Health and Wellness—AT&T

Our schedules are getting busier by the day it is easy to forget if and when you’ve taken your medication or skipped a blood sugar reading. Through technology like Vitality GlowCaps and WellDocs DiabetesManager, AT&T is working hard to provide effective solutions to make taking care of your health easier and more reliable.

The GlowCaps program, developed in partnership with AT&T and Vitality, was designed to help patients regularly take their medications by sending reminder calls, texts and emails. The cap fits on standard prescription bottles and uses light and then sound reminders to ensure dosages are not missed. Each time the pill bottle is opened adherence data is collected and securely relayed to Vitality via the AT&T wireless network. The program compiles the data and sends monthly updates to the prescribing physician, caregivers, family members and patients, and can provide tailored solutions to patients skipping doses. Skipping doses can dramatically affect the potency and effectiveness of many medications. This technology is simple to use and an effective way to manage your medications – and to say good-bye to your plastic pill organizers and the hours you spend filling it.

AT&T is also hard at work to make managing diabetes care easier and more efficient. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 26 million children and adults have diabetes. AT&T hopes to help change how diabetes care is managed by offering its users an easy-to-use- self-management tool on their mobile devices. The DiabetesManager, an initiative between AT&T mHealth and WellDoc®, collects and analyzes information like blood sugar levels and carbohydrate intake and provides real-time, clinically based feedback and strategies for adjusting behavior if blood sugar levels are too high or too low. There are currently two pilot programs utilizing the DiabetesManager – one at AT&T and the other at Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC) – the largest customer-owned health insurer in the U.S. Denise Harper-Saxon, case management nurse at HCSC said that, “This solution is helping us engage and interact with folks in ways we couldn’t before.” The end-to-end mHealth enterprise solution combines the DiabetesManager application and feedback engine with AT&T’s highly secure hosting environment, support and customer care specifically designed to enable AT&T and its customers to comply with all applicable HIPAA requirements.