VIDEO: Diabetes technology and telemedicine are 'made for each other'

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Telemedicine and diabetes technology were made for each other. This is because diabetes technology means that you're going to be making digital measurements. It's not just, "Oh, it looks small, medium, big." We can actually divide up whatever we're measuring into lots of very tiny amounts and come up with a number, whether we're measuring either their blood sugar, or their dose of insulin, or their foot temperature or blood pressure. Whatever's being measured is in numbers. And when it's in numbers, then you can, you know, manipulate it and see which numbers are most important and combine them with other kinds of information. People wear devices, and they're sending in information 24/7.

Telemedicine can be done in one of two ways. One is called synchronously, and that means that the doctor and the patient are talking to each other right now. There's also asynchronous, which means that the patient or the device that the patient is wearing can send information to the doctor anytime, and the doctor can look at it any time. The patient doesn't even have to be there. And there are important events that happen to people that don't always happen while they're in the doctor's office, so I think that the combination of the technology, which makes more measurements and the telemedicine, which allows the developments to be discussed is pretty important. I wrote a paper recently about what I call the 21st century treatment, that's this century, and that's shared telemedicine visits. What I think we're going to see is patients will have multiple, we will have like a group visit with a doctor, but instead of the group being in the same room, they'll be on Zoom. Of course, people have to agree to do it, and everybody in the group will know that the other person has diabetes. So if you don't want anybody to know you have diabetes, you wouldn't opt in for a group visit. But if you say, "I don't care, I just want this experience," it's really good because often the doctor will, they'll be talking generalities. They'll take each patient aside for some private time, but there'll be generalities for the whole group. And someone might say, "Well, how do you do X?" or, "How do you do Y?" Someone else says, "Yeah, that's a good question. I would like to know how do you do X or Y?" So people can learn from each other. Or when somebody asks a question, usually other people in the group have that same question, so it's a good way for people to learn. And it's been tested in pediatrics in a few places, including Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, USC, and also at the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes in Aurora, Colorado. And it's worked there, on I would say fairly small studies. Now I think it's time for large studies. I work at Sutter Health, and I'm going to be recommending that the leadership of Sutter Health read this article and try out this method. And I know that there's at least one extremely large hospital in the US that's planning to convert to this method also. So I think it's going to catch on. That's shared telemedicine visits.