Narrative Dx #001: When One Device Tells Two Stories
Welcome to Narrative Dx, my new series on Narrative Strategy for Healthcare. I'm performing story surgery on the healthcare industry — with an occasional tangent into life sciences and biotech. Let's dive in.
Last week the FDA cleared Dexcom’s Stelo for kids as young as 2 — first over-the-counter glucose monitor ever approved for a pediatric population. Big deal. The coverage so far? All “glycemic awareness” and “informed adjustments” — official, accurate, and not yet talking to anyone in particular.
Here’s the thing: this one device just inherited two completely different families. A parent whose toddler has a real health condition, watching this data with real worry. And a parent who’s just curious — no diagnosis, no urgency, just wondering what happens to their kid’s blood sugar after birthday cake. Same sensor. Same app. Wildly different Tuesday.
I’ve sat with this exact split before. On a public health campaign with Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, we didn’t write one diabetes explainer and dial the vocabulary up or down by age. We built two separate narratives — one for little kids, built around curiosity and feeling safe; another for parents, carrying the clinical weight and next steps the kids’ version was never supposed to hold. Same condition. Two stories. Each one doing a job the other couldn’t.
Stelo’s got that exact structure hiding inside it right now. One device, one app, one voice — trying to talk to a toddler managing a real diagnosis and a toddler whose parent just wants to understand snacks better. “Glycemic awareness” is doing a lot of work to cover both.
So here’s the diagnosis: this isn’t a “how do we write one message for two audiences” problem. It’s a “is this one story or two” problem — and somebody has to decide, on purpose, before the messaging gets written. Skip that step, and you end up either scaring families who have nothing to worry about, or underserving the ones who really do.
The fix isn’t more messaging. It’s deciding, on purpose, which story you’re telling to whom — before a single asset gets built.
That gap between the technical story and the human one doesn’t close itself. The real question is: who’s making that call?
I’m Ari Mostov — I help healthtech and medtech companies figure out exactly this kind of thing before it becomes a messaging mess. More soon in this series, Narrative Dx.