In this interview, Ronesh Sinha, MD, explains how he's addressing the burden of cardiometabolic disease with the initiation of his continuous glucose monitor program at Sutter Health.
On Wednesday, April 17, at The American Journal of Managed Care® (AJMC®) Institute for Value-Based Medicine® hosted by Sutter Health in San Francisco, California, Ronesh Sinha, MD, an internal medicine physician at Sutter Health, shared insights on the current landscape of cardiometabolic health from his clinical experience.
Beyond his clinical responsibilities, he serves as the medical director of employer strategy, where he collaborates with local companies to develop innovative health and wellness initiatives. Additionally, Sinha plays a pivotal role as the medical director for Sutter Select, overseeing the health benefits of the organization's workforce.
In this interview, Sinha explained how he's addressing the burden of cardiometabolic disease with the initiation of his continuous glucose monitor program at Sutter Health.
Transcript
During your presentation, you discussed improving cardiometabolic health using continuous glucose monitors. What were the key takeaways from your talk?
I started my clinical practice here in the Bay Area about 20 years ago, and I started seeing people coming in with prediabetes, diabetes, and heart disease at a very young age. Although lifestyle change is a really challenging proposition, and in a busy clinical practice, often doctors don't have that much time to really intensively counsel people on lifestyle. So, as a result of, sort of, using the glucose sensors in my practice, I was actually able to arm people with useful clinical information, but also give them a tool like a sensor that could tell them in real-time what their lifestyle inputs are doing to their actual glucose levels—so being really focused on preventing diabetes and heart disease.
Once I saw in my clinic that this is—wow, this is an incredible way to really get people to change [their] behavior, I really wanted to come up with a scalable solution that can really serve broader populations. So that really led from my clinical practice inside the clinic to something we can really take widely to a broader population by prescribing sensors, getting them in people's hands, and then taking a lot of my experience and insights about the glucose sensor and just making it much more achievable, consumable, so you can really understand what the numbers mean. It's one thing to put a sensor on, but if you don't know what the numbers mean, it can cause a lot of anxiety and stress. So our team's job is to really teach people how to digest that information while motivating them to implement sustainable behavior changes.
Tell us how you started the continuous glucose monitoring program at Sutter Health.
You know, what we did was we built a program from the ground up through Sutter Health. So, it literally started with just giving, basically prescribing, sensors to individuals and giving them access to a platform that we develop, where they can actually learn how to consume that glucose data and make changes. It started off really small, then out of that it just grew. So it's really 100% organic, built in Sutter. In the beginning, we thought, "Do we partner with other digital health companies, etc?" But we really made it a mission to make sure we just kind of grow it on our own.
The nice thing about growing a program within the health care system is our physician colleagues learned about it very early on, they have a lot of trust in our program so they're referring patients into it. We've had a very critical partnership with Sutter Pharmacy, and Sutter Pharmacy is the one that actually helps prescribe with me. And they prescribe the sensor so patients can basically pick it up at their pharmacy because when you're doing that for several hundred people, I can't write 100 prescriptions for that, so Sutter Pharmacy has allowed us to do that. So, everything has been kind of built and grown and disseminated through Sutter Health.
Industry Experts Tackle Specialty Drug Access Challenges for Employer Benefit Plans
May 2nd 2024Representatives from ICON plc and Symphony Health joined forces as AXS24 to discuss the challenges of managing high-cost specialty drugs and how they influence self-funded employer benefit plan design and employee access to specialty medications.
Read More
Tackling Health Inequality: The Power of Education and Experience
April 30th 2024To help celebrate and recognize National Minority Health Month, we are bringing you a special month-long podcast series with our Strategic Alliance Partner, UPMC Health Plan. Welcome to our final episode of this limited series and our conversation with Janine Jelks-Seale, MSPPM, director of health equity at UPMC Health Plan.
Listen
Specialty Pharmacists at the Forefront: Elevating Care for Rare Diseases
May 1st 2024In the US, a disease is considered rare when it affects fewer than 200,000 persons, or 1 in every 1500 individuals, with an estimated total of 25 to 30 million Americans overall living with a rare disease at any given time.
Read More
Examining Low-Value Cancer Care Trends Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
April 25th 2024On this episode of Managed Care Cast, we're talking with the authors of a study published in the April 2024 issue of The American Journal of Managed Care® about their findings on the rates of low-value cancer care services throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
Listen
Latest Advances and Updates of Treatment in the Real World at AUA
May 1st 2024The annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) not only presents the newest therapies coming out but showcases the latest in how treatments are being used in the real world, said Stephen Freedland, MD, of Cedars Sinai.
Read More
BRCA-Like Classification May Be a Useful Biomarker for Olaparib Response in Ovarian Cancer
May 1st 2024Adding olaparib to maintenance therapy with bevacizumab was associated with significantly longer survival for patients with ovarian cancer whose tumors have a BRCA-like genomic profile, but not among those with non-BRCA-like tumors, a study found.
Read More