Dec 1
2021
How Technologies Are Personalizing At-Home Diabetes Care
By Mark Clements, MD, PhD, CPI, FAAP, chief medical officer, Glooko, Inc.
Seemingly overnight, healthcare discovered and fully embraced digital health solutions. Just months after the 2020 nationwide lockdown, telehealth visits, virtual clinical trials and countless remote patient care technologies became the new normal.
Consider:
- Market analysts predict that by 2024 an estimated 30 million Americans will be using remote patient monitoring (RPM) devices, apps and other tools.
- The pandemic has exponentially accelerated the adoption curve for virtual clinical trials; one survey found that 44% of pharma, clinical research and biotech professionals already had or planned to adopt RPM solutions for their trials within a year.
- A nationwide survey of nearly 1,600 physicians and licensed professionals found that 75% said telehealth enabled them to provide quality care.
Most of these technologies addressed what the American Medical Association calls “an epidemic” of chronic diseases. RPM solutions are especially suitable for these complex conditions, which typically require the frequent collection of physiological and/or patient-generated data from self-reporting tools, mobile devices, fitness wearables or other biosensors.
Diabetes has long been a focal point for technological innovations to personalize at-home patient care, beginning with the first glucose meters for patients in 1980. The need for such solutions has never been more urgent. A 2020 CDC report estimates that 122 million U.S. adults – one-third of the population — either have or are at risk of developing diabetes.
Here are three noteworthy recent advances in personalized diabetes care management that show the vast potential of digital health solutions to revolutionize both care management for chronic diseases and clinical research.