Diabetes Self-Defense®, LLC: Frank Harritt, MBA, and Bill Bergman, M.D.

•  Jay A. Krakovitz, M.D. -    Dr. Krakovitz is a board-certified internist who received his undergraduate and medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania. After completing an internal medicine residency at Lankenau Hospital in Philadelphia, he started a private practice in internal medicine. He ultimately developed a three-person practice and concurrently served as Chairman of Medicine of Jeanes Hospital in Philadelphia. Jay was one of the first internists to participate in U.S. Healthcare's network in Philadelphia and was featured in one of the company's first television commercials. He was recruited as a medical director after 14 years of private practice in internal medicine. After Aetna merged with U.S. Healthcare, Jay was ultimately named its' interim Chief Medical Officer in 2000.  In mid-2001, he left Aetna to pursue his interest in the growing Hospitalist movement and subsequently worked with two emerging companies. Most recently, he served as Anthem Blue Cross & Blue Shield Medical Director for Colorado and Nevada and Chief Medical Officer of Physician Health Partners.  He currently serves on the Board of the Colorado Clinical Guidelines Collaborative, after serving three years as President. In addition to his business duties, Dr. Krakovitz served as Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2002.

   

• Today, he has returned to the practice of Internal Medicine in Denver, Colorado to affirm his deep commitment to patient care.  Dr.Krakovitz himself has diabetes, so he can relate to his patients in a direct and personal way.

• Kevin Tong, M.D., F.A.C.P. - a practicing endocrinologist in Denver, CO, Dr. Tong is board-certified in Diabetes, Internal Medicine, Metabolism, and Endocrinology.  Since graduating from the Tufts University School of Medicine in 1986, Dr. Tong has served as a staff internist/endocrinologist, an Assistant Professor of Medicine, and a consulting endocrinologist as well as being the author of multiple scientific papers.   

   

• David Mendosa is a freelance journalist and consultant specializing in diabetes. After earning a B.A. with honors from the University of California, Riverside, and an M.A. from Claremont Graduate University, he became a Foreign Service officer. He worked 11 years in Washington and four years in Africa for the U.S. foreign aid program. Subsequently, he became a journalist, initially specializing in writing about small business. However, when he was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in February 1994, he began to write entirely about that condition. His articles and columns have appeared in many of the major diabetes magazines and Web sites. His own website, David Mendosa's Diabetes Directory, mendosa.com/diabetes, was one of the first and is now one of the largest with that focus. It includes about 800 of his articles or web pages about diabetes. Every month he also publishes a free email newsletter called "Diabetes Update." Twice weekly he writes for his blog at http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/. He is a coauthor of The New Glucose Revolution: What Makes My Blood Glucose Go Up...And Down? (New York: Marlowe & Co., first edition in 2003, second American edition in July 2006, and other publishers in the U.K., Australia, and Taiwan). He is the author of Losing Weight with Your Diabetes Medication: How Byetta and Other Drugs Can Help You Lose More Weight than You Ever Thought Possible (New York: Persus Books, March 2008).