Kristen McGovern Discusses Exciting Innovations in Diabetes Care

Kristen McGovern, JD, partner at Sirona Strategies, said that remote patient monitoring is one of the most exciting innovations in diabetes care, as it allows both the patient and the physician access to real-time data that wouldn’t have been accessible in the past when patients only went to see their doctor once every couple of months.

Transcript (slightly modified)

What recent innovations in diabetes care do you find most exciting?

So I think we’ve heard about wireless glucometers, which can wirelessly transmit your blood sugar for monitoring. We’ve heard about, and actually Mike Payne from Omada Health uses a wireless weight, a wireless scale to transmit your weight to the health coach. It’s really this remote patient monitoring that I think is very innovative and really interesting because we’re now able to really track how people are doing on these key indicators you know maybe once a day, maybe more than once a day, and really getting real-time data points in a way that we weren’t previously getting when we relied on an office visit and you went in once a month or once every 3 months or something along those lines.

What is it about diabetes care monitoring that makes it a good fit for telehealth?

I think it’s the ability to remotely monitor the key indicators that tell a clinician when the disease is progressing. So, diabetes is a chronic disease. People live with it. You have ups, you have downs. Sometimes you’re very well monitored and maybe very stable in your condition, sometimes you’re not. I think the ability to have patients access care outside the walls of a hospital or the doctor’s office makes it a really great fit compared to some other condition that’s maybe more acute or you know, more of an emergency type of situation. And, the remote patient monitoring actually does give clinicians the ability to see if you are entering into that kind of emergency state and get help to you if you need it.