Too often, we look at the 7-day, 14-day, and 30-day trends on our blood glucose monitors, see numbers that look great (or horrid), and rather than seeing an A1c that confirms those readings, we get a number that would appear to have come completely out of left field. (Or Mars. Or the Andromeda Galaxy. It's hard to say exactly where.) We can either scratch our heads and wonder why the numbers aren't correlating, or we can take out our manual readings logs, our meter downloads, our CGM downloads, and our personal journals and try to figure "what we are doing wrong".

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If anything can make having diabetes "fun", it's the cool toys I get to play with. While I don't consider myself within the normal confines of geekiness, I'm one of those folk who feel lost without multiple computers and a broadband Internet connection to-hand, and the ability to capture and analyze data up the wing-wah. (Whether or not I actually use that ability, or use it consistently, is another story.)

Managing diabetes falls right into the obsessions of a data wonk.

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Whether your meter uses "E", "ER", or another way of designating an error, we've all run into those days where it seems like we waste a whole vial, drum, or disc of strips (and lancets, if you use the Renew device!) just to get that magical number. By the time you get that "beep", you're certain you're reading fifty points off one way or the other, just due to the stress of getting the bloody lancet to produce a bloody large-enough blood drop that beads up on -- rather than wets -- the surrounding skin, and the bloody strip to take up enough of that blood to produce a bloody glucose reading.

(And yes, "bloody" is meant both as description and expletive.)

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Over the past few posts, you've seen me comment about diabetes technology -- mostly hardware and supplies -- in the context of a particular issue (hot weather or availability), but nothing really in terms of what I would like to see healthcare providers do in terms of better using existing technology, as well as what I should like to see pharmaceutical companies, software companies, and device manufacturers develop going forward. Because of the length of my wish list, I'm going to break this up into two posts.

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My relationship has changed, and I'm not happy. Over the past three weeks, I've lost so much trust in what I'm being told that I'm looking at "playing the field" again.

The relationship I'm talking about is the one with my glucometer.

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I'm in the middle of preparing a presentation for my computer user group on "Connected Medical Devices" -- that is to say, durable medical equipment that has the ability to connect to a smartphone, a computer, or the Internet for the purpose of maintaining a log of data points, keeping track of one or more patients' health, or helping one manage his own health.

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