How do you top the GlucoMON’s ease of use and effectiveness in changing behavior? With such a successful track record it’s hard to come up with the next great thing… and I think my team has done it again. Stay tuned for HEALTHIMO (launching January 1, 2010). Anyone want to take a guess?

As the Project Director of the soon to launch Healthy Families of South Texas community telehealth network, I’m proud to share important news about this new program which expands on our previous work funded in part by grants from the USDA. The project will launch with a community registry so everyone can participate; not just people with diabetes. Then in January we’ll launch the second tier which takes our profile based education to another level - a kind of diabetes version of Amazon’s expert profile based recommendations meets Facebook. The third tier involves working with pregnant mothers with diabetes of all types in the hopes of preventing serious complications. Here’s a quick overview for anyone interested in participating. Note that access to this program is being provided at no cost to the registered members and the 3 years of federal grant dollars means it will continue to enhance the lives of people in this part of Texas for many years to come.

What is the Healthy Families Program?

* HFSTX is an education and health monitoring community resource designed to establish a home based support network around people with diabetes and at risk for diabetes.

Program Goals:

* To improve self-care for patients and their families by increasing their knowledge of better lifestyle choices.

* To provide encouragement and reinforcement.

* To extend access to care into the home vs an unrealistic emphasis on office visits.

How does it work?

* Through Internet and cell phone technology and postcards, enroll patients and their families in the Healthy Families Registry.

* Over time, the Registry helps them to enhance individualized profiles making it possible for their team to receive personalized education and support via email, cell phone text messages and post cards in the mail according to their own preferences.

Check back in a week or two to find out the url for the online home for this program as this is still being decided.

We’re not silly enough to think that people will use something like this every day. However, we do know from experience that people in our programs like using this kind of tool during one of our Step Ups that last only a few days.

We also know that it has to be incredibly simple and the person using it has to get valuable feedback as a reward from using it. I think that’s what makes Zip It! different than other approaches. Since it’s part of our technology enhanced diabetes education and management programs, covered by a growing number of health plans including BlueCross BlueShield of Texas, we know when it gets used, how it gets used and we track the impact of using it.

So advanced, it’s simple.