Please find part 2 of the interview here:
http://www.sugarstats.com/2008/03/14/interview-with-dr-anita-ramsetty-endocrinologist-part2/

We’re honored and proud to have Dr. Anita Ramsetty as our first featured expert blogger (more highly talented expert bloggers to follow, so stay tuned foks!).

As our introduction to you we have included excerpts from a recent interview between Nedrra Lanakila, partner and COO (Chief of Operations) of SugarStats and a parent of a Type 1 Diabetic, and Dr. Anita Ramsetty that talks about her background, her interests and her medical online practice at EndocrineHelp.com.

During the month of March we will present several segments on our blog from a series of interviews with Dr. Ramsetty.

This is the first of that series to introduce Dr. Ramsetty’s expertise and online practice to our community.

Nedrra Lanakila (N): We’re thrilled you have this wonderful service called EndocrineHelp.com. Please take a few minutes to introduce yourself and describe this service to our community who really needs your expert guidance online.

Dr. Anita Ramsetty (A): I am so excited to be a part of this exciting community, and I thank you all for welcoming me.
This is really wonderful for me personally, but also for our practice that is trying to do something a little unusual.

My name is Anita Ramsetty. I am a mother, wife and a physician. My field of specialty is endocrinology and diabetes. (You can learn more about her medical training here: www.endocrinehelp.com/index.php/Contact-Us). www.Endocrinehelp.com is a site that we started late last year. (more…)

A cool little project has popped up called Diabetes365. Originally started by Beth of insearchofbalance.wordpress.com, other diabetes bloggers like Bernard of www.bernardfarrell.com have joined in too.

What is Diabetes365? In Bernards words:

“Diabetes365 is an idea that I got from Beth of insearchofbalance. She started her Diabetes365 photo project a few days ago and I couldn’t think of a better way to inform people of what it’s like to live with diabetes 365 days a year.

The idea behind this Diabetes365 project is that I’ll take one picture every day of the year. I’ll post it to the flickr Diabetes365 pool and blog about it briefly.

Would you like to take part in Diabetes365? You can join the flickr pool provided that you post a picture there each day (or wait a few days and post several pictures, one per day). Each picture must be tagged with diabetes365 and titled with the date taken and which day of your year of photos it is. If you’d like to blog your photos, feel free to do that also.”

Are you part of flickr and want to find out more? Go to the Diabetes365 Project Flickr Group or check out his first post.

The “Know Your A1C” campaign represents the first ever national public education campaign supported by a coalition of leading nonprofit diabetes organizations, including the ADA, JDRF, American Association of Diabetes Educators and the National Council of La Raza.

View one of the campaign videos at:
http://tudiabetes.com/video/video/show?id=583967:Video:41688

Check out the new campaign site at:
http://www.DiabetesA1C.org.

As a means to provide as many ways to easily input information we’ve launch SugarStats Mobile Edition so you can easily input your statistics on the go.

We’ve built a very simplified mobile version for use on phones and PDA’s which have browsers that support HTML/XHTML.

All you have to do is open your mobile browser and go to http://m.sugarstats.com and login. To avoid excessive logging out you might want to select “remember me” on the login page.

Features:

We’re continually making new changes and additions but for now we’ve gone some basic functionality in place:

• Adding Sugars and Meds along with Foods and Activities if you have a premium account
• Deleting entries and notes
• Adding comments to those entries
• View entries for any day
• Add personal notes for any day
• Last 7 and 30 days trends and averages
• Browse to specific day

SugarStats Mobile Requirements:

1. Your phone’s browser needs to be HTML/XHTML compliant, this isn’t a WAP portal. A good test is to go to http://www.google.com/xhtml on your mobile phone and see if it works.
2. Your mobile browser needs to be able to handle cookies. You can find this in your browser settings and it is usually set by default
3. If you have a premium account your mobile browser needs to support SSL encryption.

Mobile Browser Recommendations:

Opera Mini:

We highly recommend those without Windows Mobile or Symbian devices to use Opera Mini as their web browser. It is just a fantastic mobile browser with great support and it runs on pretty much any device that supports Java.

You can find it here: http://www.operamini.com/ or you can download it directly by opening http://operamini.com on your mobile browser.

Minimo:

Another browser option for Windows Mobile 5 and above devices only is the Minimo project from the Mozilla foundation. Find more info here: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/

Support

If you have any problems, requests, feedback or questions feel free to let us know: support@sugarstats.com

Khurt over at Honey Sweet posted a great review regarding his experience with SugarStats so far:

“SugarStats.com is a welcome addition to my overall diabetes management strategy. I can only imagine the wonderfully useful things that Marston and his team are working on.”

Well, we’ve officially been launched for a month now! We wanted to share some overall stats of the system, how we’re doing and a tiny bit of the great stuff to come If you haven’t already don’t forget to get your own account free.

We got hit and continue to get hit with loads of traffic but we’re happy to say things are holding up great.

We’ve gotten great response in these first 4 weeks of launch that have helped us greatly improve the system. Within just the first few days alone we had hundreds of new users sign up and thanks to people seeing the value of the system and spreading the word virally this trend is still happening.

First 30 Day Stats

Within the first 4 weeks of launch:

Sugar Readings

• Over 17,500 Sugar Entries Recorded.
• Averaging 147 mg/dL and 9.2 mmol/L respectively

Top 5 Meds:

1. Lantus
2. Humalog
3. Novalog
4. Metformin
5. NovoRapid

Foods

While only premium members can track food/carbs, plenty of food/carb tracking going on:

• Some of you LOVE yogurt, popcorn, peanut butter, orange juice and milk
• Over 2850 meals have been eaten via over 750 different foods
• Over 85,100g grams of carbs consumed
• Avg carbs per food entry: 134g
• Avg carbs per meal: 29g

Before and After Meal Sugar Readings

Before you ask, yes these types of graphs and trends will be making their way into your own SugarStats account. So you premium users can look forward to an even greater look into how your meals affect your blood sugars.

Overall Averages:

• Before Breakfast: 143 mg/dL
• After Breakfast: 154 mg/dL
• Before Lunch: 141 mg/dL
• After Lunch: 150 mg/dL
• Before Dinner: 151 mg/dL
• After Dinner: 158 mg/dL

Activities

Another premium only feature but very important to keep track of:

1. Over 6200 minutes of physical activity tracked. Over 103 hours.
2. Over 206 minutes per day (3.4 hours)

Some of your favorite exercises include:

1. Walking
2. Swimming (one of my favs)
3. Dancing
4. Yoga

Overall Averages (in mg/dL):

• Before Activity: 147
• After Activity: 150

What’s to come

Besides the few that really want to track everything in detail, we’ve gotten absolutely great response from you guys. You’ve told us you love how simple and easy to use the system is. This is great to hear as that is what it was built for, so the average diabetic will actually WANT to use it and then actually be able to understand the statistics.

Even so there are plenty of places we can improve on and you’re helping greatly with that. While we won’t go into detail on our future plans (gotta keep some excitement huh? ), we’re working on some really cool stuff. We’ll give a few little hints:

• Would you like to share your stats (on your blog etc) for all to see your progress?
• Think your mobile phone/PDA browser could be more useful for adding entries?
• Would you like to add friends within SugarStats to see their stats and create a support system?
• Do you use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc?
• Want to show your people better and more informative graphs? (especially for premium users)

Ok ok, thats enough for now. We don’t have dates for specific features but there is plenty of exciting stuff going on over here So don’t forget to create your free account.

Finally, THANK YOU

And finally a big thanks to all our users and BETA testers who have helped craft the site and application. Your support and feedback has been tremendous and we really appreciate all of it. Stay tuned because there is more to come for sure!

2 new TuDiabetes Videocasts coming your way. TuDiabetes.com

Some things covered:

• 499 as of right now (July 23rd), who will be the 500th?
• Most popular groups: US-Nortehast. Also worth mentioning are “Diabetes + Disability” and “Unite for Diabetes”.
• Most popular discussions: “Anyone in a country with universal health-care?”, “Toddlers with Diabetes” and “How God Selects a Mother of a Diabetic Child”

Watch them here

Videocast #2

Videocast #3