The AI Revolutionizing Diabetes Care: From Overwhelming Data to Simple Daily Decisions

Why does having more diabetes data not actually make managing it any easier?

Ep#022 In this episode of the Healthcare Wayfinders Podcast, Zach Aten sits down with Jonathan Fitch, founder of Glucose Sense AI, to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming diabetes management from reactive guesswork into proactive, personalized care. Jonathan shares how his own health scare inspired him to build a platform that simplifies complex data into actionable insights—helping people live better with fewer daily decisions.

They also dive into how Glucose Sense AI integrates data from continuous glucose monitors, wearables, and daily habits, why providers struggle with overwhelming reports, and what the future could look like with fully automated insulin support systems.

💡About Jonathan Fitch
Jonathan Fitch is the founder of Glucose Sense AI, a platform designed to simplify diabetes management by turning complex health data into clear, actionable insights. Living with type 1 diabetes for over 15 years, Jonathan built Glucose Sense after experiencing a serious health event despite being considered well-controlled, with the mission to help others make fewer but better decisions every day.

📌 Connect with Jonathan Fitch LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-fitch/

✅About Glucose Sense AI
Glucose Sense AI is an AI-powered companion for people living with diabetes, integrating data from continuous glucose monitors, wearables, and daily lifestyle inputs to provide real-time guidance and personalized insights. The platform helps users better understand their blood sugar patterns, reduce decision fatigue, and improve their overall quality of life through proactive, data-driven support.

📲 Website: https://www.glucosesense.ai/


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Transcript

 Welcome back to the Healthcare Wayfinders Podcast, where we are routing you to more accessible and cost-effective healthcare. I'm your host, Zach Aton, and today's conversation is a powerful one, especially if you or someone you love is navigating diabetes.

I'm joined by Jonathan Fitch, founder of Glucco Sense ai, a platform designed to simplify one of the most complex parts of diabetes care, understanding and managing your blood sugar in real time. Jonathan isn't just building a technology. He's solving a problem that he personally has dealt with for over 15 years after experiencing a serious health event.

Despite being considered well controlled, Jonathan set out to build something different, an AI powered companion that helps people make fewer but better decisions every day by turning overwhelming health data into simple, actionable insights.

In this episode, we talk about why more data hasn't necessarily meant better outcomes than diabetes care. How glucose sense AI brings together data from devices like continuous glucose monitors, wearables, and daily life, what it looks like to shift care from reactive to proactive, both for patients and for providers, and Jonathan's vision for the future, including fully automated insulin support systems.

If you've ever wondered how technology can actually improve day-to-day life, not just track it, this episode is for you. Let's dive in.

  📍  📍 ​

 Hey everybody and welcome back to the Healthcare Wayfinders podcast. I'm your host, Zach Aten. And with me I have Jonathan Fitch from Glucco Sense ai. He's got an amazing product and I'm excited to have you here and hear more about it and your story behind it. So welcome Jonathan.

How you doing today? 

Doing great. I appreciate you having me on.

We love  having you on. I'm excited about this because it's not something that I have very much knowledge of. You've got an app, gluc Sense ai. Would you give us a little bit of background on what it does and then how it came about? What was your story on creating it? 

Yeah, so Glucose Sense is really a companion for people living with diabetes. Typically, those who are on insulin and wear a continuous glucose monitor, the idea is to help guide you. With regards to your management outside of the healthcare system at its  core, helping you make fewer but better decisions each day?  Personally, I've lived with type one diabetes for 15 years and that's why I started down this path. What my personal, journey or the reason this all started was I had relatively unpredictable seizure during college finals. I I've always had a great A1C considered well controlled  and even I slipped through the cracks.

And the idea  behind glucose sense is to take all this data that we track as people living with diabetes and do all the interpretation and processing for us. So when. You open it, it has all the answers and insights ready to go. It's very low lift. It doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge and doesn't require a lot  of input.

It just does the work for you. And of course  there are some features where you can take pictures of your food and we'll count the carbs and help give you estimates and show you what, how it impacts your blood sugar. We'll be able to, make findings that, pizza and Mexican food have similar impacts.

But the more you use it, the more you open it, the better it gets.

 Very cool. So this app connects into a continuous glucose monitor. Is that something people can just set up like through your app or how do they actually connect the data feed I. 

So it's pretty easy when you download Glucosense. You'll go through a whole signup flow to help personalize experience to you. In that signup flow, you'll be able to link your continuous glucose monitor. So we're a full partner of Dexcom, one of very few companies to have that full partnership. And we also integrate Abbott's Freestyle  Libre and then.

Almost any wearable device  you can think of. So Fitbit or a Whoop Apple Watch, Garmin, et cetera. You tie all that together and then glucose sense based off of how you sign up, ensure the goals, the challenges and obstacles in your life will start immediately identifying where your baseline is at, and helping give guidance and proactive support. 

 Quick question for, so you're integrated with these partners. And again, I, all these questions are coming from my own ignorance, but why do they let you integrate with their products? Do they not use like their own apps or something like that? I. 

They do. So we bring the entire ecosystem together so there's more than what you're looking at. Somebody living with diabetes in just your immediate. Dexcom blood sugar value. There are a lot of decisions that go into everything that we do, whether it's working out, eating a bite of food, going out with friends.

Having a few drinks and it really needs a central hub for it all to exist.  So we work very closely with the team at  Dexcom and collaborate, and they're great partners of ours. From a commercial business standpoint, our primary customer are health plans so that they can provide better care delivery to their members.  We view Dexcom as a partner in, in that relationship and champion them in all of the deals that we do. So it's really meant to be collaborative over competition. 

Cool. Cool. The idea here is about increasing quality of life, like from the patient's perspective or the person using this, the healthcare consumer. And again, I, my own  experience here, it is lacking, but  this helps. Just give a better all health experience helps people understand like how their body's responding to these different inputs, whether it's food or exercise or rest or sleep, that type of thing. 

Yeah, so we, so in my undergrad at Georgia Tech, we developed something called the glucose score. It's a new way to interpret blood sugar data, and it also serves as the foundational layer to how our AI. Works how we're able to empathize and understand  where individuals are at. A very  common point of feedback that we get for glucose sense is that it's like the Aura Readiness score or the Aura experience, but for your diabetes management, it's there to give you the context so you don't have to sit there and try to figure it all out on your own.

  might be areas that you need to engage with glucose Sense to really. Share more context so that it can give you a more holistic understanding of what's going on. But it's really there to operate in the background and give you closure and guidance. 

Okay. What about, what's the value from like a provider's perspective? So like my wife is a nurse practitioner at an endocrinology practice. She serves folks with diabetes like all day long. She prescribes these continuous glucose monitors. What about their experience? How does this help them or help them?

Help their patients? 

Yeah, so I guess for. The audience that wears continuous glucose monitors and is more familiar with this space. What these endocrinologists and physicians in the space see is something called a Dexcom Clarity Report,  and it's an overwhelming amount of granular  data, so typically. You'll go into your session, the doctor will be flipping through these reports and it's a whole stack of paper.

You're like, three weeks ago on a Tuesday you had this big blood sugar spike. What happened here? You're like,

Yeah.

don't know,  I probably ate something and forgot a bolus. Or maybe I had an issue with my pump. And okay, you need to be better about bolusing on time or, and it's these anecdotal conversations that are had and you end up leaving the provider and it.

Most patients have great experiences with their providers and endos, but what we've heard is a common point of feedback is a lot of times patients are there primarily to get their prescriptions refilled. But what we've found is people living with diabetes are managing their  diabetes outside the healthcare system, which isn't a big shocker.

It's  you're thinking about your carbs, your exercise, how much insulin you're taking. All day, every day. So the opportunity to support patients and really even providers is when the patient doesn't have the opportunity to be sitting next to a provider and asking them all the questions, because providers don't have the bandwidth for that, and it's not a scalable form of care delivery.

So glucose sense is designed to. Augment that care outside of the practice. And then also for providers, rather  than having that 40 page Dexcom clarity report,  we have a single page PDF that walks providers through the unique challenges that you're facing so that the conversations you have are on a level playing field.

They're actually the challenges you're experiencing. So when I tried a new form of insulin pump, my time and range went up, but I was burning out. Wasn't visible in the data because the data said I was doing better, but what Glucose was able to say is. I'm having severe nocturnal hypoglycemic events followed by rebound hyperglycemic events. 

Now, that's provider lingo, but what that means is I'm  having overnight lows at different hours of the nights. I'm overeating in the middle of the night because I'm asleep and waking up to correct my blood sugar. So I just. Some food down. Then my blood sugar skyrockets, and then the next day my blood sugar ends up all over the place.

That's what Glucose Sense has the ability to cut through the noise on and allow the provider to work with the patients on the true challenges they're having rather than trying to find the one-off incidents in a very overwhelming sea of data that they see today. 

No that's really cool. 'cause that's a complaint that I hear from my wife. Literally probably once a week of we have all this data. How is it actually helping us? Help the cus help the patient, have a better life experience, a better health experience. And yeah, they're not, no who remembers what we ate two weeks ago  at

let alone three days ago. It's not realistic. So we hope to fill that gap and that's where we've seen a lot of success. 

 That's awesome. So you said that you ha you primarily your distribution is primarily through like health plans. I'm assuming somebody could still just go on the app store and download your app and use it. How would somebody who's maybe. Getting it through their plan versus they just, see this podcast and they're like, I wanna go download this and start using it.

How would they access it? 

So today Glucose Sense exists as a free offering. So go to App Store or the Google Play Store. Glucose Sense is available to download and you link your devices, all your data's private and your. You're good to go. We raised our initial funding to build the perfect diabetes experience,  and we're certainly very close to there, and there's always room for  improvements and new features, and we constantly get new requests.

But the commercial business model is furthering our partnership with health plans. So at some point in the future, the signup flow will be more reflective of that, but today, there's no barriers for anybody to get started with glucose sense experience. 

That's awesome. So somebody can just get on there, download the app, and start in integrating it with their continuous glucose monitoring device and and then start benefiting from all of the the help that Glucose Sense provides. I'll definitely put links to all of that in the show notes so that people have easy access to do that. 

And for providers, we can sign up healthcare systems, independent practices, relatively ea easily. What we've seen with Glucose Sense is the most effective way to reach more people is this grassroots effort by  people living with diabetes who use glucose sense. Every  day or multiple times a week, they show up to their providers and go, Hey, this is.

Been super helpful, and the provider goes, what's this? And then they reach out to us and then we get the practice onboarded, and that's a great way to spread the message.

 Cool. So do providers work with you directly or is it more of they just make people aware of this tool that they can use with their continuous glucose  monitoring device? 

It is a, it's a mix, but I will say it's in the best interest of the providers to get involved with us as well, because then the patient has the ability to share their data back to the provider, which gives those comprehensive reports on, that example of nocturnal hypoglycemia followed by rebound and helping providers and patients have more effective time together.

 That's great. That's great.  how does the, how does somebody know that they're doing well? The app? What are the, if I'm using this, is it primarily a I feel better and have a more consistent feel, good life experience?  How do they measure, like the quality of their life, the quality of their health experience?

If I start using this today and I'm using it in three months, am I gonna feel better? Am I gonna, what? What's the how do people know that they're doing better? 

Yeah, so there's a few ways to indicate it. I personally don't think A1C is the best indicator of the quality of your life. As I had an A seizure in college at a six A1C. There's a lot of variables that go into diabetes management.  What's usually used today is A1C in a  metric called time and range.

Of course continue to use those. But what's unique with Glucose Sense is when you sign up, you get that glucose score number. It's not a grade. What it does do is it serves to say, this is where you're at. So if you sign up and you're at a four, the goal is to get to a  five, and we'll give you little bits of education to help you get to a  five.

And once you are getting fives every day. We'll work with you to get to a six and six to a seven, and when you're seven and above, you're meeting and exceeding all standard management guidelines, but you should feel encouraged and empowered to manage by changing  by. Leveraging some of the small  suggestions we give to help slowly dial in your life and make it more intuitive to manage.

Like I said at the beginning, our mission is to help you make fewer but better decisions each day. As that really starts to take place, you should feel like diabetes is less of a burden on your day-to-day life. 

Cool. That's great. So for your health plans how do they know that it's benefiting their population? How do they measure that? 

So they really like to stick to what's the A1C outcome data. But then there's other metrics we track. So the frequency of acute episodes of somebody ending up in an extreme hypoglycemic event leading to the ED or a DKA incident, and then look at the volatility of blood sugars. Of course, with the health plans, we do wanna see  a reduction in cost if we're deployed across a large  population level.

Just, people are living healthier, so thus they should cost a little bit less to the health plans, but. Ultimately the there's one other layer. Health plans are overburdened with many diseases, many chronic conditions that they're having to manage. They typically use care managers to provide  ancillary care to make sure you navigate the system  effectively.

Where we're seeing an area of opportunity for glucose sense is better triaging data to care managers so that they can be more proactive in their outreach. Are your PAs getting approved? Are you on your medicine? Do you have enough medicine? Do you seem burnt out? Based off of the data we have, can they be more proactive in their outreach RA rather than calling you retrospectively after you have an acute  episode post discharge from the ed?

Because the high  cost incident has already happened. So for health plans, it's really allowing. It's enabling them to be more proactive and supportive to their members because no matter what set about the health plans out there, nobody really wants to pay for you to show up to the emergency room.

So it's in everybody's interest to get ahead of that and get you the medicines you need and make sure you're living a sustainable day to day with the tools you need to do that. 

Is this something that can be used by somebody with either type one or type two diabetes? 

Yes. So if you were a continuous glucose monitor, when you sign up, you'll be able to choose from type one, type two on insulin, type two on GLP one, and pre-diabetic or non-diabetic. For the non-diabetic, I believe we have to give you a share code. It's not the population we typically focus on, but it, we support anybody who has that flow of data. 

Okay, cool. So even if I don't have a continuous glucose monitor, but I want to. Live a healthier life. I've got maybe type two and I'm doing my best to manage my diabetes. I can still get a lot of value with using Gluc Glucose Sense ai. 

 That is a few months out. So there is that development in the pipeline today. You do need a con continuous glucose monitor to get value. 

Okay. Cool. That leads into my next question of like, where are you wanting to go with this? What's your big, hairy, audacious goal around what Glucco Sense could do to help folks with diabetes?   

As we have an internal there, there's several ways to answer this, but I'll take the most exciting approach. So we have a project internally that we call Project Rios, and it's a full a ID. What that means is automated insulin delivery system that. Dosing insulin. Now, I am the only person on  this technology.

It is based off  of all the IP we have at Glucose Sense, the food logging, the chat that's coming, which is already operational in Rios. All this foundational logic we had to build, and I'm getting 90 to a hundred percent time in range with almost no effort. You don't need to count cards, you don't need to be technical.

I will say something like.  I'm going out to dinner, having Mexican food, having a bunch  of chips, probably eating quite a bit of food. It can take that and make sure that my blood sugar does not go high and I have relatively stable blood sugars for the next eight to 12 hours. Post meal. As Mexican food is one of the most challenging things to manage with diabetes.

That is the experience we want everybody with diabetes to be able to have.  And we're continuing to work and develop  with our industry partners to make sure that technology can find its way to market. Now, we aren't gonna become an insulin pump manufacturer, but we do hope that our technology will be able to live through other devices that currently operate on the market.

And there is a separate regulatory pathway that we are going through to ultimately reach these goals. 

Very cool. That sounds like an awesome future for everybody that. I know that has diabetes.  you, 

It's, yeah it's incredible.

yeah. Now you're a fellow Georgia Tech grad, right?

Yes. 

You  and your co-founder. 

Tech.  Yes. Yes.  

 Come on. Go 

Jackets. 

Go jackets.

That's great. How long have you got, did you say you developed, started developing this in school or. Your experience in school helped start the process. 

A bit of both. This started, really through my last year of college, after I had the, that event, I had another company at the time, wasn't super passionate about it, but I grew it to a meaningful size. I was able to exit that company and then go full time on. And then Georgia Tech had this program called Create X, which is a startup accelerator, and then we've just continued from there. 

That's awesome. And now you guys are part of the Advanced Technology Development Center at Georgia Tech. 

Yes, we are. 

That's awesome. That's awesome. Jonathan, I really appreciate you coming on. Is there anything else that you'd wanna talk about before we sign off? 

If anybody's interested really in getting involved or learning more about the story or the mission and can support in any way, we always welcome  that. 

That's great. That's great. Jonathan. It's been great having you on, man. Super pumped  📍 about the great work that y'all are doing.

Thanks,  📍 Zach. I really appreciate it.