Abstract

Objective: Telemedicine (TM) is one more tool at modern medicine service at care and treatment of Type 1 Diabetes (DM1) moreover in remote areas. Since 2016, our Diabetes Care Program includes TM as a possible add-on care according to the families’ realities and needs, in the aim to facilitate diabetes management and education at home without improved cost and time. Because of covid-19 pandemic, since March until at least September, we decided to provide regular care, education, and emergencies prevention and management through exclusive TM (ETM) using families’ resources (phone, whatsapp, computer..) . The study objective is to evaluate the impact of 6 month ETM on metabolic control, diabetes care providing and families’ satisfaction. Methods: A descriptive comparative and correlational study of the ETM impact is conducted in our Chilean center from December 2019 to October 2020 with 53 patients aged 2-17 years. The ETM impact will be evaluated and compared (by Student t-test) in 4 different times (February, May, August, October) on metabolic control outcomes (A1c, average glucose (AG), hypoglycemia number, acute complication number, total daily insulin dose(TDID), BMI), ETM indicators (contact number, content) and families satisfaction (quantitative and qualitative survey). Preliminary Results: Our sample included 53 children aged 9,4+- 3,8 years; treatment CSII (15,1%), CGM (24,5%). The first results (from December 2019 to May 2020) are showed in the table. The main reasons of use respectively TM add-on care and ETM, are adjusting insulin doses (65,5%/89,2%), emergencies management (58,6%/45,9%) and improved diabetes education (13,8%/21,6%). The frequency was 1-3 per month (79,3%). Since March, families’ needs of ETM was regular visits (59,5%), insulin doses adjustment (89,2%), emergencies (45,9%) and education (21,6%). Only 35% of the families are using a platform/software to upload data. Satisfaction is optimal (4,95/5) principally because of a best diabetes management, improved family motivation and responsibility, perception of security and tranquility, reinforced relationship with diabetes team, time saving and cost reduction. Conclusion: the first results indicate that exclusive telemedicine appears like a good diabetes care system for the families even if they don’t have access to technology, and seems to improve diabetes management. However, there are still many pending results, including clinic and biochemical data, to complete our study objective with the comparison data.