The popular theory these days is that consumers with chronic health conditions want to take more control over their healthcare, and they'll be using mHealth tools to do just that.

Glen Tullman disagrees.

"They don't want to be engaged," the mHealth venture capitalist and former Allscripts CEO says. "They want to be able to live their lives. … The last thing that people with any kind of chronic condition need is one more thing to do."

Tullman has launched a new mHealth company to back up his words, and he's targeting the fast-growing diabetes market that's now dominated by the likes of Glooko and Telcare. His company, Livongo (LIve ON the GO) Health, debuted its FDA-cleared interactive blood-glucose monitor and corresponding cloud-based analytics platform at TechCrunch DISRUPT earlier this month in San Francisco.

Tullman, serving as the company's CEO, has a personal stake in the industry – a college-aged son who's a type 1 diabetic. He sees today's mHealth landscape heading in the wrong direction in treating people with chronic conditions. They don’t want to be asked to do more to manage their healthcare, he says – they want mHealth solutions that will manage their health for them. He calls it "rethinking the way we currently manage diabetes."

"We don't want them to do more – we want them to do less," he said. "What we can do is empower them."

Livongo's product consists of a touchscreen device that serves as a blood glucose monitor, pedometer and two-way link to the cloud-based platform, which offers analytics and real-time monitoring and support. A user need only test his or her blood sugar, and the device and cloud will do the rest. The user can share information with a select group of caregivers, from doctors to parents to friends, and ask for and receive advice as often or as infrequently as necessary. The analytics platform, meanwhile, processes blood sugar readings, diet and exercise to chart the user's health, issue alerts when there's a concern and provide useful tips on health management.

Tullman says the Livongo platform is ideal for healthcare providers "who don't want to be data geeks." It pulls them into the consumer's orbit only when necessary – when the consumer has a question or the data indicates an intervention is needed – and that's it.

This targets one of the enduring challenges in today's healthcare landscape: patient engagement. Tullman doesn't like the phrase, because it connotes more intervention by a provider than might be needed. The idea is to enable someone with a chronic condition to live as normal of a life as possible, with minimum interventions, and to give doctors the freedom to provide health management only when necessary. This adds value to the provider's time, and reduces waste.

The company, which received financial backing from 7wire Ventures (the Chicago-based venture capital firm run by Tullman and longtime collaborator Lee Shapiro) and General Catalyst Partners, has been beta testing its platform at the University of Massachusetts and the University of South Florida, and is partnering with HealthCare Partners, one of the country's larger managed care networks.

According to Tullman, three-quarters of the patients who have used Livongo in the beta tests said they'd pay to keep it after the project concluded.

Calling Livongo "a promising new technology," David Harlan, MD, director of the Diabetes Center of Excellence at UMass Memorial Medical Center, said in in a press release that the product was "well received by our patients with diabetes and also provided more data and information than our clinicians have ever had before."

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