Sep 6, 2018
Kelly Close founded Close Concerns
in 2002; its mission is to make everyone smarter about diabetes. At
Close Concerns, Kelly and her team write approximately three
million words each year on diabetes, prediabetes, obesity, and
digital health for Closer Look, a highly praised service covering
the goings-on in the field. Kelly's passion for the field comes
from her extensive professional work as well as from her personal
experience, having had diabetes for over 30 years. Kelly is the
author of more than 30 peer-reviewed manuscripts as well as
Targeting a Cure for Type 1 Diabetes: How Long Do We Have to
Wait?, a widely praised book published by the American
Diabetes Association (ADA) in 2013. She also wrote the foreword for
the widely praised Bright Spots & Landmines by Adam Brown,
published in 2017. Kelly is an associate editor of Clinical
Diabetes, a journal focused on diabetes for primary care
physicians published quarterly by the ADA. Close Concerns is a
winner of the ADA’s “Excellence in Health Communications” Award,
and Kelly and her team write a quarterly column in Journal of
Diabetes, a peer-reviewed journal based in Shanghai.
Kelly chairs the diaTribe Foundation, a nonprofit established in
2013 to improve the lives of people with diabetes and prediabetes
and to advocate for action. She is also the founder of
diaTribe.org, begun in 2006 as an educational resource for people
with diabetes; diaTribe.org’s free educational mailers go to over
100,000 people every 2 weeks. Before starting Close Concerns and
the diaTribe Foundation, Kelly’s work focused on life sciences more
broadly. Over nearly a dozen years, she worked on Wall Street
(investment banking at Goldman Sachs, equity research at Merrill
Lynch) and at McKinsey & Company, where her work centered on life
science, managed care, and nonprofit organizations.
Kelly has a BA in economics and English from Amherst College, magna
cum laude, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She was a
founding board member of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition,
led by University of California, San Francisco’s Robert Lustig, MD,
and a previous executive board member of the Diabetes Hands
Foundation and the Behavioral Diabetes Institute. She and her
husband and three children are cohosts of the popular San
Francisco–based discussion series CPS Lectures.
01:22 Why Kelly started diaTribe.
02:22 Empowering patient decisions and disease management.
03:51 The power of numbers in making change.
04:12 Other advocacy groups inside and outside the diabetes
realm.
05:09 Paying attention to direct costs as well as indirect
costs.
05:44 The four areas of constraints to obtaining the outcomes
desired in treating diabetes.
06:34 Behavior design and behavior change.
07:52 Overcoming diabetes constraints.
08:18 “You can’t know where you want to go with your diabetes
management until you know where you are.”
10:10 Supporting patients and continuous glucose monitoring.
13:01 “What’s not going well here, and what’s changeable?”
15:18 “Until we’re doing much more to create healthy communities
and supporting communities, we will not be successful.”
15:52 Go to diatribe.org/brightspots for educational materials for
your diabetes patients.
17:00 Avoiding stigmatizing language.
17:40 Ensuring you have a diabetes educator or social worker who
understands what resources are available.
17:51 Finding community organizations like Wellville—EP118 with Rick Brush.
18:40 The dichotomy of engaged patients vs those who aren’t.
19:39 The importance in understanding where patients are coming
from and their emotional well-being.
21:24 The impressiveness of Kaiser moving half of their
appointments to telehealth.
23:02 Health technologies helping to improve diabetes outcomes and
how they are finding reimbursement.
24:46 Innovated payers funding diabetes research to improve
outcomes.
25:48 The excessive expenses associated with diabetes today.
28:12 “The only good thing about this spending ... [is] that a lot
could happen to reduce that.”
28:59 Houston’s efforts to make an impact on diabetes in the
community level.
30:44 “I think today the really forward-thinking companies are
really thinking about stakeholder value.”
32:10 You can learn more by going to diatribe.org, follow diaTribe on Facebook and
Twitter, and check out diatribe.org/foundation and
diatribe.org/brightspots.