Dexcom G7 Updates & Sensor Replacement Policy - CEO Interview

Dexcom has a new sensor replacement policy that is taking the community by storm enhancements coming to the Dexcom G7 helping out with connection and an allnew CGM coming this summer for people with type 2 diabetes not on insulin I got to speak with Kevin Seer the CEO of Dexcom about all of this and more I'm Justin welcome to the diabe Tech podcast on the show I talk all things diabetes Tech news and management with tech leaders Physicians and those thriv with diabetes I'm in Orlando at Ada one of the biggest diabetes conferences that happens every year now this is just one piece of all of the coverage I'll be doing this week I'm also looking at omnip pod's new iPhone app metronics 7-Day infusion set and I even got to see the twist pump the new pump powered by tidepool in person so excited about it if you're not following me on YouTube yet make sure you subscribe if you enjoy this video and you're watching on YouTube give it a like this podcast comes out every Monday and make sure you subscribe on whatever platform you like to listen or watch it on all right let's get into the conversation Kevin thank you for coming back on the show I'm happy to have you here it's great to be here again great here to chat it's been a little while yeah this is our second ada8 together I think that's the last time I saw you actually that's right so I want to just start with that ADA what excites you most about this conference you know I've come to this conference since literally 1994 so aside from the business part I have relationships here that go back a long time in fact someone was showing me photos of myself when I was much younger at this show uh earlier today so I it's so fun to follow the progress in Diabetes Care Through The Eyes of for example a lot of these Physicians uh that have taught me about diabetes and all fairness because I don't have it I've learned from them as much as I have uh from the people at work uh Dexcom is a huge presence here over the course of my career con we've gone from an afterthought in a tiny Booth to pretty much anybody who speaks talk about talks about the effectiveness of their therapy based on Dexcom CGM data and so it's really gratifying to see that it's gratifying to see the advances we're making uh that our Aid partners are making uh doing this and just in general I think we see things getting better across the board so it's a good show it's good to be here that's great yeah I'm happy to be here too and and to see all the friendly faces I've met in just the three years I've been here yeah it's fun yeah so can you kind of give us give us a little this the state of Dexcom right now what what's going on with Dexcom it's never slow yeah uh we continue to grow rapidly uh in 23 we literally had a list of accomplishments so long it could have counted for 10 years um big accomplishments for example we opened our plant in Malaysia and are producing uh product there to give us more capacity we launched G7 last year G7 is going wonderfully uh late last year early this year we've launched a version of our Dexcom 1 plus product which is Dexcom 1 on a G7 platform in several countries in Europe we continue to roll out more Integrated Systems with Tandem and insulet uh and those patients are doing very very well we're kind of transitioning from G6 to G7 that's ongoing so the company continues to grow we are expanding access across the board in the US uh and in you know in our us markets too I I think the key to our technology in any geography if we can get access for people if we can get the product reimbursed our company grows and people are healthier and then for us a new thing in March we got the first ever approved over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor for people not on insulin our Stell product which we're talking a bit about at the show but we're talking more about uh what we have talking a lot about Stell because I can it's going to be a great experience and it's going to put us into a new literally a new frontier of people that we can help you know we changed our mission a couple years ago to help people control Health rather than just diabetes and you know a lot of our employes looked at okay we've been this diabetes based company we are we will never lose focus on on our insulin using customers because that's that's the foundation of our company of our business but there's so many more people who can benefit from our technology and can learn from what we have so we're going to launch Stell uh late this summer and uh it's going to be it's going to be really fun we're going to learn a ton that's great I kind of want to try it myself a little bit um when it well it's got no alerts it won't it won't no not as my main device I'm just curious you know I want to create content and and help spread the word and educate be great but when it comes to the G7 I know there's been some enhancements specifically one of them is rapid reconnect can you kind of explain to us what that is yeah uh as we launch the product anytime you launch a product you have a list of things that can make it better because from the time you develop and validate and verify and then get it filed and get approved okay well I can do this I can do this I can do that rapid reconnect is a feature that whereby if you walk away from your phone for a long time rather than a 5 minute wait to reconnect uh the way the app and the transmitter works is it it tries to they try and find each other rapidly so you don't have a bunch of data uh and a big data Gap you know for example sometimes uh if I'm wearing a sensor I'll just leave I leave my phone in the other room when I go to bed and I turn the alerts off so it won't wake me up and I go up in the morning and in the old days without rapid reconnect it it take quite a while to connect with rapid reconnect that thing's looking for a signal every minute and the data is populated very quickly and so we've had an enhan Bluetooth configuration and Rapid reconnect to greatly improve our connectivity with G7 and we've seen great results for that yeah and I know there were also enhancements to range this is something that and that's part of the Bluetooth set as well okay and it jumps from I read like 20 to 33 people can expect the range they had with they they can expect the range they had with the G6 y okay great now um were there changes done for this within the sensor or was it software or was it there's a little bit of of electronics changes on the board uh and then there's software changes as well you know sensor science consists of about every type of engineering you can IM imagine from chemical engineering with the membranes to mechanical engineering putting the stuff together software engineering on the app development side but also on the algorithm side and I I I showed up for one day and I saw a wreck I had to hire a packaging engineer because need an engineer design boxes that will not damage the sensor if they're dropped so almost any engineering type there is we have and so there are changes across the board you know we've introduced a new app or an an update to the G7 app almost monthly since we launched it uh with great new features with great improvements in our last big launch we had Direct to watch come uh we also have uh some medication logging that you can have we have activity data can have be ingested into the app and can be seen we don't correlate activity data with glucose data yet uh that's a long-term vision of mine and something we'd hope to do in the future but this app has really been a great platform for us today's episode is sponsored by t1d exchange you can directly make an impact on Diabetes health care treatments and Technology by participating in the t1d exchange registry it starts with a simple survey about your life with t1d and and it only takes about 15 minutes after that you'll have a personal portal with ongoing t1d study and Survey opportunities from research on technology daily t1d management and more plus some of these studies even offer compensation signing up with the link in the show notes helps support my channel and it allows me to continue putting out free content you can sign up at t1d exchange.org SL diabetic or click that link in today's show notes now for the episode so something I noticed when it comes to adhesive there has been a change on the adhesive the one I'm wearing right now this is different than what I've been used to for the last year the last one was more maybe a little bandagey if that's like if I may be butchering what that is but this one seems to be a different what changes have you been making to the adhesive and why well we recognized uh that there are more quite canly more sticky adhesives that we could put on the product and we've put a new adhesive into the G G7 configuration that's as we look at our inventory levels uh within the distribution channel it's almost all the way in and another couple months it'll be a to new adhesive it's it's stickier it will stick better we study adhesives all the time adhesives are very fine balance for us because if you make it so no one's ever allergic to them that's great and they fall off a bunch of people if you make it so some people are allergic to them but they never fall off you get the same amount of discussion back and forth so we study adhesives a lot we go through a lot of studies and trials before we we adapt one this new adhesive is much sticker stickier and we're very confident our patients will have a better experience with it yeah does does this change an adhesive I know that there's been a change in your sensor replacement policy and this has there has been a lot of discussion about it in the community so I had to bring it up and no I appreciate it well so so what it states is that there that Dexcom will have three Goodwill replacements for sensors that aren't found to be failure you know maybe they fell off whatever so I guess I'd like you to clear that up a little bit and one thing I guess that was possibly a little concerning to me is it said that the three Goodwill Replacements will include procedures so for example if someone in the span of two weeks had to have an MRI a CT scan and surgery they'd have to replace three and then they'd be out of Replacements be awful so I guess and I've been I've personally been in that situation that's why it kind of resonated so I guess I'd like a little clearance in what people should expect with this policy so let's let's start uh we never had a real clear policy on this before uh and we spent a lot of time studying it we've been very good to folks about replacing sensors forever but we also think from a business business model perspective unlimited Replacements doesn't work for us either so we want to do something was very fair we studied sensor Behavior we studied our customers 95% of people don't use don't have three sensors that come off for tape over the course of a year now if your sensor fails and that signal quits and you get a sensor failure method we're replacing that that that's our problem no questions asked that's easy uh and and so we felt with three sensors that would deal with 95% of the cases we're going to adjust and adapt the policy more over time we we just wanted it to be clear we always want to take care of our customers we always want to make it best yeah but we also want to make sure the business has boundaries so we'd never formalize this before a lot of thought went into it and we'll continue to evaluate it and and see where it goes uh but that that's the purpose of it we want it to be clear to everybody okay I appreciate that and I know specifically a lot of parents who you know they're seven-year-old who's running at soccer they have no control these kids they're crazy they're running they're sweating knocked off yeah exactly and it's you know it would be a burden for these parents if it and and so we will look at all that okay I have had phone calls and emails over terrified customers who have an aid system runs of the sensor now they don't have one anymore so we'll look at this policy over time and do what's best for our users no question yeah now direct to watch it's here I'm excited about it many people are I'm wondering kind of what has the adoption rate been like what is the reception to this feature the people we've heard from absolutely love it uh and it's very much obviously an athletic set you know athletes uh if you're working out and you're going for a long run you don't have to carry that phone anymore we've heard a lot from parents who rather than send their kid to school with a phone gee letting it sit on their watch and being able to do this and look at your glucose rather than get your phone out now you could do it with the phone in your backpack before but this is just another level of patient interaction that people really wanted I I think it's going to be a great feature uh and and it really speaks to the creativity of our Engineers way back when we designed G7 and G6 I remember literally arguing with the engineers why are we taking so much time because we want to connect with multiple devices at the same time and that requires a lot of engineering but you can go faster yeah I know you could go faster but by doing what we've done we can connect to three devices at the same time we can connect to your watch to your phone and to your insulin delivery system you can make a change on one of those platforms forms and all the others are updated too that's really incredible engineering and I think really meets the needs of our our patient Community very very well yeah it's a huge upgrade and you know something of course everyone got it and now they want more a feature that isn't available on it is Dexcom follow currently not yet but it will be well and I wonder with the Dexcom follow would that be coming and Dexcom follow allows parents often or or caregivers to to follow along with numbers would that would that or could that come from also the pumps could say tandem's pump which is receiving numbers is connected to the cloud oh no it's not I guess yeah how do we how do we connect it to the cloud would it would the watch need to have cellular capability yeah it would and over time it's one of the great uh debates in our industry who controls the data of the patient experience of an aid patient the censor provider or the delivery provider and and so we have data sharing arrangements with our partners we talk about it a lot you know we've had our Clarity Cloud structure and our share fellow structure built for a very long time and we haven't had insulin data from those products in there we've talked with those companies about it over time don't have a time frame for you I would love to have it there someday I think it'd be a great feature to be able for followers to be able to see insulin data and to see that you actually took a bolus if you needed to take a aolis uh could it be is it a hold up on Apple's side does Apple need to implement battery life know direct to watch was a seven-year Journey for us just to get our glucose data there uh that the watch architecture is far different than going to a phone and so I think that'll be probably another challenge for us across the board I don't know that the pumps will directly go to the phones ever because I don't know that they can connect to more than one device uh I don't know what they are iture is so we'll just have to look at that over time but we can get our data there yeah speaking of data I know that Dexcom had has a recent clinical trial when it relates to cgms and gp1s can you just tell us more about that relationship or what what you found you know there's been a there are a lot of studies going on with gp1s using CGM and and most of the data we present and talk about is based on data we've derived from like payer databases or from insurance companies where we can see all the claims that are filed for users and what we've seen with gp1s and pretty much across the board with diabetes if you are using a diabetes drug and you're on a sensor you have a better outcome than if you aren't and so with respect to G gp1 patients and I've had discussions about this with many Physicians uh and I assure I'll have many of these discussions over the next couple of days if a patient has a sensor on and they're on a glp1 they can see the effect of the drug they can see the effect of eating L they can see the effect of when they decide to binge and eat a bunch of sweets at night because they haven't eaten all day long that their glucose is going to spike and it's not a good thing and so the changes that gp1s can enable people to do what Their physiology are demonstrated real time on a glucose sensor and it gives them immediate Fe immediate feedback and particularly as you look out into the future if people rotate off these compounds if they've been on a glp1 and they've been on glucose sensor they know what a good day looks like this is again how we believe our cell product can fit into this landscape We Believe it'll be a great product offering for glp1 users We Believe it'll be a great product offering for somebody before they go on a glp1 so they can see wow this is how my glucose goes up and down oh I'm on the drug look I'm eating less my spikes aren't as high and then if they go off they know the range they need to manage and and CGM provides that feedback I mean I had a a p a person I spoke with yesterday yesterday uh the guy had lost an incredible amount of weight not on any drugs but he he had got on a sensor because IID recommended it and he said to me you can't fix problems you don't know about because by going on your sensor I learned what I was doing wrong and and literally gave me a a 35 minute lecture on how CGM had changed his life and he had type two diabetes and and and he's in Remarkable Health now so we believe we can complement these drugs and we We Believe stud's over time will show it yeah I'm looking forward to seeing all the stories and reactions to specifically Stell too I think it's going it's it's opening up to a whole Market of people who are going to gain access and information to stuff they have in yeah is there a date for Stell I know it was summer summer yeah we'll launch it in late August okay and that's via your website we're going to have a Stell store a Stell website you'll buy it directly from there and we'll have various purchase plans and programs for people and we're really looking forward to kicking it off then over time we'll look at the distribution model as it gets bigger well we can possibly go through other avenues but to start it we wanted to make sure we had a bit of control and understood what was going on so that that's our plan with that okay and back to the G7 a little bit so many Integrations now you're you're integ integrated into the eyet by Beta bionics omnipod 5 is just around the corner it's basically here tandem both Mobi and the X ke X2 but we want more so are you thinking about um are you looking at I know twist the squl med tech pump that's coming out hopefully soon G6 compatibility at launch are you looking at bringing G7 to that pump there's European pumps like epom Med that uh currently works with the G6 you know what we talk with everybody uh and we have relationships with many of these companies in the development stage we'll certainly partner with others uh we also want to offer the best product offerings that we can and and so it's a balance of supporting your current Partners yet being with the others so we'll partner with some there'll probably be some we pass on uh but we we'll continue to expand our universe as much as we can okay and I'm not sure you can say much about the topic but I'm curious is there a status report on G8 what's going on there are so many things going on in our R&D world uh our biggest priority to get to a 15-day wear and we want to get to a 15-day wear part of the stickier tape is to get to a 15-day wear uh we have studies uh going on with that and I think that is what we're looking for for our next biggest Innovation on top of that when we go to a 15-day sensor we'll have a new algorithm to compute the glucose values from the sensor and we're looking for more accuracy uh in addition to that but every component of our system we have a project on we have projects on insertion devices we have projects on electronics we have projects on the sensors the membranes you name it there's stuff across the board I think our next big in Innovation will be 15 days and after that you'll be looking at uh you know this platform's got to run for a couple three years before we go to another Hardware platform but certainly we'll look at smaller certainly we'll look at better connectivity and more connectivity and all the things that you know that are users want and demand from us yeah is Dexcom looking into non invasive at all we study it all the time and we've looked at several of those devices we haven't seen anything that meets the accuracy standard that is important to us but if something were there we certainly would investigate it and possibly try and include it with our product portfolio if it was something we could buy or license and work with but we haven't seen anything that is just that great yet but we look at them all we'd never be naive enough to think that we're the only people in the world that can do this yeah Kevin thank you so much for Tak the time uh this has been awesome and I hope you have a good rest of your Ada well your questions are always great thank you it's always fun now I want to hear from you have you had any experiences with the new sensor policy let us know in the comments and I've got so much more content coming for you from Ada whether it be twists insulin pump the omnipod iPhone app metronics infusion set and a whole lot more on social media YouTube the podcast so make sure you're following me on all of those platforms Oh and before I forget there is a new video up on my patreon which shows off all of the technology I'm using to produce my podcast and make videos if you want to see that it's on patreon with the link in the show notes I'm Justin and I'll take you later

Channel: Diabetech

Views: 4,188

Keywords: dexcom g7, dexcom, cgm, dexcom replacement policy

Id: qbInrUPNJ8w

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2024