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FeedMeet the EndoGoddess
Dr. Jennifer Shine Dyer had a problem. Her teenage diabetes patients were not taking all their medicine. Dyer understood what this meant—that at 30 they might lose their eyesight, even a limb. She also understood that for teenagers it is developmentally hard to think ahead to next week, let alone more than a decade.
So the pediatric endocrinologist, then at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, turned to texting. She started with three patients, texting them every Thursday and asking something specific about their interests, then a casual “been checking your sugars?”
The diabetic’s daily regimen is not easy; the messages, Dyer hoped, would offer support. After three months, she says the average “diabetes report card” went from a D-minus to a B-plus.
“In any clinical trial, this much improvement would be seen as a miracle drug,” she says.
That was in 2009. Today, Dyer is a tech entrepreneur, having rolled out one app, with another on the way. She’s frequently invited to speak, and she tweets, blogs and leads webinars on healthcare and mHealth (mobile health). “Knowing 85 percent of people get healthcare information online, I felt obligated to get good content out there,” Dyer says. But just as in her medical practice, she knew people were more likely to listen to a real person, “not a robot.”
To the patient, the endocrinologist usually is shortened to “my endo,” and one of Dyer’s patients liked to call Dyer “my endogoddess.” And so was born EndoGoddess, the doctor’s social media handle, blog name and the title of her app. According to her description on Twitter (next to a glam photo), she is a “stylish pediatric endocrinologist,” “foodie” and “former Texan who loves NYC.”
To develop EndoGoddess, Dyer stepped down from her position at Children’s and partnered with Duet Health, a local start-up. She says she “absolutely misses” her patients and intends to return to practice, perhaps part-time, but first there’s a second app to finish—a carb counter for diabetics—and a medical trial to run.
“Right now, mHealth is a big buzz word; it’s exciting, but as a doctor, what I care about is that it improves the healthcare for my patients, and there has to be a measure of that.”
When this all started in 2009, Dyer presumed that the personal relationship was key to success, but eventually her test patients began to slip. They needed more. “The texting was a trigger,” she says, “but for a sustained health behavior you also need literacy and motivation.”
So the EndoGoddess app (with about 500 users) now has videos, how-tos, other information and a point system. These days, motivation means “gamification,” so when users put in their four readings a day, they earn points toward getting an iTunes download, she says.
Loved ones generally load up the iTunes account, and, interestingly, with their “buy in” comes another kind of motivation: “Grandma puts in $5,” Dyer says. “She’s now engaged. She can see how hard it is. She might be more likely to say, ‘I’m proud of you!’ ”
