Marybeth Fottler

Welldoc continues to study how best integrate digital health solutions into care models. A collaborative study, Complementarity of Digital Health and Peer Support: “This Is What’s Coming,” was undertaken by Welldoc and Dr. Edwin Fisher PhD of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill along with Peers for Progress and Vanguard Medical Group. The focus was to assess the effectiveness of the Welldoc solution and peer support in providing health management and education for adults with Type 2 Diabetes in a primary care group practice setting.

Truven Health Analytics, part of the IBM Watson Health company business, conducted an analysis for Welldoc by using the MarketScan Research Databases, a family of research data sets that fully integrate de-identified patient-level health data, productivity, laboratory results, health risk assessments, hospital discharges, electronic medical records, and morbidity data into data available for healthcare research.

Data are contributed by large employers, managed care organizations, hospitals, electronic-medical-record providers, and Medicare and Medicaid programs. Findings are based on an analysis of commercial and Medicare consumers within the MarketScan databases. Truven Health researchers created a complex, custom algorithm and applied it to the MarketScan data. Welldoc also applied the Truven Health findings to previous research it conducted about the Welldoc BlueStar solution’s ability to lower and control A1C.

Consider for a moment the cost of diabetes to the healthcare system. One estimate projects that by 2034, the number of people with diabetes is expected to double to 42 million and that related healthcare spending will triple to $336 billion.¹ To meet those growing challenges, many health plans have piloted and rolled out innovative strategies that reduce healthcare use and costs among this population. Study authors from Aetna/CVS Health, Welldoc, and LifeScan explore health plan strategies that take advantage of digital health relative to outcomes.

In the past few decades continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) has emerged to provide a better understanding of glucose trends and patterns. But interpreting the hundreds of CGM data points generated per day can be challenging for both patients and healthcare providers when it comes to discriminating between patterns or events of concern and patterns that can be considered normal.

Research conducted by Welldoc in collaboration with the Robert H. Smith School of Business Center for Health Information and Decision Systems evaluated the performance of a Welldoc automated method for detecting significantly adverse glucose events and, further, classifying those events by level of severity. Another key study conducted by the same coauthors and presented at the ATTD 2021 Virtual Conference found a correlation between digital health habits and improved blood glucose control.