What You Should Know
- The Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) will conduct a comprehensive new independent evaluation of digital health tools for type 2 diabetes, slated for publication in 2027.
- The evaluation re-evaluates the market three years after its landmark March 2024 assessment, which determined that widely used digital diabetes tools relying on noncontinuous glucometers failed to deliver meaningful clinical improvements and drove up net healthcare spending.
- Focuses on the expanded therapeutic landscape since 2024—specifically evaluating how modern digital platforms integrate data from Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) and support GLP-1 receptor agonist therapies alongside traditional blood glucose tracking.
How PHTI Re-Evaluates $1B in Digital Diabetes Tools Across Clinical and Economic ROI
The digital chronic care management, self-insured employer benefits, and health plan procurement sectors face a defining validation moment: billions of dollars are flowing into digital diabetes platforms, but healthcare purchasers remain cautious after initial generations of point solutions failed to demonstrate durable clinical or financial return on investment.
According to national health data, more than 40 million Americans—approximately one in eight adults—are living with diabetes, with type 2 diabetes accounting for 90% to 95% of cases. The disease represents the seventh leading cause of death in the United States and generated $413B in direct and indirect healthcare expenditures in 2022, consuming one out of every four healthcare dollars spent nationwide. Consequently, diabetes management continues to rank as the highest-priority chronic disease category for commercial payers and self-funded employers.
When the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI) released its initial assessment in March 2024, the findings disrupted the digital health industry. That baseline evaluation examined eight prominent digital tools that relied on traditional, noncontinuous glucometers paired with remote coaching, concluding that they failed to achieve clinically meaningful glycemic reductions (HbA1c) while increasing total cost of care. Since that report, the clinical standard of care has undergone a massive structural shift.
Digital diabetes companies have raised over $1B in new capital, rapidly pivoting their product roadmaps to ingest continuous glucose telemetry and manage the complex adherence, side-effect profiles, and dosing protocols of GLP-1 receptor agonists.
To determine whether these expanded technological and pharmaceutical integrations have translated into verified clinical efficacy and economic savings, the Peterson Health Technology Institute has announced a new evaluation of digital diabetes management solutions, scheduled for release in 2027.
Evaluating a New Era of GLP-1s and Continuous Biosensing
PHTI’s upcoming 2027 assessment establishes an updated methodological framework to evaluate how digital health platforms manage modern chronic metabolic care:
- Expanding Beyond Spot-Check Glucometers: Incorporates the widespread adoption of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs), assessing how platforms ingest, harmonize, and contextualize high-frequency interstitial glucose telemetry into actionable clinical interventions.
- Evaluating Digital GLP-1 Management: Assesses how digital platforms support initiation, titration, dietary behavioral modification, side-effect management, and long-term medication adherence or off-ramping protocols for GLP-1 receptor agonists.
- Rigorous Clinical and Economic Assessment: Evaluates whether contemporary multi-modal solutions produce statistically significant, durable HbA1c reductions and whether they successfully lower downstream medical expenses to justify their subscription and licensing fees.
- Informing Enterprise Healthcare Purchasers: Provides health plan actuaries, employer benefit leaders, and health system CMOs with objective, third-party evidence to guide procurement decisions and formulary benefit design.
- Expanding Independent Digital Health Surveillance: Adds to PHTI’s established body of independent evaluations across gastrointestinal conditions, opioid use disorder, depression and anxiety, hypertension management, and musculoskeletal care.
“When we released our 2024 evaluation, people were disappointed to learn that widely-used digital diabetes solutions were not meaningfully improving clinical outcomes for patients,” said Caroline Pearson, Executive Director of PHTI. “That evaluation remains one of our most widely read, and we continue to receive more questions about it than any other. PHTI assessments are meant to drive better innovation, and it is encouraging that the landscape today appears to have improved. We are eager to see if these digital solutions have evolved to better serve patients.”
