Professional Continuous Glucose Monitoring in office

[SteveDE]

I am looking for anyone with experience dealing with in office CGM. I'm not talking about CGM that goes along with an insulin pump, but where the docking station is IN OFFICE. The patient would come in to the office, have the CGM placed, and then return a few days later for download of information on how their blood sugars have ran over the past few days.

I believe this to be worthy assistance in planning proper treatment, safe treatment, and regulating insulin dose/time/type.

If any of you have used these, how well do they work? Problems incurred? Cost versus reimbursement? and anything else to help decide the use of this professional cgm.

Thank you.

[wsuRN09]

Our clinic has started the in-office CGM. At this point we have not actually purchased a CGM setup, we still have a rep bring in the equipment and he loans the sensors to our pt's for a few days. When we get approval from the higher ups we will get at least one CGM. So far it works fairly well. 1 or 2 days a month we have 3 or 5 pt's that will wear the sensors and bring them back to the clinic for download. That part is simple and there have been no issues. The biggest problems are poor care of the site, the sensor slips out, inadequate calibration, not enough BG checks, and inadequate food logs... the data needed to have a useful interpretation won't be there. As far as reimbursement goes, it's hit and miss depending on their insurance. Some of them won't pay for it. But since we just started offering this to pt's a few months ago, I can't provide a whole lot of information on that aspect. I know that the providers typically review the data when the pt comes back in for a routine office visit My providers find the information they can get from a sensor trial very helpful, especially in our youngest pt's. CGM's in general are great and they're only getting better.

If you have a rep that can provide you with a few CGMs to just try one clinic day, I would go for it. A rep would probably have more information for you too. Sorry, I am not more informed about the cost vs reimbursement part of it. But I think it's great, if that helps at all :)

[CDEWannaBe]

I've just used one as a patient and no it was covered by my employer's insurance, but don't know it they typically are.

I used it several years ago when I was pregnant to insure my pump's basal rates were on track. The needle was big and sort of angled so I was glad not to place it on my self. I ate low carb and logged my glucose readings and food. From a patient perspective it was disappointing because it gave no readings on the device itself, so I couldn't tell if it was working or not. Later when my results were downloaded they were very consistent with my meter.

As a patient it was very useful. I'd only use with a patient who was really wanting to do it since the patient needs to to do quite a bit of work along with wearing it 24/7, which was a pain.