Tidepool Platform expansion and matching grant

We’re thrilled to announce that The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust has awarded a $900,000 grant to Tidepool to support continued development of the Tidepool Platform and Tidepool Uploader.

All by itself, this is an incredibly generous and wonderful statement of support of Tidepool’s efforts to make diabetes data more accessible to people with diabetes, their caregivers and diabetes researchers.

But wait, there’s more. As part of this grant, the Helmsley Charitable Trust is offering a $300,000 matching challenge grant, meaning that the Helmsley Charitable Trust will DOUBLE the impact of your donations to Tidepool. There has never been a better time to support Tidepool’s efforts. As a matter of fact, there’s no time like the present, so please visit tidepool.org/donate and donate now, or send us an email if you’d like to donate securities or talk more.

As you probably know, the Helmsley Charitable Trust is the largest private foundation funder of T1D-related research, treatment and support services in the nation. With this grant, the Trust is enabling us to further expand the Tidepool Platform and provide APIs that will enable developers to write applications that securely access diabetes data (using Oauth2 and REST APIs, for the nerds among us). The possibilities are endless - we see a vibrant ecosystem of applications that can share diabetes data with the user’s permission.

A huge impediment to diabetes research is access to high-quality, correlated device data. This grant also enables us to expand our research APIs and query interfaces. We will also offer all Tidepool users the opportunity to donate their data to the T1D Exchange and Jaeb Center for Health Research, two of the largest and most respected T1D research organizations, also funded by the Helmsley Charitable Trust. (As always, we firmly believe that patients own their own health data, so donating data is a CHOICE we will offer and enable, and is not at all a requirement.)

Finally, this grant enables us to continue to add new devices to the Tidepool Uploader, further expanding the number of devices we are able to read data from. As we’ve previously said, the Tidepool Uploader will support devices from Asante, Dexcom, Insulet/OmniPod, Tandem/t:slim, and Abbott. This grant will allow us to add more blood glucose meters and insulin pumps as device makers make their protocols available.

And to answer the question on everyone’s mind: So when can I get access to all of this? We’re currently in the thick of a private beta of both Blip and the Tidepool Uploader. We are also currently supporting the “Replace BG” study being conducted at the Jaeb Center (and also supported by the Helmsley Charitable Trust). We expect to be expanding to a public Beta over the next couple of months and hope to release the Tidepool Uploader, Blip and our developer interfaces shortly after that.

We simply cannot be more thankful to our friends at the Helmsley Charitable Trust who have shown over the years an incredible dedication to supporting research and better treatments for people living with type 1 diabetes. With this generous grant, the Helmsley Charitable Trust enables Tidepool to help accelerate development of our platform, enable an ecosystem of diabetes apps and research, and to bring even more devices on board.

And best of all, by offering a matching grant, they are doubling the impact that you can have. Won’t you please join us? Please visit tidepool.org/donate to donate now.

Cheers,Howard