The Steady Health team joined Carbon Health in 2021, and since then we have been working tirelessly together to bring the Carbon Health vision of omnichannel, continuous, sensor-driven care for chronic conditions like diabetes to life. Most recently, the team launched Carbon Health’s diabetes program. There’s lots to unpack here, so let’s dive in.
A continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) device can be an indispensable tool for a person who has diabetes or is at risk of developing diabetes.
You attach this small device to your body, and it measures the concentration of sugar in your blood. Monitoring blood sugar levels is critical for anyone living with diabetes, and continuous monitoring can give you and your healthcare team insight into how things like food, exercise, stress, sleep, and medication affect your body’s glucose response.
Without CGM, measuring your blood can be painful and cumbersome. The most common way to do this is via the finger prick method — you prick your finger, place a drop of blood on a test strip, and insert the strip into a meter to get a single reading. CGM devices measure interstitial glucose concentrations every five to 15 minutes, providing a continuous reading over seven to 14 days (the exact frequency varies somewhat by manufacturer). This makes it far easier to keep track of your levels throughout the day, even while you’re sleeping or exercising.
There are three main manufacturers of CGM devices on the market today: Dexcom, Medtronic, and Abbott. Carbon Health partners with Abbott and Dexcom for deeply natively integrated continuous glucose monitoring.
A critical piece of the CGM process is getting high-quality access to the data CGM collects. To achieve this, patients will be able to link their CGM devices directly in the Carbon Health patient app.
Once the devices are linked, the CGM data also flows into our provider application, which clinicians use to chart, diagnose, and document patient care.
Clinicians can now easily see a summary of a patient’s CGM data in the Vitals section of the provider application. This summary includes where the patient is, relative to range and time in range, and any urgent events related to their blood sugar.
The Daily Glucose Profiles section in the Blood Glucose overview enables clinicians to comprehensively view any 14-day span of a patient’s CGM data, as well as easily visualize the times the patient was out of range (the graph areas in red).
The Trends section enables clinicians to visualize time in range, time below range, urgent lows, average blood glucose, and how much time the patient was wearing a CGM device over the course of days, weeks, or months
An Ambulatory Glucose Profile (AGP) report is a standardized, single-page report that includes glucose statistics like time in range, a summary glucose profile, and daily glucose graphs. Providers use and interpret AGPs at visits to identify overall patterns, and to kick off conversations about why those patterns exist and what the patient and provider can do to address them. AGPs also help a provider compare a patient’s progress over time — looking at the profile from a previous period (for example, three months ago) and comparing it with a current profile allows patients and providers to see where they’ve improved. In future iterations, we’ll migrate this from a table to a graph visualization, which should make it even more accessible and user-friendly, providers can more easily incorporate it into their visits and workflows.
These changes are part of the ongoing evolution of our provider application, meant to support clinicians in caring for patients with diabetes and other metabolic health issues. They also are an example of how we intend to enable sensor-driven care — native integration of longitudinal device data, visualizable by patients and providers in the same applications that they use to manage care every single day. It’s incredibly important that access to this data be seamlessly available to clinicians and patients with as little friction as possible.
There’s more to come. If you are wondering how you can best manage living with diabetes, schedule a free 15-minute consult about Carbon Health’s diabetes program. And as always, please send questions or feedback here.
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