Less than half of the estimated 22 million people prescribed one or more diabetes medications are maintaining blood sugar levels within the acceptable range, according to Glytec, a company pioneering digital therapeutics to improve the lives of people with diabetes.
The consequences not only impact health status and quality of life, but they also add to the growing economic burden of diabetes estimated in 2017 at $327 billion.
Glytec has multiple patent allowances for a novel product, Therapy Advisor® software-as-a-medical-device and is actively engaged in the FDA 510(k) process.
Glytec is poised to improve these clinical and financial outcomes by helping providers more easily and efficaciously select and dose all varieties of diabetes medications.
Therapy Advisor® will be the market’s first digital health product for selection and dosing of all diabetes medications.
“For primary care providers, diabetes can be an extremely challenging condition to manage,” says Dr. Andrew Rhinehart, Glytec’s chief medical officer, and diabetologist. “When it comes to diabetes medications, there are literally tens of thousands of possible combinations.”
Rhinehart says choosing what’s best for anyone patient is a daunting task.
“With Therapy Advisor®, providers will have evidence-based guidance on which diabetes medications are most likely to be successful for a patient, with consideration given to relevant clinical variables and personal preferences, including affordability,” Rhinehart explains.
When appropriate, Rhinehart says this can be used for the purpose of patient engagement and shared decision-making.
“Therapy Advisor® will remove the guesswork and make it much simpler for providers,” explains Rhinehart, “and with an abundance of evidence indicating wide variation in the choice and sequence of diabetes medications, Therapy Advisor® will help providers overcome therapeutic inertia and allow them to achieve the kind of standardization and personalization that drives high-quality, high-reliability care and better outcomes.”
Therapy Advisor® also promises to deliver a far better patient experience.
“Patients will sometimes change the frequency or dose of their diabetes medications because they’re just not getting good results,” says Glytec’s head of research and development, Robby Booth, “Or, they may not fill one or more of their scripts because the prescribed regimen is not well-tailored to their lifestyle.”
Booth says Glytec has designed Therapy Advisor® to account not only for demographic and clinical data, such as age, renal state, BMI, type of diabetes and A1C but also for experiential data that factors in specific patient preferences.
If a patient is on a weight loss program, for example, Therapy Advisor® will allow for the exclusion of medications with known side effects of weight gain.
Or, if a patient has a cognitive impairment, such as dementia, Therapy Advisor® will allow for the exclusion of a more complex regimen that could prove confusing.
“Through a process of directed questioning, Therapy Advisor® will lead the provider to two treatment alternatives and will specify the pros and cons of each,” says Booth. “This will truly be a game changer.”
Therapy Advisor® incorporates guidelines authored by the American Diabetes Association, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, American College of Endocrinology, and the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.
Glytec.
Featured image courtesy: Glytec.
Source:
- Glytec. Glytec Developing Novel Solution for Selection and Dosing of All Diabetes Medications. (2019, June 4). Businesswire. Retrieved: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190604005257/en