Beyond Blood Sugar: Adele Health's New Approach to Diabetes Tracking & Prevention

Episode 015. What if managing diabetes didn’t have to be so complicated? In this episode of Healthcare Wayfinders, we’re joined by Mark Norton, founder of Adele Health, to discuss how their innovative approach is simplifying diabetes care through cutting-edge hardware and intuitive software. Adele Health is rethinking the way we track blood sugar, providing real-time insights, and offering a holistic view of metabolic health—all in a seamless, user-friendly device. Mark shares how his personal experience with family members managing diabetes inspired a smarter, more effective solution, and how they’re tackling the challenges of traditional diabetes management. Tune in to hear how Adele Health is breaking away from outdated solutions and setting a new standard for diabetes care.

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Transcript

Zach Aten: [00:00:00] What if managing diabetes could be simpler, smarter, and more seamless? Welcome back to the Healthcare Wayfinders Podcast, where we are routing you to more accessible and cost-effective healthcare. I'm your host, Zach Aten, and in today's episode we're joined by Mark Norton, founder of Adele Health, to explore how their unique service is setting them apart from traditional diabetes solutions.   

Unlike the typical cumbersome devices and disconnected apps, Adele Health combines cutting edge hardware with intuitive software that works together to simplify blood sugar, glucose tracking, provide real-time insights, and even offer a more holistic view of metabolic health. Tune in to hear how Adele Health is making diabetes management, not just easier, but more effective by addressing the gaps in the current solutions and aligning incentives for better outcomes. 

Let's jump in. 

Zach Aten: All right, Mark Norton, thank you so much for coming on the Healthcare Wayfinders podcast. How are you doing, sir? 

Mark Norton: I'm doing great. Thank you so much [00:01:00] for having me today. This is a, it's exciting to reconnect.   

Zach Aten: Yeah. Yeah. I'm excited to share with everybody, about the great work that you're doing at Adele Health for folks who are managing diabetes. Can you talk a little bit about your company and what you guys do and how you're going to make managing diabetes a much lower lift for people. 

Mark Norton: Yeah, no, totally. Thanks again for having me, Zach. It's really cool to be here and get to be a part of all the cool work that you guys are doing at Yeah, I've been watching you from afar and seeing the growth that y'all had is just tremendous. You're doing good work for good people. 

It's fantastic. Yeah, so Adele was inspired by my own family members who had diabetes watching them struggle through the process of managing that, both from the hardware that they had to use to, to do diagnostics, but then also trying to understand how all the different factors in their life up. 

affect their diabetes and their management of it. And really started in during COVID as watching close loved ones go through that. And then I was at [00:02:00] Apple at the time, thought, I've got some really good ideas here. I really want to pursue this. So I left Apple where I was managing production of the Apple watch to start Adele. 

And the whole point of Adele is to make managing diabetes easier across the board from hardware and software and how we give you things and all of those different pieces to managing diabetes. Our central goal is to make it easier and frankly, simpler for people to manage diabetes. 

Yeah.   

Zach Aten: That's awesome. So I don't have diabetes, but I'm familiar enough with the process that I know that a person managing this disease has to use test strips. They have to stick their finger, they have to get blood glucose reading. They have to go get their labs checked for an A1C. Does your product change that? 

Does it, does it do it better? How does that work? 

Mark Norton: Yeah. Yeah. If we back up for a second good thing you don't have diabetes cause it has a whole bunch of negative health consequences, but about half of America is diabetic or prediabetic. About 40 million Americans have type one or type two diabetes. And then the rest of that half are prediabetic. 

Many of them don't know they're prediabetic as well. And there's a whole bunch of stats around the [00:03:00] negative. Consequences. But I'll give you this. If you're diabetic at 50 your lifespan is on average six years shorter than someone who isn't diabetic. And so the impact of managing diabetes young and early and getting people on a healthy trajectory is really important. 

And so if you look specifically at the younger demographic, under 45, I'm about half a million Americans every year under 45 are diagnosed with diabetes. And that rate is increasing as type two diabetes becomes more prevalent in young people. And we've taken an approach just generally, if you look at across the healthcare suite and all the different product offerings You remember back when we all had mp3 players, right? 

And you had the Sony Walkman and then you transitioned into that first mp3 player. And then the iPod came out and you're like, ah. This is better. That's our core thesis for what we're trying to do within diabetes management. And what made the iPod successful wasn't just the hardware, it was also iTunes. 

And we see this tandem of really simple, easy to use hardware pairing really well with easy to understand and intuitive [00:04:00] software. And that has just been a mismatch across the board for really decades within the healthcare space, right? You can have really great innovative hardware and software is poor, or you can have really cool revolutionary software, but it doesn't work well with the hardware or the hardware is clunky to use. 

And so we see that interplay of the two being really critical to what we're doing and making it easy for patients to manage diabetes. And our hardware is a really unique device that incorporates all of the different testing processes into one. And so with just two presses of a button, you can have your finger pricked and your blood sugar checked. 

But then from there it's in and of itself as a platform and gives us the opportunity to test a whole bunch of different conditions in the same device. And things like glucose, which are critical for diabetes, but also ketones. Cholesterol. And then we're working on a whole bunch of other diagnostic tests as well. 

And so we see this as being somewhat of a mobile portable platform for testing your diagnostics from the hardware perspective. And then the software brings it all together. So if you're wondering I don't know if you're like me, I opened the Apple health app and I go, I don't know what [00:05:00] any of this is, right. 

It's taking great data, but I don't know what to do with it. We're synthesizing that type of data into one place and giving you a wellness score. So you understand. Simply how all these different factors are playing into your diabetes. I think of it like if you want to lose weight, you're going to step on a scale every day. 

But if you're trying to manage diabetes, what is that equivalent scale? That's what we're building. 

Zach Aten: That's cool. Since we do testing sort of the traditional way in a, like a clinical lab is your device itself able to run these tests or does it like send the data somewhere else? Or how does that work? Cause that's super 

Mark Norton: Yeah. It's the traditional off the shelf technology. So essentially today you can buy different devices to do all of these tests at home or on the go. And we have found a way to bring the core components of that together into one device. And so using a modular system, like a Keurig and pods, you know how Keurig, they didn't invent making coffee, but they made it really easy. 

Using the cartridges, we have a similar type of. Design that allows us to test multiple conditions through the same device. [00:06:00] Starting with glucose, that's, the FDA process requires us to have a starting point. So we'll start there. But some fast follows into really cool other opportunities there too. 

Zach Aten: Very cool. This thought comes to me, and I don't know if it makes sense at all, but Is there any type of connection between the types of devices that people are using now to manage diabetes and what's billable to insurance companies or what, is there like some type of economic influence on why the hardware sucks, for lack of a better word, with what people are using? 

Mark Norton: Yeah, I think, man, it's. I think it's a multitude, like any problem, there's multiple factors to it that affect it. I think the first is just the difficulty in getting new technology to market within the healthcare space. For example within glucose meters, a few years ago, the FDA updated its guidance. 

By providing a guidance document. So great, fantastic. They give us a roadmap to bring glucose meters to market, but then they added a 350 person [00:07:00] user study to that guidance document. I had that, that reviewed it with, my team and then gave it to another consultant that like, I've never seen a user study this high. 

From a guidance document perspective. And so you just think the FDA made it really easy as far as making it straightforward, but then added this really burdensome process to it of having a bunch of users come in. And so I think from that perspective is it just gives shares a lens on how difficult it is to bring. 

Yeah, I think the first piece is the reimbursement model. Even really standard technology, like a glucose meter to market in a new way, is there's just all of these hurdles, regulatory hurdles to get there. And so I think, they're important and they have their place. But I think on some level there's the regulatory capture is the friend of the incumbent. 

And so I think it makes it hard for new interest to come in. I think that's the first piece. But then the reimbursement model, my opinion on it is that it's relatively broken because the incentives are misaligned, right? And so when I dig into that incentive structure, it really makes sense for the person using the device to also pay for the device, right? 

Because then What I'm building is built for them, they're paying me. It aligns incentives. When you have [00:08:00] this, multiple middlemen in the system it creates disincentives for innovation and so the end user can't air their complaints. They just have to go with what's on the market because the actual buyer doesn't care what's on the market. 

And I think for us, we've looked at our business model as how do we realign those incentives? And there's a whole bunch of different ways to play in this market. We focus more on the upper end. Yeah. The iPod of mp3 players, right? And let's focus on that upper end and try and realign incentives that way. 

And look, over time to how we can expand that access. 

Zach Aten: Cool. how do you see your product fitting into sort of this new wave of, GLP one drugs being prescribed for and everything. More people having access to them. We work with several companies who are providing those types of services and lots of their folks have to get lab tests done in order to maintain those prescriptions, or get the medication that they need. 

Where do you guys see yourself fitting into that? Do you see yourself [00:09:00] involved in that in the future? 

Mark Norton: Yeah, I think some of the lab work that you guys do for that is more detailed and more thorough than what we would do on our device. So I think the two aren't mutually exclusive in that regard. I think they're more complementary. GLP 1s are interesting. I think there's a lot of hype around them, understandably. 

So right now I think what's not discussed enough are the side effects of them. And If you look at some of the stats, I know it's a, I don't want to misquote it, so I won't misquote it, but I know there's a significant percentage of people that actually stopped using the drug early before they reach their targets because of the complications and side effects. 

And I think that's one piece to this puzzle that adoption may not be as strong long term. And that what it does is. Alter people's mentality. I know I need to go on these drugs because I need to avoid diabetes. Now I need to start stepping on the scale and seeing where I am. 

And if I'm not going to use these drugs, how do I get healthy? And I think that leads them down to really the two pathways for managing your metabolic health. That's continuous glucose monitoring, which is one option. And the other is discrete measurements, like what our device [00:10:00] does. And I think long term, you may not want to wear something 24 seven, but you do want to make sure that you're stepping on the scale regularly enough to know that You're getting healthy. 

If you're not on, if you are or aren't on GLP-1s. And so I see again the Rise of GOP ones, really raising awareness about diabetes. Most, I think it's something like 60 or 70 percent of pre diabetics don't know they have diabetes, pre diabetes. And so you go to your doctor because, oh, now I can lose weight with this drug. 

Oh, actually I'm pre diabetic. Oh, shoot. I now need to be managing my health more. And that awareness I think is really important in driving healthier outcomes. Whether or not they use GLP one. So I think we're a part of it. I think more than anything, the awareness raises our market potential. And when people are looking for what is that solution, what scale am I going to step on? 

I think we're definitely one of the better options. 

Zach Aten: So do you need a prescription in order to use your device or could I buy your device and check my, you were talking about these point in time, checking these measurements when you're healthy or when you're prediabetic, [00:11:00] can anybody use your device or how does that going to work? 

Mark Norton: Yeah, that's the great thing about it too. Being a legacy device like it is when we're to market and I want to be clear. I don't make any claims to our efficacy yet since we have not submitted all of our stuff to the FDA yet. But yeah, once we're in market and cleared by the FDA, yeah, you could buy it off the shelf. 

Go to our website, order it and start stepping on the scale. So to speak. You don't need a prescription. That's actually our starting business model. Is direct consumer. Pricing it affordably where you could, go and buy it. But also in a way that, it's still sustainable for us as a company. 

There's a. It's a hidden secret within the industry that co pays typically cover the total cost of things. And particularly within glucose meters and test strips, everybody's insurance is a little different, all the different situations, but it's not uncommon for the co pay that patients pay, actually being the total price that's paid out to the manufacturer. 

And so we have a unique opportunity to be at price parity for your out of pocket, even though you have insurance. We'd be a price parity and still [00:12:00] be a sustainable, profitable business while bringing you a higher level of features and usability and all those things as well. It's a unique opportunity, I think, as we realign incentives to also, bring a better user experience to the customer. 

So 

Zach Aten: Okay. So people are going to have to wait a little bit for your product to come out. You guys do have a wait list on your website, right? For people who are interested. 

Mark Norton: yeah, we do just go in, put in your email address and and we'll keep you updated as we go through our build process and submit the FDA and all those kinds of things. 

Zach Aten: All right. We'll definitely put links to that in the show notes for everybody who's interested. Is you, are you guys planning to integrate with, like Apple Health and stuff like that for people who want to maybe, use your platform, but also connect their healthcare data to some of the other services that they use? 

Mark Norton: Absolutely. And I think of it, we have, like I mentioned, hardware and software hardware is a platform for your diagnostics. Our software is a platform for your data. And so bringing in your Apple health data, maybe you're using a nutrition, food tracking app. [00:13:00] We'll pull that in. Maybe you are using a continuous glucose monitor. 

We can pull that data in, bring it all into one place. And then we have a phenomenal team that's building custom machine learning algorithms. And so we take. Specific data about you and correlate that back to what your metabolic health is. Think of things like, I went for this walk in the evening and in the morning, does one affect my long term A1C prognosis? 

better or worse, right? Like how would I understand that without bringing all that data on? And doing that analysis, it's straightforward from a scientific perspective, but it's just so much data that no doctor is reviewing this, and giving you this custom insight. It's hard for patients to do that themselves. 

Generic google advice isn't going to give it to you. And so we bring that all into one place to say that of your goal is to lower your a1c is by 0. 5 percent well Here's how you'll do that. These factors are playing into it. Your sleep, your nutrition, your exercise, how hydrated you are, when your calendar is lighter, actually you're less stressed and your prognosis improves, right? 

All of these different factors. There's a really interesting one. I heard recently [00:14:00] I was talking to a guy who has type one diabetes and he mentioned how the age of his insulin affects its efficacy and he's been really struggling to figure out how that improves. Age correlates back. Is it a week, a two weeks, a month, like how old until I need an extra unit, and so by bringing all of this data into one place, we can give those type of customized insights into your health. 

And so yeah, if you sign up for the waitlist we're doing pilots and studies with our waitlist trying to Build a better product for launch. So if you join, you have the opportunity to participate in some of those. 

Zach Aten: Very cool. All right. I want to ask a question, honestly. For my wife, who is a nurse practitioner at an endocrinology practice managing helping patients manage diabetes all day long for the providers who are out there who are used to, prescribing one of these pieces of technology that's years, decades old, probably to try to help people manage their [00:15:00] diabetes, how, what's the benefit for them, to integrate you guys into their care? 

Are you guys going to have a portal for them? Or what's the value prop there? Or is this primarily just focused on a healthcare consumer who's managing diabetes? 

Mark Norton: Yeah, that's a fantastic question. Because there's so many different ways to approach that type of integration. We've thought of it through the lens of value based care. And again, aligning incentives. I think that's The most greenfield opportunity for us within integration, because what you typically find when you dig into these studies and these type of conditions is patients who test more have better outcomes. 

And so if you can align the doctor's reimbursement incentive with patients who have better outcomes and the better outcomes come from patients testing more and a device like ours could be easier to use and encourage compliance with those testing instructions, I think. All of those incentives really align well. 

And I think that's the most likely pathway for us moving forward in that regard. When you think of kind of their [00:16:00] incentives to bring us on board I lean to, and as I talk to doctors, I think good doctors will tell you this too. More options are better for patients, right? Because every patient is a little different and has different needs and concerns and all those kinds of things. 

And so by bringing more new. Novel ways to manage diabetes. You give patients more opportunities to take control of their health and live healthier. And I think their incentive, aligns with that as well. 

Zach Aten: Yeah, that's good. Anything that can help patients actually follow the care and get the insights that they need to make good choices and hopefully have a better managed chronic condition is going to be better for everybody. yeah. Where are you guys going from here? I know you're submitting stuff to the FDA. 

Do you have a an expected time that you might be hitting the market or what's the next five years look like for you? 

Mark Norton: the next five years. Oh, man. I'm still trying to figure out what tomorrow holds. But no, we're in development with our product, the hardware and the software expect to submit to the FDA [00:17:00] hopefully in the second half of this year. And hopefully be in market first half of next year. 

Still, looking into, sorry, we're at the end of December. 26 being in market. Is there a timeline? Yeah. But yeah it's and then you had a second part to that question that I think is really interesting just around the timeframe of it all. And where it all lines up over the next five years, there's, I think, tremendous opportunity within this space as we maybe refocus our attention into The health of the American population and I think as people become more aware of their health and more intentional and thinking about their health and long term consequences of the decisions they're making today it'll go back to I need to buy a scale and I think we'll be building one of the best scales for managing diabetes. 

Zach Aten: nice. I have a smart scale that I use and I can't live without it now. Gotta get on there every morning because 

Gotta get my little coin in my app for the day for doing the right behaviors, right? 

Mark Norton: Exactly. And I think there's some really interesting stuff too. If you think of how we've been focused on social media and [00:18:00] consumerism and media, and really, like our phones are probably some of the greatest mechanism for delivering media. We've gotten hooked in that way. I think the gamification of your health is really important too. 

And creating a social dynamic that supports one another in that, in the same way that we support one another going on trips and posting on Instagram we should support one another in, Getting healthier and staying healthy. And so I think the integration of that kind of media consumption, that's for better or worse kind of taken over the world. 

I think integrating your health into that is really critical. And aligning modernizing healthcare in a way where, you know, I. I share what I'm doing with you and you're like, Hey, that's awesome. Mark. Great job. Way to step on the scale today, and vice versa. Getting that, that coin in your hat. And so I think, as we realize that collectively we're all, supporting one another. I think building systems that that create that type of community and foster that type of encouragement are really critical. We think of type one diabetics as a, our core market. 

That's They're just warriors the way they fight through all the adversity they faith face with that disease and [00:19:00] managing it and also just the system at large that, that really, I think in some ways treats them really poorly. And so we want to take a more empathetic approach, which is why we named Adele. 

Adele means noble and kind. And we wanted to bring that sense of dignity back to healthcare and back to diabetes. But when I look at the type one community, it is very much so a community. And they encourage one another and spur one another on to do, and to be better and be healthier. 

And I think that type of community Understandably exists within type one, but it'd be great to see that within the type two community as well, where a bunch of people who are encouraging one another to get healthier and stay healthier and make good choices within that frame, I think will be really important. 

And it won't be part of our launch system, but it's definitely part of what we want to integrate into our platform is that type of community approach where people are encouraging one another to get better, just like your Apple watch nudges you when your friend works out and now you want to work out. 

One of those, this type of things. And  

Zach Aten: All right, I'm going to put you on the spot to bring it all together. I'm a 55 year old male with diabetes. Tell [00:20:00] me your value pitch on on why I should go out and get your product when it comes out in 2026. 

Mark Norton: man, great question. So you 55 your kids are in high school. You're working every day, going into work, doing all those things, preparing for retirement. You want to have a good retirement. You want to have a long retirement, enjoy all your grandkids. To do that, you need to stay healthy today. 

It's going to be really hard when you're in your sixties and your seventies to get healthy. So you gotta get healthy today. That requires. stepping on the scale literally and metaphorically. And if you're doing that as part of your daily life, you don't want to carry around a backpack full of supplies. 

You want a device that fits in your pocket, that works with your phone and integrates with, all of your technology seamlessly. And that's what we're building from a hardware perspective. But then you also want to be able to understand what to do with all that data that you're collecting and how does all of that work out to where. 

Do I eat this thing or go on this walk now or later or how is that affecting me? What is really effective for my body? Understanding all that you really can't get that anywhere else and [00:21:00] that's gonna be I think the key piece to why you'd want to buy into our platform, so 

Zach Aten: Mark Norton, everybody. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Appreciate you. We'll have links to your website and your wait list and your product when it comes out so people can go and check you out. Thank you, sir. 

Mark Norton: Thank you so much for having me Zach, I appreciate it. Good to see  

Zach Aten: You too.