The partnership will leverage Glytec’s insulin dosing support software to address challenges with hospital inpatient blood sugar management, reports Amanda Pedersen, writing for medical device and diagnostics industry (MD+DI) in the USA.
Glytec, a Gold winner in the 2021 Medical Design Excellence Awards competition, has nabbed a rather big partnership with Roche that will ultimately benefit countless hospital patients and their clinicians.
Through a digital health collaboration, Glytec’s insulin dosing decision support software, Glucommander, will be the first software application available to run on Roche’s newly launched cobas pulse. A next-generation hospital blood glucose system, cobas pulse is designed with the intention of improving patient safety and care by enabling point-of-care clinicians to collect and take immediate action on glycemic management data.
The collaboration with Roche Diagnostics USA could bring some long overdue recognition to Glytec and underscore the need for Glytec’s technology in the hospital setting. It also comes at a time when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has called for increased focus on glycaemic management for hospital patients, regardless of whether or not they are insulin-dependent outside of the hospital setting.
“In the inpatient setting over a third – in some cases, depending on patient demographics, it can be up to 40% or 50% of patients – are on insulin while they’re in the acute care setting, even if they’re not insulin-dependent diabetics when they’re out of the hospital,” said Glytec’s CEO Ed Furlong. “That’s because of the stress their bodies are under from the other acute condition they’re in, which can induce glycemic management challenges, hyperglycemia for example.”
Furlong said there are also certain procedures, especially cardiac procedures, for which the standard of care is to put the patient on insulin while they are in the hospital. He added, “This condition is really the only disease today that can literally exist in every bed, in every unit, on every floor of a hospital. So the hospitals ability to handle this is quite challenging for them because they don’t have endocrinologists at every bedside … so they really do need an electronic management system in order to deploy this at scale across the health system and manage the glycemic management condition that patients are in.”
According to Glytec, the Glucommander software has been proven to reduce severe low blood sugar by 99.8%, 30-day readmissions by 36-68%, and length of stay by up to 3.2 days. The safety and efficacy of Glucommander have been validated in hundreds of research studies, the company noted. One Glytec customer calculated that Glucommander led to over $9 million in cost savings in the first year of use.
