The Burlington Free Press

Following are excerpts from this piece.  To read the complete original article, please click here: From Ivory Tower to Market

As a professor of medicine, Ben Littenberg spent years studying the quality of health care in a conventional academic way — doing research and publishing the results. Then a few years ago, he and two colleagues came up with an idea for improving diabetes care that ultimately nudged him into a new role: entrepreneur.

In the case of the diabetic data system, he admits, “I’m putting less emphasis on publishing and more on translating the science into the community so that people will get better.”  More than 20 million people in the United States have diabetes, at a cost to the nation of well over $100 billion, yet remarkably, the are many people receive for this chronic condition is spotty.Most diabetes patients are due at least twice a year for blood tests that monitor blood sugar and cholesterol levels, kidney function and levels of urine protein.  These tests are supposed to help the doctor forestall complications that can include heart and vascular disease, renal failure, and so on.

Littenberg and his two UVM College of Medicine colleagues (Charles MacLean and Michael Gagnon) devised a low-cost, computerized data information system that automatically collects the lab data, updates the flow sheet, and sends it directly to the doctor’s office computer. Missed appointments or worrisome results are flagged with letters to doctors and patients.  Patients under the system, perhaps because they and their doctors were more in tune with their ongoing health status, filed fewer insurance claims and saved, on average, more than $2,000 a year.