Inside Dexcom's Announcements from ADA with Chief Commercial Officer Teri Lawver

Accurate CGM system.

This is Diabetes Connections with Stacy Sims. This week: G7 updates, direct-to-watch announcements, and a lot more about what Dexcom sees as the next frontier in CGM. A conversation from ADA with the company's Chief Commercial Officer, Terry Lawver. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider.

Welcome to another week of the show. I'm your host, Stacy Sims, and I'm always so glad to have you here. We aim to educate and inspire about diabetes with a focus on the ADA conference. And holy cow, it was huge. Everybody had told me, 'Be prepared for a ton of walking and a ton of people,' and that was very much the case. But it's also very much a professional-facing conference, doctor to doctor, industry to industry. I don't really think it's a conference for patients, certainly, or lay people. I learned a lot, I saw a lot of old friends, and the podcast even got mentioned in an official session. Dr. Bryce Nelson, who I talked about a couple of weeks ago, he included that interview in his remarks about Tezspire, so that was really cool to hear about. But by the time this episode airs, it will be almost two weeks since ADA. I will be processing what I heard for a long time, I am sure, in that weird time-shifting way of podcasting. While you're hearing this, I'm actually at Friends for Life in Orlando.

We are announcing speakers for our next two Diabetes Connections Presents Mom's Night Out events. These are going to be in Frisco, Texas, near Dallas, and in Providence, Rhode Island this fall. So excited to announce that Kerri Sparling will be speaking in Providence. Of course, Kerri wrote 'Six Until Me,' one of the longest-running diabetes vlogs. She is a published author as well. She lives with type 1, she's an amazing speaker, and I am thrilled that she will be talking to us in Providence. More speaker announcements to come. Please check diabetesconnections.com for all of the info, how to register, and how to get on our email list for future Mom's Night Out events. We are going to be in many more cities. This is just the beginning.

The bulk of the bigger announcements for Dexcom at ADA, I do think it's really important to include the full picture here. But Terry, of course, answers our questions about type 1 and insulin-using customers of Dexcom. This is also where I put in my disclaimer. Long-time listeners are very familiar with this. Dexcom is a sponsor of the show. You will hear an ad from them later on. We have that partnership because we love the product, but that doesn't mean that they get to dictate the content. In other words, they're not telling me what to ask Terry here, they're not dictating what I say to her, that sort of thing. Maybe obvious, maybe not, but to me it's always important to talk about it. I'll be right back with Terry in just a moment.

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Thank you so much for joining me, and thanks for coming on Diabetes Connections for the first time. I appreciate that.

So much to talk about, lots of announcements. And I don't think I need to welcome you to Dexcom, but you haven't been here very long. Can you talk about coming to the company?

Well, as a former Animas customer, I would love to circle around later and talk a little bit more about that. You have a lot of these AID systems. I guess just to kind of check some boxes, can you speak a little bit about interoperability with the G7 for the rest of the year? I know these are Tandem and Omnipod decisions and announcements, but is there anything you can tell us from Dexcom?

The G7 launch in general, how is it going? It seems, and I sit in a different place, all I really see is my own household and the community. I'm curious about the insurance. Has insurance gone well? Are the payers kind of cooperating? How's all that going?

I sat in on the Friday investor meeting, which I've never done before. It was really interesting, kind of a different perspective, because it was much broader than the things that I usually focus on. But really interesting to see the road map. It seemed to me that the big takeaway for my audience, and I'm laughing as I'm saying this, but when Kevin Sayer announced direct-to-watch by the end of the year, I know people were very excited about that. But I wanted to ask you about the CGM that's coming for people with type 2 who don't use insulin necessarily. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Now you asked about specific features. For confidentiality reasons, at this point we're not sharing detailed features of the product. I totally respect that. We're interested, and hopefully you'll share that soon. But I think I'm also curious about how you get that population to be engaged with the CGM.

Now back to Terry, and she's answering my question about people with type 2 and CGM.

And as you're answering it, it seems like I asked kind of an unfair question, because I remember when my son got a CGM, we were in diabetes for seven years and we didn't know what we didn't know. So that analogy of the flashlight, right? We got this tool and it just opened up our world. So I think that's a really good point. A question I get a lot from my listenership is people with type 1 rely so much on CGM, they are nervous when you see the big market and frankly the big money of type 2 that innovation and the service to type 1 may stall. Can you talk a little bit, I know future plans you may not be able to talk about, but just a commitment to the type 1 community?

Kevin mentioned things like lower MARD, smaller hardware, to be continued. I'll have to repeat what Kevin said, and that is we're not going to provide specific timelines for those features at this point. But yes, those are when we talk about continued research, lower MARD, better accuracy, better software, smaller footprint, all of those things that Kevin mentioned are absolutely part of our research and development program. And we all repeat what Kevin said: we're not going to provide timelines at this point, but we are working on all of those things. He did say though that direct-to-watch is coming by the end of the year, and that was very quick. He just kind of put it in there, and I know my antenna went straight up because this is such a feature that, as you know, people have been asking for.

Yeah, that's fair. Sorry. That's okay. Everyone's asking, I know. It's a hot topic.

I remember sitting in the hall outside his bedroom because I don't like devices in his room, so I would try to, with the RF signal which was the original, right? And you could get it through closed doors sometimes. So to see where we are, it's really interesting. But before I let you go, I want to circle back to Animas, if you don't mind, which is near and dear to our hearts. It was my son's first insulin pump. He had the Animas 2020, and then we switched to the Ping, and then we wound up when Animas was no more, we stopped using it. Although I know people who just recently stopped using Animas insulin pump, so I don't know how they were getting supplies, but this community is quite creative. But I'm curious, what was it like for you all there during that time? It must have been really difficult.

I loved those fish tanks. I remember that. We went to many Animas events with the fish tanks. And I actually have an episode about how to choose an insulin pump, not a brand, but how to ask questions to yourself and your provider. And the title of that episode is 'Can I Just Get the Pink One?' because people care about that. So I have a Dexcom suggestion for you. Animas had a feature where you could customize the sounds. We'd call it open source now. They put it online and you could change the music. It was very tinny, right? It wasn't real music. Maybe the Dexcom alerts and alarms, you could play, you know, my one of my relatives, I can't say who, has the Darth Vader Imperial March as a theme when someone calls them. Like maybe you could put that in when your son is high or something. You could get as fun as you wanted or as silly as you wanted. So that's another thing we loved about Animas. I'll take that. Okay, Terry, thank you so much for joining me. It's great to start getting to know you. I appreciate you coming on and sharing the information, and I hope we talk again soon.

I'll be talking to them much more in the weeks and months ahead as they move forward to integration with Omnipod and Tandem and more advances with the G7. You know, just a really quick inside baseball aside here: it's always funny for me to do in-person interviews. Most of my interviews, as you can imagine, I do in my home studio and they're remote. We use Zoom or Zencastr or another way to connect online. But when I go to these conferences and I do these interviews in person, I think the dynamic is a little different. I wonder if you can hear that as you listen. I know the sound can be a little bit different, but love to get your feedback on that. Up next, a little update on Benny, his adventures at camp. You know, with that kid, it is always an adventure. And a little personal news of what we've been up to.

I'm so excited that Dexcom G7 is here. Go to the Dexcom Savings Center for a free benefits check to see what coverage options are available to you. Powerful and simple, Dexcom G7 is proven to lower A1C and help you spend more time in range. Learn more, go to diabetesconnections.com and click on the Dexcom logo.

I gotta tell you, it was really fun at ADA. People asking me about how my kids are doing. I met a lot of people who have really followed Benny and me, I guess since I started blogging, as I mentioned, since 2007. So you guys have known him, some of you, since he was two years old. Well, he's 18, and he just finished his first month at camp as a lifeguard. He's having a great time. No rescues needed. But he did have a pump failure, which is why we can never be out of warranty. But he finally put the Type 1 Tactical case on the new pump. I've been nagging him to do that forever. He has always been the kind of kid that he had a SpiBelt or it wasn't that brand when he was little, but he had like a little waist pack from ages 2 to, let's say, 12. And then he just shoved the pump in his pocket. But that doesn't work well in this kind of environment. So big thanks to Type 1 Tactical for sending that amazing holster last year. Well, I hope to see them at Friends for Life and I can thank them in person. But Benny's really doing well. I don't hear much from him, which I think no news is good news. He sends me funny pictures, which is the best. I do not have any news on my daughter, but she's living in the state of North Carolina and she's living at the beach for at least the next year. So insert cliche here: time marches on, time flies, I don't know. But I'm really proud of both kids and it's fun to watch them do their thing. All right, please follow me on social media. We have lots to come from Friends for Life this week. I'm hoping to have a lot of fun posts. And again, Mom's Night Out registration is open for our next three cities: Frisco, Texas; Providence, Rhode Island; and Charlotte, North Carolina in February. And please watch for more speaker announcements for each city. We have so much good stuff to come. Thank you as always to my editor, John Buchananas from Audio Editing Solutions. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Stacy Sims. I'll see you back here soon. Until then, be well.

So much going on this time of year: camp and travel. And it's really important to keep your insulin at the right temperature, even in the extreme heat or cold. We love ViviCap, the thermal insulin pen carrying case. It works with any insulin pen, it is interchangeable between pens, it's so easy to use, and it really works. Benny keeps one of these in his bag for his backup insulin pen. He likes it because it's small and lightweight. He doesn't even do anything to it. It lasts for years without any kind of maintenance. I like it because it protects against heat and cold. It's TSA approved and it's FSA and HSA eligible. If you've never seen this, it really is just a cap. You take off the regular cap or the lid of the pen, whatever you want to call it, and you put on the ViviCap.