3 Novel Diabetes Treatments Improving Patient Care

How new technologies are helping patients with diabetes better manage the disease.

For all the progress science and medicine have made over the last century in treating diabetes-particularly adult-onset diabetes-we haven’t done a very good job of preventing it.

Unlike cancer, which has seen declining incidence rates in the U.S. since the early 1990s, diagnosed diabetes rates have doubled over the last 20 years. On the current pace, 40% of Americans will be living with diabetes or prediabetes within the next few years, and diabetes-related spending and lost productivity will cost the country $500 billion annually within the next decade.

It is one of the nation’s costliest public health emergencies-and it will remain so, unless we make a coordinated effort to bend the curve. I talk to clinicians and subject-matter experts about diabetes care often, and have come to understand there are a few ways we should approach this:

1. Team-based care 

Historically, patients living with chronic conditions like diabetes might have seen their primary care physician three or four times a year. Apart from those visits, they were on their own when it came to managing their disease.