The Benefits of 'Hands-on' Coaching for Type 1 Diabetes

This conversation with Arti Masturzo, M.D., chief medical officer of CCS, was edited for length and clarity.

MHE: For people with type 1 diabetes who go through CCS coaching, what kinds of improvements have you seen in their health or daily life compared to those who don't get coaching?

Arti: The number of stories that we get from folks that just say, "Wow, you just totally changed my life." Many folks with type 1 diabetes, especially at the time of diagnosis, it's extremely overwhelming, because you're learning not only how to live a different lifestyle, but you're also learning new devices.

Especially now with insulin pumps and things like that, it's a lot. So I would say that we have an impact on the objective level, and then more on the personal, subjective level.

The personal stories are, "I didn't know any of this until you educated me," or "I felt overwhelmed until you held my hand and walked me through it and told me everything's going to be okay."

On the objective side, we're seeing average A1C reductions of 1 point, 2 points, which is really awesome, sometimes even higher. We just had a patient with type 1 that had an A1C close to nine, that is down three points on an A1C in just a matter of of six months.

I'm a big believer healthcare is probably 20% medication and 80% actual true care and education and support.

MHE: How does the CCS team team up with doctors and health insurance plans to make sure more people with type one get access to coaching?

Arti: The way we think about our role in the ecosystem is we are the destroyer of silos in the world of diabetes and chronic diseases related to diabetes.

What I mean by that is, right now, care is so fragmented, right? Health plans often have their own care management solutions. You have digital apps that are different. The manufacturers that provide monitors have their own app. Then you've got your Fitbit, you've got your aura ring. I mean, there's just absolutely no shortage of everybody trying to lend a hand and do something.

The problem is, if you're at the center of it all, as a patient, I wouldn't know where to go and what to do with all of those endpoints. So the first thing that we do is we ensure that we have a strong, trusting relationship with the healthcare providers that are referred to us.

So we have over 60,000 physicians made up of endocrinologists and primary care physicians that trust us to deliver devices to their patients. The reason they trust us to deliver devices is for the reasons that we go above and beyond, we stay on the phone with you while you unbox your device and show you how to use it, right? As opposed to a paper that says, "follow these directions."

So it starts with the healthcare providers also providing their staff any necessary education support they would need on some of the newest technologies.

I always joke (that) our clinicians that are out in the field, they should be teaching medical school courses on diabetes. They're some of the most knowledgeable people I know. I would say a vast majority of them have type 1 diabetes themselves, which makes them super duper impactful, as you can imagine, not just with the patients that they coach and educate, but also with the providers that they work with.

I think with a health plan it's really getting them to appreciate how we can be the glue that brings everything together, because we have such a long standing, tight, close relationship with the patient as well as the healthcare provider.

That's what we're doing with our living connected solution. It's a clinical solution that provides coaching and education, addresses behavioral health challenges, social determinants of health, which, as you can imagine, are huge in some populations. It also addresses any gaps in escalating care where it's needed and and really communicating a health plan to make them to help them appreciate that we are not just a distributor, but that we actually truly are a healthcare company that distributes devices that does more.

We're also the only distributor that developed an AI predictive model with interventions to improve adherence on monitors. What we found is that anywhere from 25 to 40% of folks who are prescribed a continuous glucose monitor will stop using it. What we did is we developed an AI predictive model that, with 86% accuracy, will predict who's likely to fall off therapy, and then we created personalized messages and interventions to those patients to improve adherence and to and to keep them on therapy.

So, I think from a health plan perspective, it's a lot of it is just yelling at the top of the mountain. We're not just a distributor. Anybody can ship devices. We're just really in it to have a much more meaningful impact.