Wisdom from the Brightest Minds in Diabetes Education
Our team recently attended the AADE 2015 Conference in New Orleans – this is always one of our favorite conferences of the year, and we love learning from the amazingly committed diabetes educators who work endlessly to better the lives of people with diabetes. Below are some of our favorite quotes from this year’s conference, and for more information on AADE see our past coverage here.
“We don’t like to use the term 'non-compliance' – non-compliance is a term that is banned in my unit. If someone is non-compliant, maybe your advice was not worth complying to. You’ve got to make your advice worthwhile, you have to find the right partners to work with … People ask what is the magic? There is no magic. We all have the same drugs and intelligence. It’s just commitment, the commitment to get things done.
– Dr. Paresh Dandona (University of Buffalo, NY) on addressing diabetes in primary care settings – by the way, we SO prefer the term “engaged” to something like “complied” etc.!
“How can we make health reminders relevant to patients’ lives to keep them engaged? Personalize them using analytics.”
– Dr. Kamal Jethwani currently leads the research and program evaluate on initiatives at the Center for Connected Health.
“I think that as a scientist I get caught up a lot in the numbers. But we do understand that one of the biggest parts of this is the human piece and allowing people to spend a lot less time and energy worrying about diabetes control.”
– Dr. Steven Russell (MGH, Bionic Pancreas) on the psychosocial benefits of the Bionic Pancreas.
“For people with diabetes, tracking data is not a hobby – it’s a mirror to see themselves clearly and solve their own health mysteries … Most people who are tracking data have never told their clinicians that they are doing so. Let’s not maintain this ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy about tracking. We need to ask them. And it’s not asking, “What’s the matter?’ It’s asking, ‘what matters to you and empowers you?’”
– Susannah Fox, CTO of Health and Human Services, in her keynote address on leveraging the next frontiers of healthcare technology.
