During SXSW, One Drop Founder Jeff Dachis had picked up a huge pile of tacos for the unofficial blood glucose taco challenge. He invited everyone using his company's diabetes app to come on by to enjoy the feast and test their blood.
Just then a woman walked up to Dachis and said she had to talk to him. He asked her what's going on, and she said she has had diabetes for 10 years, absolutely hated the disease and wasn't doing a great job of managing it. Then, she said, One Drop came a long and gave her some hope -- and gave her a more engaging and fun way to stay healthy.
"I've just never had anything like this," Dachis remembers her saying. And then she introduced her husband and daughter and gave him a hearty thank you.
"I welled up into tears and started crying there right in front of her," Dachis said. "If my team was able to do that just once, then we can wake up everyday feeling good."
And that's the type of change that Dachis envisions for healthcare -- not just with his diabetes management tools, but with a plethora of health-related technologies that can sidestep the often archaic healthcare system and help people live healthy before illness and symptoms set in. And his company is on a roll.
One Drop just launched a big update to its functionality, and it was recently announced as one of the first apps to be integrated into Apple's new CareKit, which seeks to bring a variety of healthcare technology into one place on the iPhone. And Dachis said One Drop is about to announce expert coaching that will allow users to select certified diabetes educators and mental health professionals to help them find the best ways to manage their health.
With that, One Drop users will have personal data analytics, peer-to-peer interaction with other people dealing with similar health issues and one-on-one support available on a subscription basis. Then, in October, One Drop plans to release a Bluetooth-enabled blood testing device that will bring glucose readings directly into the app. Dachis is currently using a production model now.
"It's gorgeous and I take it out at restaurants and I take it out at business meetings and check my blood," said Dachis, who was diagnosed with Type I diabetes nearly three years ago. "It's not this thing that I'm embarrassed to take out."
And Dachis, who co-founded the interactive design company Razorfish, said those aesthetics can have a big impact for people living with diabetes.
...we're gonna take a lot of the cost structure out of the existing, very inefficient, very bureaucratic healthcare system.[/pullquote]
"I'm not quite sure why the medical industry is the way that it is," he said. "But you can start to see good design coming into play now, and we think that One Drop is one of the folks out there doing a pretty good job with design."
One Drop, which has been on the market for about 11 months, started with a $1 million seed round and followed up by raising an $8 million Series A round. While it started in Austin, it has since shifted some operations to New York. It has about 10 employees.
Meanwhile, more than 30 million Americans are living with diabetes, and an estimated 70 million have pre-diabetes.
Dachis sees One Drop as one of several that are part of a tech-driven movement that will revolutionize healthcare in coming years. Smartphones create an almost endless opportunity to innovate and give people quick and easy access to all kinds of information. Dachis said that the first wave of changes was largely dominated by communications -- from Facebook to Snapchat.
"That revolution is almost over and a new, deeper revolution is happening as those same types of tools get applied to financial services, health and the like, not only in the U.S. but in emerging markets," he said. "So the next big revolution that I think we're going to see right now with mobile phones driving it is the democratization of the tools used in diagnosis and analysis of healthcare. And we're gonna take a lot of the cost structure out of the existing, very inefficient, very bureaucratic healthcare system that's bad at treating the day-to-day chronic conditions that people have."
He thinks models similar to One Drop will be applied to the personal management of asthma, obesity, colitis and hypertension.
"It's better done using mobile technology to allow us to collect data and analytics about our given biometric telemetry," he said. "And share that data to the cloud, run analytics on it and get back insights in real time -- real time, when I'm about to make a decision about a burrito."