Sanofi has launched an online diabetes dictionary that it hopes to build into a comprehensive resource of diabetes-related terms and phrases.
The pharma company’s new Diabetapedia website starts life with 119 entries, covering the basic (diabetes, glucose and basal insulin) as well as the more esoteric (diaboogle, Blue Fridays and D-Mom).
Writing on Sanofi’s Discuss Diabetes blog the company’s senior manager of patient solutions Laura Kolodjeski said: “Living with diabetes is an on-going, life-long learning process.
“There is almost always something to learn when it comes to diabetes, particularly for those newly-diagnosed, for those who may have a family member or close friend living with the condition, or even for those new to the diabetes online community.”
Sanofi hopes to use the site to engage with the diabetes patient community and encourage its members to share the resource online and submit their own terms.
To encourage this the company says it will provide US patient organisation the Diabetes Hands Foundation (DHF) with $5,000 to create a Diabetes Advocates’ Scholarship Fund, when the terms and phrases receive a total of 2,500 tweets and Facebook ‘Likes’.
The fund will help members of DHF’s Diabetes Advocates programme, which Sanofi is sponsoring in 2012, attend diabetes-related conferences such as the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting.
Sanofi’s initiative follows another recent online diabetes programme launch, this time from Roche. The Swiss pharma company last week teamed up with Ignite Health to use the agency’s Diabetes Nest platform, a Twitter-based social network that will allow it to curate, filter and present relevant, real-time conversations to the diabetes online community.
