lystn

In a companion interview to his June 7 talk with Stanford's Michael Snyder, Harry speaks this week with Noosheen Hashemi, who—with Snyder—co-founded the personalized health startup January.ai in 2017. The company focuses on helping users understand how their bodies respond to different foods and activities, so they can make diet and exercise choices that help them avoid unhealthy spikes in blood glucose levels.

January's smartphone app collects blood glucose levels from disposable devices called continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), as well as heart rate data from patients’ Fitbits or Apple Watches. The app also makes it easier for users to log the food they eat, and see what impact each food has on their glucose levels. Once the app has enough data, January’s machine learning algorithms can start predicting the effects of different foods and activities on blood glucose. It can then recommend meals and exercise that’ll help users keep their blood glucose in a healthy target range. 

The goal isn’t to prevent glucose spikes completely, but rather to prevent diabetes from emerging over the long term in people at risk for a cluster of serious conditions known metabolic syndrome. That could help individuals live longer, healthier lives. And at a population level it could save billions in healthcare costs.

Please rate and review MoneyBall Medicine on Apple Podcasts! Here's how to do that from an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch:

1.Open the Podcasts app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.

2.Navigate to the page of the MoneyBall Medicine podcast. You can find it by searching for it or selecting it from your library. Just note that you'll have to go to the series page which shows all the episodes, not just the page for a single episode.

3.Scroll down to find the subhead titled "Ratings & Reviews."

4.Under one of the highlighted reviews, select "Write a Review."

5.Next, select a star rating at the top — you have the option of choosing between one and five stars.

6.Using the text box at the top, write a title for your review. Then, in the lower text box, write your review. Your review can be up to 300 words long.

7.Once you've finished, select "Send" or "Save" in the top-right corner.

8.If you've never left a podcast review before, enter a nickname. Your nickname will be displayed next to any reviews you leave from here on out.

9.After selecting a nickname, tap OK. Your review may not be immediately visible

Full Transcript

Harry Glorikian: I’m Harry Glorikian, and this is MoneyBall Medicine, the interview podcast where we meet researchers, entrepreneurs, and physicians who are using the power of data to improve patient health and make healthcare delivery more efficient. You can think of each episode as a new chapter in the never-ending audio version of my 2017 book, “MoneyBall Medicine: Thriving in the New Data-Driven Healthcare Market.” If you like the show, please do us a favor and leave a rating and review at Apple Podcasts.

Harry Glorikian: I’ve been making the show long enough that you can see a kind of family tree emerging, with branches that connect many of our episodes.

That’s definitely the case with today’s interview with Noosheen Hashemi, the co-founder and CEO of the precision health company January AI.

The branch leading to Hashemi started back in June of 2021 when I interviewed Professor Michael Snyder, the chair of Stanford’s Department of Genetics.

Snyder is a huge proponent of using wearable devices to help people make better decisions about their own health. In fact, the day we spoke he was wearing seven separate devices, including one called a continuous glucose monitor or CGM.

A CGM is standard equipment these days for about 3.5 million diabetics in the U.S. who need to know when their blood sugar is too high and when it’s time to take more insulin.