Dario Diabetes App Reduces Healthcare Utilization by 9.3%

By some accounts, 1 in 3 American will develop diabetes sometime in their lifetime. The cost in poor health and early mortality is enormous, but so far are the financial costs. Research cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on its website found that $1 in every $4 spent on U.S. healthcare is associated in some way with caring for people with diabetes (much of it related to dealing with complications from the disease, such as heart disease and stroke) to and $237 billion is spent annually on direct medical costs and there is another $90 billion in costs stemming from lost productivity.

Given these numbers, the CDC says that prevention and management efforts, such as self-monitoring of blood sugar and intensive lifestyle modification to prevent diabetes are bargains as measured by quality-adjusted life years and other metrics.

Last month, data from a Sanofi-sponsored study of a digital health app that was presented at annual meeting of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) in Boston suggests that such that digital health technology may be another avenue for managing diabetes and reining in its costs.

Laura Wilson, Pharm.D., a Sanofi employee, and her colleagues conducted a retrospective study that compared about users of a DarioHealth digital health app for a diabetes to nonusers.

DarioHealth, headquartered in New York and founded in 2011, entered into a $30 million contract with Sanofi last year that was billed as helping to “accelerate commercial adoption of Dario's full suite of digital therapeutics.” The press release announcing the results of this research said it was the first study completed by Sanofi under its agreement with Dario.

The DarioHealth app for diabetes combines a blood glucose meter and a mobile app that allows patients to keep track of their blood glucose levels in real-time.

When Wilson and her colleagues compared roughly 2,500 users of the Dario diabetes app to approximately 7,300 nonusers, they found a statistically significant 9.3% reduction in all-cause heath care resource utilization (HCRU) among the Dario users compared to the control group after 12 months, reflecting an absolute rate reduction of 0.049 events per year, according to the poster they presented at the ISPOR meeting. The difference in all-cause in-patient hospitalizations was 23.5%, reflecting an absolute rate reduction of 0.05 events. They found, though, that rate of emergency department visits among the Dario app users was same as the rate among the control group.

Dario said in the press release about the study — which used de-identified user data from Dario and claims data — that it was the first of its kind in digital health research.

Omar Manejwala, M.D., MBA

“These results are important not only to our clients and partners who are looking for solutions to help reduce the cost of care, but also to the market as we push for more accountability in digital health research," said Omar Manejwala, M.D., MBA, chief medical officer of DarioHealth, in the press release.