Jared Watkin on health economics

The Abbott Diabetes Care Symposium on the occasion of the 50th meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, Vienna, Austria (September, 15 - 2014) Jared Watkin is Divisional Vice President of Technical Operations for Abbott Diabetes Care (ADC) and is responsible for ADC’s Global Research and Development, Clinical Affairs and Scientific Affairs activities. Jared has worked in the diabetes field for almost 25 years, since joining MediSense, later acquired by Abbott, in 1989. Over that time, he has been involved in the development of numerous monitoring products, including the world’s first biosensor test strip for home monitoring of ketones (β-hydroxybutyrate), and the chemistry scheme that still forms the basis of all ADC’s Precision/Optium-branded glucose test strips. Jared has been actively involved in sensor-based product development since 2004, following Abbott’s acquisition of TheraSense, and was responsible for the development of the Freestyle Navigator Continuous Glucose Monitoring System product range. He was appointed to his current role in 2010. An Introduction to Flash Glucose Monitoring The benefits of ambulatory glucose profile (AGP) based reports to allow the graphical and statistical characterization of diurnal glucose patterns of people with diabetes are becoming more widely recognized. At the present time, the two available categories of glucose monitoring products that allow people with diabetes to collect the glucose data required to generate useful AGP reports (blood glucose monitoring and ISF based continuous glucose monitoring) have significant but distinct drawbacks that have prevented the widespread adoption of AGP reporting. In the case of the widely used blood glucose monitoring products (BGM, the burden of frequent finger prick testing (pain, inconvenience of overnight testing etc.) means that the self-collection of 24 hour glucose data to generate AGP reports is impractical in real-life conditions. In the case of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) systems, they have proven to be acceptable to only a small percentage of people with diabetes and their health-care providers due to issues of cost, reimbursement, ease of use, data interpretation and concerns over accuracy. Consequently, Abbott Diabetes Care (ADC) has developed a new category of glucose monitoring product (Flash Glucose Monitoring) that is designed to offer a widely acceptable alternative to BGM testing while at the same time, offering the ability to conveniently collect the frequent 24 hour glucose data needed to allow the practical generation of AGP based reports. The first product to be launched in this new category, FreeStyle Libre, will be described along with its accuracy performance and plans for clinical studies to support reimbursement efforts.