New insights for you and your doctor in just 3 days
When healthcare professionals talk to us about their diabetes patients, one question comes up almost every time. It goes something like this:
"How do patients and healthcare professionals really get the best value out of self testing their blood glucose?"
Certainly there is clear value for patients who follow the guidelines and act on their results. But it can be difficult to get the full picture of what's happening if patients test infrequently, don't complete log books, or do all their tests at the same time each day.
If there's not enough information, it can be hard to know how people are really managing their diabetes day-by-day. And that, of course, makes it difficult for patients and healthcare professionals to have a meaningful discussion and for a healthcare professional to provide the best guidance for individual patients.
But there is a simple way healthcare professionals and patients can gain more value from testing blood glucose. It's a three-day intensive monitoring programme called Accu-Chek Insight which provides a detailed snap-shot of what's really going on.
The Accu-Chek Insight programme doesn't replace your usual testing over the long haul - your regular testing is an important part of your on-going diabetes management, this is especially true if you use insulin. But with the Accu-Chek Insight programme, you set aside just three days to get a really close up view of how different types of food or activity affect your blood glucose during the day.
The Accu-Chek Insight programme uses a pocket-sized chart for people to fill in during an intensive three-day testing programme. The chart covers reports on meals, energy levels, and blood glucose levels throughout the day. And, by popular demand, it allows people to add notes about events that may have affected their blood glucose.
As people have told us, this is an important factor. If you've been to a party for instance, or off on a big bike ride, your blood glucose results will be affected. If those events aren't noted, it can lead to a wrong conclusion. By detailing the event, your doctor can take those out of consideration and deal with identifying the more typical changes in your blood glucose.
The information that your healthcare professional can gain from the Accu-Chek Insight chart has been shown in a study1 by renowned diabetes specialist, Professor William Polonsky, to enable healthcare professionals to:
- identify the optimal time for medication to be taken
- adjust dosages of medication
- discontinue medication where appropriate.
The Accu-Chek Insight tool isn't intended to replace your usual testing and diabetes management. But it does provide a fresh new view of what's going on with your blood glucose. And, best of all, it only requires a three day commitment from you.
As Professor Polonsky told diabetes healthcare professionals at a conference in Wellington recently, almost everyone who has tried the Insight tool found it easy to complete and spontaneously noted correlations between meal size, exercise and blood glucose results.
"Your patients can do this and make their own discoveries about how to use self monitoring of blood glucose to improve their glycaemic control," he said.
If you would like to have these insights into your own blood glucose levels, ask your doctor if they have an Accu-Chek Insight chart. They're free, and if your doctor doesn't have one yet, just ask them to call us on 080 80 22 99.
Reference:
1: Polonsky WH, Wagner RS, Primary care physicians identify and act on glycaemic abnormalities found in episodic, intensive blood glucose monitoring data from non-insulin treated type 2 diabetics Poster session presented at: 43rd Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetees: 2007 Sept 17-21; Amsertdam, The Netherlands.