Collaboration with Diabetes Center Berne
It’s official! We are collaborating with Diabetes Center Berne on the proof of concept work for SmartStart CGM. Participating in the DCB Open Innovation Challenge last summer was the catalyst for conversations that led to this partnership. I’m so excited to have the chance to bring SmartStart CGM to life and put it in actual users’ hands.
The scope of the project
We’re validating SmartStart CGM for adults on intensive insulin therapy (3 or more injections per day, or using an insulin pump) who are new to CGM.
N.B. We have a pipeline of different SmartStart CGM products in mind to meet the needs of several specific groups of people living with diabetes: type 2 diabetes, gestational diabetes, families with a child newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and more.
Medical content review
Gary Scheiner will give an initial review of all content and feed back before we show it to any patients. Dr. Thomas Grace will show the content to 3 patients prior to the build; any urgent changes can then be made before content is uploaded to the learning management system that will serve as our ‘app’ for the proof-of-concept study.
The study protocol
Dr Grace will enrol 15-20 of his patients in the programme. We’ll measure the difference in knowledge between the initial pre-quiz and the post-test as a key indicator of whether SmartStart CGM works. (This is in line with the structure of CGM-TRAIN, the validation study conducted for SPECTRUM in Germany.)
A few weeks after each user’s enrolment, we’ll have a debrief to understand what they liked, what they didn’t, any things that caused confusion. Dr Grace and his team will feed back on the extent to which SmartStart CGM helped them help their patients and ease-of-use. We will make any urgent/high priority content changes before the translation into Swiss German is completed.
The Swiss side
Once we have a steer from s DCB Innovation will work with clinical colleagues to recruit 15-20 of their patients and run the intervention in their clinic. This might sound like a duplication of effort, but there is a clear goal in terms of assessing the cross-cultural relevance and ability of SmartStart CGM to work in another language. (Even if we’re awesome in English, we aren’t going to change the world in just one language.)
Adding it all up
When the last person from Switzerland has completed SmartStart CGM, we’ll start sifting through the data and analyse the results. Expect a poster at a conference in early 2023!