A Health 2.0 Overview, Through the Eyes of a New Diabetic Geek by Matthew Holt
This is a really interesting phenomenon—a web 2.0 expert, Richard McManus, editor of the well known Web 2.0 blog Read/Write Web, was diagnosed with diabetes recently.
What was his response? To find out what Web 2.0 tools there were available to him. The result?
A Health 2.0 Overview, Through the Eyes of a New Diabetic.
Read through the comments to get a good perspective on several quick issues that come up—lots of support from the diabetic community (including several of our friends like Enoch, Amy T and Manny), notes on how tough it would be for Richard to find future insurance coverage—of course he lives in New Zealand, and many commenters just assume a Web 2.0 guy is American— and of course the requisite loonies suggesting that Type 1 diabetes is curable by drinking the milk of virgin mice (or some such rubbish).
It’s often said that diabetes care is a microcosm of the health care system; and the same thing is true for diabetes in Health 2.0
Matthew Holt
Health 2.0 Developer Challenges
I agree completely with your last sentence. If you can solve the challenges of treating diabetes (both Type 1 AND Type 2) then you've probably got a model that will work for many conditions.
And by the way, if you don't figure out an approach that works then the 'diabetes epidemic' pretty much guarantees that you'll be in trouble across the board because of the rising costs of diabetes treatment.