New Advances in Blood Glucose Monitoring - FLASH Technology

Lori Berard, RN, CDE, Diabetes Nurse Educator, talks about new advances in blood glucose monitoring called FLASH technology that no longer requires patients to prick their finger for readings.

For people living with diabetes, there’s been a lot of new advances in the area of glucose monitoring.

First of all, for individuals with type 2 diabetes, you may have been affected by some recent developments in terms of restriction of test strips.

So for you I really encourage you to work with your health care professional to make sure that you’re able to do the self monitoring that you need to to achieve your goals.

There’s been lots of advances in continuous glucose monitoring.

It’s been around for a few years.

There are now two insulin pumps that have built-in glucose monitoring, and a standalone device.

Not only does the standalone device not require an insulin pump, but it can now actually be connected to your smartphone.

Really exciting is a new computerized software.

Taking all those wave forms from your CGM and dumping it in to give you one modal day that helps you understand what your blood sugars are doing, it’s called ambulatory glucose profile.

Until recently, that was only available to individuals using continuous glucose monitoring, until recently, the launch of flash glucose monitoring technology.

For the first time ever for people living with diabetes, you no longer have to stick your finger to get a blood sugar reading.

The device is a patch that you wear on your arm and a standalone reader.

The patch is good for 14 days, and all you have to do is wave the reader over top of it to get your glucose reading at the time, to tell you what your trend is, and more importantly, to store all that data, to create that same wave form – called ambulatory glucose profile, which will help you and your health care professional make decisions on treatment regarding your diabetes.

For more information regarding these advances on blood glucose monitoring, you should speak to your health care team, perhaps your pharmacist, your nurse, your dietitian or your specialist.