Understanding Online Healthcare Conversations Around Glucose Monitoring Devices

The global blood glucose monitoring devices market is anticipated to grow at a significant rate in the coming 5 years, owing to the rising prevalence of diabetes and an increase in the adoption of continuous sugar surveillance systems. There are various types of monitors available in the market ranging in price, size, ease of use, the length of testing time and portability.

Increased patient awareness and concern about the sugar level has increased the number of self-monitoring blood sugar users. These users are more vocal online than any other channel and this presents an immense opportunity to various brands and agencies to learn from their experiences.

Since the emergence of social media in 2004, a growing number of people use social platforms for health-related discussions. The major channels that see the most conversations around type 1 diabetes and glucose monitoring devices include Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Forums, Instagram and Youtube.

We compared the user experience of four major glucose monitoring devices shared over various social channels. Of these, Abbott Freestyle, Dexcom G5, G6 and Medtronic Minimed are continuous glucose monitoring systems (CGMs). Dexcom G4, G5, G6® Abbott Freestyle Libre® Medtronic Minimed® Roche Accu Chek® are some of the pharma brands covered in this study. CGM is an advanced way for people living with diabetes to check glucose readings in real-time or to monitor them over a period of time.

Our patient conversation analysis is done using data from various social channels and discussion forums on the world wide web for 2019. A trend analysis of conversations across channels provides insight about the reasons behind the spikes in conversations of a particular brand or product.

In this report, we take a step further and delve deeper into these peak points. It gives us insights into what is working, why patients have a higher abandonment rate for a particular product, and what corrective actions could be taken by brands to minimize the shortcomings of the existing solutions. Dissecting the trend data leads to many meaningful insights. Different social media platforms have different participation and influence rates hence these are broken into various groups for further analysis.

An analysis of the conversations for January 2019 revealed that a major concern of Abbott Freestyle Libre users was the allergic reaction due to the adhesives used for holding the device. On 29th January 2019, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) issued a medical device alert stating that the manufacturer (Abbott Laboratories) had revised the formulation of the adhesive which would be available to UK customers from April 2019. This announcement triggered a huge number of conversations on Twitter where people shared their experiences with the old adhesive while welcoming the move by Abbott to re-formulate it.

Scry Analytics Inc. #2635, North 1st Street, Suite 200, San Jose, CA 95134, USA

Medsocial is an exclusive healthcare social intelligence platform that uses advanced text processing at scale to decipher and analyze millions of online messages from across multiple sites and geographical locations. It breaks down unstructured data and extracts relevant topics, events, attributes, sentiments, stories, and trends of a drug or device and provides competitive analysis and deep insights.

This release was published on openPR.