Effect of Continuous Glucose Monitoring System Alerts on Diabetes Management in the Hospital

Glycemic management for patients with diabetes during hospitalization is highly challenging, especially for those requiring intensive insulin therapy. For those patients, hypoglycemia is a common adverse event, which is associated with adverse clinical outcomes. Bedside capillary point-of-care (POC) glucose monitoring is the standard of care to assess glycemic control in the hospital. However, POC glucose testing only provides glucose measurements at specific time points, leading to missed information important for glycemic control. Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) measures interstitial glucose every 5 min, thus providing a more complete glycemic profile during a 24 h period compared with standard POC glucose testing.

The cloud-based real-time continuous glucose monitoring (RT-CGM) and management system was previously observed to be safe and effective in guiding intensive insulin therapy. Therefore, this CGM intergraded system holds promise for improving glucose control in patients with diabetes during hospitalization. However, it is currently unclear if alerts are the main reason for the better outcome in the RT-CGM groups, or rather the fact that sensor values are available in real-time. Moreover, the current system provided the feature of predictive threshold alerts that could alert before the onset of clinical hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia. Thus, this trial aims to examine whether these glucose alerts provided added benefit on glycemic outcomes in patients with type 1 or 2 diabetes who required intensive insulin therapy during hospitalization.