CGM/Clarity Use, Glycemic Control and Clinical Outcomes

The prevalence of Diabetes Mellitus (DM) is rising and more than 30 million of Americans or 9.4% of the US population has DM. Several large scale randomized clinical trials have found that improved glycemic control reduces the development of complications in patients with DM. However intensive glucose management carries an increased risk of hypoglycemia, a condition that may lead to neurological damage and is associated with increased incidence of cardiovascular events and mortality. Reducing uncontrolled hyperglycemia and hypoglycemia represents therefore an important objective, as may decrease the direct and indirect impact that diabetes has in our health care system. Achieving optimal glycemic control requires frequent blood glucose monitoring by the patients and recurrent clinic visits,which is often difficult to achieve, as access to typical DM clinic is at least sub optimal. m-Health and telemedicine health solutions represent alternative ways to manage patients in the outpatient setting and have been applied in different medical areas, among them in diabetes. However, almost all the telemedicine studies that have been previously performed and recruited DM patients used telemedicine solutions which were based on point of care (POC) finger-stick glucose testing, which are checked infrequently , usually 4-6 times/day. Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices offer additional ways to monitor blood glucose values and can provide numerous glucose measurements (as frequent as every 5 min). By using software applications, such as the Clarity (Dexcom), which highlights glucose patterns, trends and statistics in standardized reports, providers can make safe recommendations of adjusting DM medications, especially insulin titration. In this randomized clinical trial investigators propose to use CGM devices and Clarity software as a telemedicine platform in order to improve glycemic control and improve health outcomes.