USA – Glytec, a company based in the United States, has announced a collaboration with Roche Diagnostics USA for inpatient blood sugar management at the hospital bedside.
The collaboration will bring together Roche’s expertise in medical devices and IT solutions, as well as Glytec’s Glucommander insulin dosing decision support software, to address the challenges of sugar management at the hospital bedside.
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.
Cobas pulse, a next-generation hospital blood glucose system, is intended to improve patient safety and care by allowing point-of-care clinicians to collect and act on glycemic management data in real time.
The collaboration with Roche Diagnostics USA could bring Glytec some long-overdue recognition and highlight the need for Glytec’s technology in the hospital setting.
It also comes as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has called for a greater emphasis on glycemic management for hospital patients, regardless of whether or not they are insulin-dependent outside of the hospital setting.
As part of its annual inpatient prospective payment system update, CMS published two new Electronic clinical quality measures (eCQMs) to measure glycemic management outcomes in August.
Glytec CEO Ed 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.
“This condition is really the only disease today that can literally exist in every bed, in every unit, on every floor of a hospital,” Furlong said. “… 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.”
The Glucommander software, according to Glytec, has been shown to reduce severe low blood sugar by 99.8 percent, 30-day readmissions by 36-68 percent, and length of stay by up to 3.2 days.
Glucommander’s safety and efficacy have been validated in hundreds of research studies, according to the company.
Glytec, despite being a small company of 100 or so employees, was the first to receive FDA approval for an insulin titration decision support solution, a milestone that occurred in 2006, the same year the company was founded.
Since then, the company has obtained several more FDA clearances for its technology, including clearance for pediatric use in patients ages 2 to 17.
“Our algorithmic decision support software has been helping hospital clinicians optimize glycemic management for nearly two decades, and we’ve seen the positive impact it can have,” Furlong said.
Recognizing that time is a clinician’s most limited resource, the Roche-Glytec collaboration aims to combine the immediacy of a bedside blood glucose test with Glytec’s insulin decision support on a single, handheld device, streamlining workflows and saving time.
The integrated device and applications are intended to improve patient safety and outcomes by enabling point-of-care clinicians to collect and act on glycemic management data in real time.
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