Despite being largely preventable, diabetes has spiraled out of control into a global epidemic. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 100 million Americans, or 1 in every 3 people, are either diabetic or pre-diabetic. Aging populations and a growing obesity problem underpin the global theme. The 2019 International Diabetes Federation Diabetes Atlas shows that a stunning 463 million adults are living with diabetes, a number that will balloon to 700 million in the next 25 years on its current trajectory.
ALR Technologies has developed the system to address key problems in today’s diabetes care: adherence to treatment programs and insulin dose adjustments to optimize therapy. These are integral to care and getting blood sugar, which can be a highly toxic poison to the body, in the proper range.
The ALRT Diabetes Solution is an FDA-cleared, HIPAA-compliant, remote diabetes patient management system that leverages blood glucose data patterns to improve diabetes outcomes. The system includes patent-pending Predictive A1C and FDA-cleared insulin dose adjustment features to assist healthcare providers in managing diabetes patients who use insulin therapy.
The rubber is about to meet the road for ALRT and its diabetes management tool as the company looks to deliver conclusive evidence that utilizing its system can lower A1c, the gold standard measurement of average blood sugar.
To do so, ALR Technologies has partnered with the world renown Singapore General Hospital. Powered by data from Statista, Newsweek named Singapore General Hospital the third best hospital in the world for 2019, trailing only the venerable Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN and Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH.
Singapore is a perfect selection to host a clinical pilot given the country has the second highest proportion of diabetics amongst developed nations at 10.5%.
The clinical pilot has been coined “GEMINI-T2D,” an abbreviation for “GlucosE Monitoring and InterventioN in Insulin-treated Type 2 Diabetes.”
For the pilot, Singapore General will recruit 25 people with Type 2 diabetes (the most common type, accounting for 90-95% of all diabetics) who use pre-mixed insulin and whose baseline A1c is above 8.0%. The patients’ blood glucose data will be analyzed during the 24-week treatment period using the ALRT Diabetes Solution remote patient management platform.
The primary outcome will be a reduction in A1c. Secondary outcome measures will include patient adherence to blood glucose testing regimens and frequency of hypoglycemic (low blood sugar) episodes.
Data collected throughout the development of the ALRT system has consistently pointed to the efficacy and feasibility of using the system as a remote method to better manage diabetes. Not only is it better for the patient, but the system provides caregivers and insurance companies with a far larger data set to evaluate performance and run more efficiently.
ALRT is a small company that has repeatedly been overlooked by investors, presumably because of its small size compared to competitors like Livongo Health (NASDAQ: LVGO), which arguably has inferior technology that is more of a user-facing app than truly disruptive technology like ALRT has developed. If the data from this pilot at a major hospital like Signapore General aligns with previous data, it would seem unlikely that ALRT would continue to run in the shadows of its bigger peers. Furthermore, it would seem highly probable that Singapore’s universal healthcare system and its private healthcare sector would be eager to implement the ALRT system in a bid to curtail its serious diabetes problem and contain the billions of dollars in direct and indirect associated expenses.
