Diabetes

NEW YORK The complications that can result from unhealthy eating among middle-aged and elderly Americans with Type 2 diabetes have consequences for the whole healthcare system, but it’s not just diabetes, which already costs the U.S. healthcare system $116 billion. Unhealthy eating habits contribute to and exacerbate obesity, hypertension and kidney disease, diseases that often have causal relationships to one another. Obesity and diabetes already cost the healthcare system $147 billion and $116 billion, respectively.

NEW YORK The name of the game in diabetes management is compliance. For patients and their healthcare advocates/practitioners, compliance translates into better health outcomes that will prove to be considerably less costly over the life of the patient. And for retailers and blood-glucose meter manufacturers, compliance translates into a high-frequency/high-marketbasket consumer as compared with the average pharmacy patron.

NEW YORK The business of blood glucose meters has always been a business of “what will they think of next?” When people with diabetes didn’t aggressively test because of the painful, daily pin pricks of their fingertips, manufacturers secured approval for alternate site testing. Manufacturers also developed no-coding meters to eliminate any errors in testing that may have resulted from miscoded testing strips, when that was identified as a potential interface issue.