Kaiser Permanente, American Diabetes Association Launch Web Site That Will Offer Treatment Programs

The American Diabetes Association and Kaiser Permanente are developing a Web site that will offer free, customized treatment plans for people with diabetes, the Wall Street Journal reports. On the site, expected to be launched during the first half of next year, people will enter information about height, weight, race, blood-sugar levels, medications and their hearts and kidneys. Within 10 minutes, they will receive suggestions on how best to manage their diabetes. The Web site will use the software program Archimedes, which was developed with funding from Kaiser and has been used by health researchers to study cost issues and treatment recommendations. The program has been "highly accurate" with its patient treatment suggestions, as evidenced by a comparison with 17 "real-world" studies that measured treatments and patient outcomes, the Journal reports. Because Archimedes has so many variables, running a simulation based on patient information could take as long as 100 hours on a single personal computer. However, Gateway Computers will donate processing power from about 6,800 "essentially idle" PCs to create a computer grid capable of reducing processing time to fewer than 10 minutes (Bulkeley, Wall Street Journal, 5/14).