Saint Luke’s first worldwide to incorporate new glucose monitoring system

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Dec. 3, 2012) — Improved glucose (blood sugar) management in critical care patients may reduce morbidity, mortality, and the length of stay. While glucose control is a standard practice for patients after cardiac surgery whether or not they have diabetes, it’s difficult to achieve.

Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute evaluated safety and device performance of the Medtronic Hospital Glucose Management System (HGMS) in adult patients admitted to ICU following cardiac surgery who require IV insulin therapy for glucose control. Medtronic’s HGMS is the first minimally invasive continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system specifically designed for use in hospital critical care units.

Serving as an early warning system, the HGMS has the potential to help clinicians take a more proactive approach to glucose control. Without it, the current standard of care is taking blood glucose measurements intermittently (typically every two-to-four hours). By continuously measuring glucose values, CGM provides a more complete picture since it can reveal high and low glucose levels that periodic blood glucose measurements might miss, and thus may help prevent hyper- or hypoglycemia (glucose levels that are too high or too low).

“HGMS is a promising new technology that was easy to incorporate into the care of our critical care patients, and can alert the clinical care team to impending hypo or hyperglycemia, potentially improving glucose control,” said cardiologist Mikhail Kosiborod, M.D., principal investigator of the study conducted at Saint Luke’s. The system continuously displays the patient’s glucose value in real time on its monitor, and provides predictive alarms and alerts if the patient’s glucose values fall outside the selected target range.

The HGMS is intended for any patients in critical care units with dysglycemia (unstable blood glucose levels). The device is pending CE Mark approval in Europe but is not FDA approved for use in the U.S. at this time.