Enhance-d Delivers Digital Diabetes Management Tools Previously Reserved for Elite Athletes

This European co-founder team helps people with diabetes make daily health decisions with less stress through their integrated and user-friendly data platform.

Challenge

Every day we wake up and start making decisions. A lot of them. A recent study out of Cornell estimates that we make more than 200 decisions each day on food alone. In a survey undertaken by Noom, responders indicated an average of three hours a day deciding what to wear, what to watch, what to eat, and what time to go to bed. Even once a decision was made, 87% of people admitted to changing their mind or not acting on the decision. Decision fatigue is a common complaint; when you’ve made so many choices already in a day your ability to make good decisions gets impaired.

If the burden of decisions is high for the average person, just imagine the number of decisions a person living with diabetes needs to make in their day. Those decisions about food aren’t just about preference but about what the potential impact will be on their blood glucose. When you add in extra things like whether or not to exercise and what kind and for how long becomes a complicated calculus way beyond the typical questions of ‘do I feel like it?’ or ‘do I have time?’’ It’s a continuous tightwire act, a threading of the needle, to ensure that glucose numbers stay balanced and to avoid both hypo- and hyperglycemia.

To maintain this delicate balance, people with diabetes rely on things like continuous glucose monitors (CGM) and blood glucose meters and strips. They receive data about their blood sugar, but that data arrives independently of other health metrics like activity level, amount and quality of sleep, stress levels, and even information about what nutrition choices resulted in those sugar levels. It’s little wonder that cases of anxiety, stress, and diabetes burnout — feeling overwhelmed, exhausted and frustrated by the management of the condition — are widespread in the community. It’s decision fatigue on a grand scale, with serious consequences if you go on autopilot or stop paying attention to all the details.

Origin Story

Fede Fontana, PhD, and Sam Scott, PhD, first encountered the daily weight of decision making a person with diabetes carries under unusual circumstances. Fontana, a physiologist and data scientist, and Scott, a physiologist and researcher, met while working for Team Novo Nordisk, the world’s first all-diabetes professional cycling team. As Fontana worked with the athletes, first as a data interpreter and then as the head of performance, he quickly developed an enormous respect not just for them, but for anyone living with diabetes.

“It is a complex life and a complex job to manage glucose if you are living with Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes. It’s self management for the majority of the time.”

In their different roles supporting people living with Type 1 diabetes, Fontana and Scott realized that diabetes-related data was being presented in an overly-complicated way and the different data streams rarely intersected. A diabetes specialist would look at CGM numbers and a different specialist would focus on heart rate, physical activity, sleep, and nutrition. There was no platform to bring the data together in one place to make sense of it all, or as Scott puts it, “there was no insightful conversation between the data.” This meant that the information wasn’t being leveraged to its full potential — both from the people living with diabetes and from their doctors.

“It can be just as hard for someone with Type 1 diabetes to manage glucose levels if they are exercising for 30 minutes three times a week as a cyclist with diabetes who spends three hours a day on a bike.”

The idea of creating a tool that they felt was missing had to be placed on the backburner for a number of years because the pair were busy on other projects. But that initial idea kept simmering in their minds. Then, through chance, after fruitful conversations with the Diabetes Center Bern (DCB), a foundation that supports startups in the diabetes space with expertise and financial support, they decided it was time to take the leap and strike out on their own.

By combining workflow and data streams with all available health metrics and bringing the data into the same hub and creating visuals for it, they could create better blood sugar outcomes for those that initially tested their platform and anticipate blood sugar changes before they arose. And they quickly realized that what they were doing had implications for a much broader audience.

To expand on the potential, they rounded out their own expertise in the physiology and science side by bringing on two additional founding team members: MBA Fabio Saviozzi to lead the commercial side of the business as CCO and data scientist Felipe Mattioni Maturana, PhD, as CTO. All four co-founders were familiar with startup culture and the demands they would face, and perhaps more importantly, all four knew or worked with each other before creating their team, which meant they hit the ground running in terms of their working dynamics.

As Maturana describes his willingness to jump into the venture, “I knew Fede for about eight years. When he reached out to me with the idea, I thought, that’s a problem worth solving. It’s a big challenge, every day, but at the end of the day, we like what we do and working together is a joy.”

In October of 2022, they all quit their jobs and set out to create the tool they imagined that relieves the burden of daily decision making for anyone living with diabetes.

Under the Hood

Enhance-d is a digital diabetes management platform that integrates, analyzes, and presents data and decisions in a simple, user-friendly, and actionable manner to simplify decision making. It brings together all the available health data points to a single location for its user and provides personalized insights from the data, so that a person can make informed choices for their day. Enhance-d helps shoulder the burden of decision-making, relieving stress and confusion for a person living with diabetes, and supporting them in making choices that improve their health and overall wellbeing.

“We often hear from people living with diabetes that they wish they could live a normal life. ‘I want to dream as a person without diabetes. I want to go through emotions without always stressing and worrying about what I am going to do tonight as I approach my dinner.’ We want enhance-d to provide a source of security for them so that they can know they’re making the right decisions,” Fontana emphasizes.

To that end, the platform is designed to learn about its users routines and habits, using AI and machine learning to predict what sort of glucose scenarios its users will face in a day. Someone can check the app almost like they check the weather, getting a sense of their diabetes forecast for the day and making plans accordingly. Enhance-d also plans to speed up and improve decisions around diabetes management by establishing themselves as the first shared platform for patients and doctors, building common knowledge and insights to ensure the best possible approach to care.

The team is rolling out a beta version of its platform this spring and plans to upgrade to a full mobile app next year. They will start with a low-cost subscription model and then open up different options for reimbursement as they go along. With a multinational, multilingual team headquartered in Switzerland, enhance-d’s initial market is DACH countries, with their eye on quick expansion across Europe and then on to the US.

“The business model changes from country to country, but regardless of location, the doctors and the patients have the same needs. We’re building a solution that focuses on the patient first, and then figuring out the business model to get it to them from there,” explains Saviozzi.

Final Word

With its dynamic co-founding team and first-to-market comprehensive diabetes management platform, enhance-d is poised to deliver clarity, ease, and confidence to the millions of people living with the condition, supporting informed decision making that leads to better physical and mental health.

Please join us in welcoming the enhance-d team to StartUp Health as one of the first members of a new cohort of Type 1 diabetes startups in the StartUp Health T1D Moonshot Fellowship. This Fellowship, supported by a program-related investment (PRI) by the Helmsley Charitable Trust, represents an exciting new way to create cross-disciplinary innovation in a specific disease area. We’re excited for their next steps.

→ Learn more and connect with the enhance-d team.

Call for T1D Innovation

Are you a scientist or innovator focused on T1D innovation who would benefit from education about how to navigate and build a company that will be successful in attracting mission-aligned capital, customers, and collaborators to pursue scientific discoveries in the field of Type 1 diabetes? Learn more and apply for a T1D Fellowship.

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Enhance-d Delivers Digital Diabetes Management Tools Previously Reserved for Elite Athletes was originally published in StartUp Health on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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