Managing Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM)
The use of wireless CGM and Social Media to control and manage GDM
Mohamad Arif Ali, MD, Jeffrey Brandt
The use of wireless CGM and Social Media to control and manage GDM
Mohamad Arif Ali, MD, Jeffrey Brandt
Abstract:
Motivation:
Managing Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) is very important to a successful and healthy childbirth as well as a healthy mother. Gestational diabetes affects about 4% of all pregnant women - about 135,000 cases of gestational diabetes in the United States each year.
Problem:
Twenty percent of women with GDM will need insulin therapy. Controlling the patient’s blood sugars can be a very difficult with the need for change in the patient’s lifestyle. Untreated or poorly controlled gestational diabetes can harm the unborn baby, so there are two patients at risk. Changes in diet, exercise as well as the need for medication is challenging for the patients to accept and quickly adopt.
Approach:
Social media has allowed for personalized care as well as coaching with many successful online communities. These online communities allow for direct interaction between family members as well as others people with the same disease. The patients can share their experiences about different challenges they have had with diet compliance, emotional struggles as well as the successes.
Ouibehealthy.com social media site will allow for mothers to be able to easily monitor blood glucose with a wireless sensor or glucometer along with medication compliance. This data can then be uploaded to the Ouibehealthy.com online community where the mothers can control the level of sharing as well as privacy with other members of the community. Lab tests, medications, depression scales, images, weeks gestation, diet logs are some of the service that will be available online and can be shared. The clinical data can also be connected to a Personal Health Record like Microsoft Health Vault, Dossia, and Google Health or obtained directly via an interfaced to an Electronic Medical Record (EMR/HER) using the Communication Software's mHealthBridge connection product.
Mothers can upload pictures from their smartphones as well as track their medications and maintain a diet log with Communication Software’s OuiBeHealthy App. This data will then be uploaded to the OuiBeHealthy.com online community. Mothers can also have information pushed to them about the baby's status with relation to the weeks of gestation. Nutritional information and reminders can be also be pushed to them as well as SMS messages (e.g., inspirational) from other online member. Though our overall solution encompasses the use of a Smartphone, text enabled phones may be used to update PHR data manually via Open Mobile Health Exchange (OMHE).
Conclusions:
Communication Software’s OuiBeHealthy products provide a complete solution that uses the freedom that wireless monitoring and smartphones bring as well as the ability to have an intimate online community that social networking provides. We feel that this solution can improve patient compliance of diet and medication as well as build more intimate relationships with distant family members that geographically are unable to provide the moral support they would want to provide.
Future plans include the addition of other disease states into the community.
References:
[1] American Diabetes Association
