How technology is changing treatment of diabetics
An article published last week in The Wall Street Journal, “For many diabetes patients, skin patches and phones are replacing finger pricks”, reviews the evolution of diabetes treatments, focusing on how the use of transdermal patches and apps are replacing the need for patients to extract a small amount of blood from pricking their thumb to monitor blood glucose levels, an essential part of the day-to-day life of diabetics. Nothing that most diabetics didn’t already know or that has not been explored in specialized publications, but an interesting article for the general public.
In the United States, there were approximately 840,000 patients out of a total of thirty million using continuous glucose meters at the end of March, a market of about 3.2 billion dollars increasingly dominated by brands such as Abbott, Dexcom, Eversense or Medtronics. The treatment is not available to anyone: the devices cost between $1,300 and $3,000, which with medical insurance usually results in co-payments of between $31 and $50 per month. The treatment consists of patches placed on the skin for between ten and 90 days that carry out measurements of blood glucose levels every five minutes and transmit them to a device, typically via a smartphone or smartwatch that can be shared with other people, which is particularly useful in the case of vulnerable patients. Some companies…
