met Louis Dias at the 2015 AADE conference in New Orleans, it was very interesting to learn more about his role as Chief Patient Officer. What is his primary job? Louis is an intermediary between users and the company, and he takes our opinions, suggestions, and comments back to the executive team. Louis told us; "Patients stories are valuable and we want to give them a voice.â As an organization created by people touched by diabetes, DHF understands the importance an open dialog and the exchange of ideas, questions and concerns can have in promoting improvements on patients services and products.
In terms of the information on upcoming products:
Medtronic talked about the 670g MiniMed insulin pump with the Enlite 3 sensor, a close loop system that can make decisions to prevent hypoglycemia, thanks to its algorithms. We listened to the experiences of a participant in the MiniMed 670g trial, who told us that she was very comfortable with the hypoglycemia prevention and reduction.
They are close to beginning the pivotal study required by the FDA to submit the necessary approval for the fifth generation of sensors, which can be worn for 10 days and will only require one daily calibration.
One interesting concept that Medtronic also mentioned during the Forum was the combination of infusion and sensor in the same insertion. This is something we read about some time ago and then Medtronic went radio silent. They are investing money and committed to improve it and bring it to market. This new insertion, can be used for up to seven days.
They talked about Personal Diabetes Assistant, an application Medtronic is working with IBM Watson. This application takes your data feed and it can offer retrospective analysis to identify potential hypoglycemic predictions and information in real time. We continue to learn that the data is very valuable and that using it will help us greatly in managing diabetes.
An interesting concept that was mentioned was a finance program to purchase an insulin pump. Medtronic did not give much details about the program, but we know that this concept is being introduced in Mexico during this month.
We would like to thank Medtronic for their invitation to the Diabetes Advocate Forum. Medtronic covered our travel expenses, lodging and food. Opinions are our own.