http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/livongos-new-chief-medical-officer-lives-with-type-1-diabetes-too/
We"re always fascinated to hear how diabetes has influenced lives and careers, and put fellow PWDs (people with diabetes) on a professional path that helps them make a difference for all of us.
Dr. Jennifer Schneider is one of those D-peeps. Diagnosed at age 12, she became a physician and later found her way into the technology side of healthcare, working for startups like Castlight Health and then becoming part of the Doctor On Demand outfit that uses telemedicine to impact patient care.
In September, Jenny joined Livongo Health in California, a new glucose meter and diabetes care company that we introduced a year ago, with its sleek-looking new touchscreen smart meter called the InTouch.
Today we"re excited to bring you this Q&A with Jenny -- about how diabetes came into her life, influenced her professional career choices, and what she"s looking forward to most in her leadership role at Livongo.
An Interview with Dr. Jennifer Schneider of Livongo Health
DM) Congrats on the new position, Jenny! First up, can you tell us about your own diagnosis and how that led you to a career in medicine?
JS) I’m from the Midwest and had a very classic presentation of type 1, though at the time didn’t know anything about it. I was diagnosed at 12, was 5’7’’ and weighed probably just over 80 pounds.
When I was diagnosed I was sleeping in bed with jugs of water. So I went to the doctor’s office and ICU and was diagnosed. At that time, I used pork insulin and went to Mayo Health Clinic and had a wonderful endocrinologist, Dr. Roger Nelson, who’s still on staff there. From the early get-go as a 12-year-old, he clearly influenced my thinking to go to medical school. I used to say from an early age I wanted to become an endocrinologist, but frankly it’s because that’s what I have to do everyday. I attended medical school at Johns Hopkins and my residency at Stanford and really went more broadly into health services research.
How did you get into the healthcare technology world?
That happened through the position I was offered at Castlight Health, a cloud technology company founded in 2008 to enable employers to deliver world-class benefits to their people. I was just very excited to be able to join for a few reasons: as someone with diabetes and as a practitioner, I’ve always been struck by the amount of data that went unused in diabetes care. When I was in the intensive care unit, my job really was to synthesize data and come up with algorithms or insights. I kept thinking that could really be done from a machine, and then you could be spending more time with the patient while also leveraging those data analytics.
How did you get to Castlight, and what was tthe goal of your work there?
I trained in internal medicine and did all of my residency and then took a year off, and met my husband when coming back for a fellowship. I met a health economist who was doing some health services research, which is math in the population, and how you can think about and apply it to people. I thought “OMG, that’s exactly what I want to do.”
Just as I was finishing up my Master’s in Health Services Research, I met Gio (Giovanni Colella), who is the CEO of Castlight. The questions Castlight was asking at the time were really around creating a sort of creative marketplace of physicians in healthcare: could we do healthcare like that with the same quality and knowing what’s paid for? I took a job as employee No. 20, and got to do all kinds of things – build a product, run the analytics and service teams, and serve as as Chief Medical Officer.
My objective wasn’t actually to find a job in healthcare technology. It was to say: "Let’s look across the marketplace to see what’s revolutionary and moving in healthcare."
What prompted you to join Livongo?
Broadly, it was based on my experience in healthcare tech and wanting to change the system. But there’s also my personal connection with type 1 diabetes, having lived with it for nearly 30 years.
From a personal standpoint, I"d had three kids in 3.5 years and was just back to work after my other company had just had an Initial Public Offering (IPO), so it was a very busy time… I wear an insulin pump and continuous glucose monitor and went very low at night for the first time. All I remember was waking up with the paramedics asking me questions, and I couldn’t get my mouth to work or my arms to move. I kept thinking I’d had a stroke, not that my blood sugar was low. But the kicker of it all was that when I looked at my insulin pump and CGM sensor, I’d been less than 40 for hours.
From that experience I had the realization that there was all this data, but it wasn’t being leveraged correctly. Thankfully, I woke up from my severe low and my husband called 911 and all turned out fine. But if there was a way to take that data and give it to people at the right time to avoid emergencies like this... that possibility is one of the reasons I was excited to join Livongo.
Livongo offers a "smart meter" connected to a call center of healthcare professionals who can help patients in real-time, which is pretty unique...
True. We believe that people with diabetes do the work most of the time by themselves. So the ability to help them when it’s most convenient for them when they care about it, is the holy grail. Think about small kids, when you’re up in the middle of the night and your kid has a fever. But what if your pediatrician called you at 2am when you’re up holding your child who"s feeling miserable? You’d think that"s magic, right?
It’s technology at its best and is indistinguishable from magic. That is in many ways really the opportunity that we have at Livongo: as people are testing their blood sugar, you can help coach or guide them, right as they’re checking and need that info. You can engage with them about where they are and what they want to do. That’s pretty amazing and I fundamentally believe that’s the future of medicine for people with chronic conditions.
It’s not just about getting more data, but it’s about the effective use of that data.
Having a healthcare professional call at the moment you need it… isn’t that what you’ve been involved with through Doctor On Demand?
That’s a great example of one of the movements in healthcare that’s revolutionary. Certainly as a primary care doctor I can say this: a lot of what I see is actually what I don’t necessarily need to see when patients come into my office. I spend a fair amount of my time counseling family and friends, and I can’t count the number of times my college roommates call for a quick consult. It’s striking. My knowledge is really no different treating people over the phone than it is treating a patient in the office. Getting to be a part of the Doctor On Demand story -- offering consults via iPhone, iPad, Android and on the Web -- and helping them think through the services they offer has been really enjoyable for me.
Fundamentally, I believe chronic conditions are where we need to be spending our time. The ability to leverage data and empower people to do all of this on our own, because it’s not about the very little time we spend in the office with our provider.
And clearly you believe Livongo is the next step for treating diabetes...?
Healthcare consulting for people to do better in their diabetes… we’re doing that already. But Livongo is asking: how do we use technology and leverage data to help people do it easier and better? That’s the beautiful part of the marriage between Silicon Valley tech and the ability to collect and aggregate data simpler and easier in the healthcare field. Really, I believe and buy in to the mission of not helping people with chronic conditions, but empowering them by giving them the right tools so they can do what they need to, faster and easier, so they’re spending less of their day on this.
I never wake up and say, "I want to spend more time on my diabetes." Of course I don’t. This is not a hobby for me. I would love for it to go away totally, not to have to think about it. But can we at least decrease the time we think about it, make it less obtrusive and still drive better outcomes? That’s where the innovation lies.
What should people know about the Livongo system specifically?
Livongo is really on the cutting edge and doing some innovative work for those of us with diabetes. The key to Livongo is three things:
- Real-time data – this ability to upload data and feed that back directly to the user.
- Personalization – we can offer real-time coaching through the technology that is suited to what each individual user needs and wants.
- The Human Dimension – my time in healthcare has taught me that technology can go very far, but at the end of the day, we need a human touch.
Livongo is building everything around those three concepts: a beautiful, personalized, real-time data tool to drive insights, with real people on the other end ready to help.
With people generating a number at the time they’re checking glucose -- that’s about as captive an audience as you’re going to find. I am checking my blood glucose and I care right now, and it’s amazing to think about what kinds of tips or personalization to make my life easier could be delivered at that right time. What Livongo is positioned to do, both from a leadership and experience standpoint. That cross-section of trying to treat people as normal people first, not as people with a disease, and empowering them to live easier and more simply.
It"s a far cry from the original home glucose meters...
When I was diagnosed, I had one of those big Accu-Chek meters that took 60 seconds… I used to stare at that thing, and calculate how many hours of my life I spent looking at that countdown. If you turned away from it, you couldn’t actually retrieve your glucose number and you’d have missed it. Obviously, now it only takes three seconds – that’s a marketer’s dream to have that kind of captive audience!
How will Livongo make the most of that opportunity?
Imagine a world where you get to say, "These three things are what I really are about," and someone knows your health so they can say, based on all of that data and what you are about, these things are what you can do to achieve what you want. Rather than the model today, where you go and see a doctor, and he/she says, "Get your A1C less than 7%." But you don’t know the realities of how to do that. In a world where healthcare is focused into 15-minute visits, I don’t really understand what my patients truly want and care about. Imagine a world where we can do that. It’s this beautiful interplay of health goals are and overall personal goals.
Sounds like you"re pretty excited about this job...
The ability to think creatively and personalize the information and deliver that information in a meaningful way is what I’m most excited about. It’s not just the ability to look at trends, and get information coupled with guidance from CDEs about those trends. No, we want to combine those trends with what you want out of that data. That’s a big part of why this job is so cool.
OK, but lots of organizations talk about "empowering patients." How will Livongo truly achieve this for people with diabetes?
Sometimes I find that people with diabetes take so many meds. They are trying to figure out why, and what"s it all for?
The analogy I draw (although a little morbid) is for example if you’ve been working for a long time and you’re nearing the end of your work career and have just been diagnosed with some fast-acting cancer -- but you’re still putting money into your 401(k). Is that really the best investment for you at that time? Is there a way to say that for you at this time, based on your goals, this is how you should be spending your money and time? We should be able to provide realistic options, for example if you have two years left, then instead of putting money into that 401(k) there may be better things that money can be put toward.
Similarly for health and diabetes and tech, we can offer practical options based on the data and analytics and looking at the person"s goals. Maybe that’s run 3 miles a day and keep my blood sugars within a specific range.
So it"s really like a data-driven lifestyle?
That’s in many ways a longer-term vision of where Livongo is going even beyond diabetes and chronic conditions. How do we optimize for our own human existence? If I’m a public speaker and I am going to stand up and give a speech, what should I be eating in the morning that could be helpful from a performance standpoint? That vision of empowering people by taking advantage of what we know, coupled very tightly with each individual, is what healthcare should be about, and it"s the value we can bring long-term.
At Livongo, we’re thrilled to really be the first in his ecosystem to be doing end-to-end revolutionizing of diabetes by empowering people.
Wow, that"s quite ambitious, Jenny! Thanks for talking with us, and we look forward to seeing how Livongo evolves.
Disclaimer
This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn"t adhere to Healthline"s editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline"s partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.
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