The trial data I’m sharing below came out of a study presented at the 2007 Diabetes Technology Meeting by one of the investigator endocrinologists from Texas Children’s Hospital; the largest pediatric type 1 regional diabetes center in the country. Not only were the outcomes impressive - this trial was abandoned after a few months the first time it was attempted due to the difficulties experienced by the research team in getting timely access to quality outpatient blood sugar data. Then we added the GlucoMON® (an embedded long-range wireless telemetry device) to the protocol and voila - timely accurate data. Let the research party continue! So you see it’s sometimes as simple as Possible vs Not Possible and when you see the results you’ll appreciate that it is essential that we drive advancements in remote healthcare (via M2M for you tech geeks) because it’s possible - not to mention proven better.

In a randomized, controlled pilot study from 2005, 34 children completed a 3-month, open-labeled study using Diabetech’s automated monitoring and tethered-wireless transmission of blood glucose data. Subjects were children with an average age of 14 who had had type 1 diabetes for an average of 6 years with an average HbA1c of 11.0 ± 1.5 %.

The control group used standard SMBG, while the intervention group used the automated diabetes management system (aka - GlucoMON-ADMS). At the beginning of the trial, HbA1c was comparable in the control and the intervention group (11.2 ± 1.3 % Vs 10.8 ± 1.6 %, p = 0.56). After 3 months the HbA1c in the control group was unchanged (11.2 ± 1.3 % vs. 11.5 ± 1.7 %, p = 0.40), while HbA1c in the wireless-enabled intervention group went from 10.8 ± 1.6 % to 9.2 ± 1.1% (p < 0.0001) over 3 months.

Conclusions from this pilot study indicate that wireless-enabled SMBG in combination with direct supervision significantly improves HbA1c levels in children with poorly controlled T1DM. A previous attempt to conduct this study was abandoned due to the inability of the research team to reliably collect SMBG data from the treatment group demonstrating how GlucoMON-ADMS is a proven technology for overcoming human behavior and a general unwillingness of patients and caregivers to perform manual logging and sharing.

In other words, simply asking people to log and fax their numbers, use a website, text their data or any other method that requires extra work by the patient or patient caregiver is a non-starter when compared to the Automated Diabetes Management System. Maybe we should be calling this Health3.0?

Last 5 posts by Kevin

• What's in a name? - March 7th, 2010
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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Automated Diabetes Management System, Health2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.