Patients' experience with information technology in diabetes care

Objective We examined the attitudes of people with diabetes toward digitization and advancing technology in diabetology, what advantages and disadvantages they see, and how do they assess current developments in IT (information technology) in diabetology. Materials and methods In all, 3427 people with diabetes completed an online survey. Results Overall, survey participants had a very positive attitude toward digitization (83% positive/very positive) and considered the potential for optimizing diabetology to be very high (79%). The greatest advantages of digitization were "better quality of treatment" (80%), "greater personal responsibility and self-determination in therapy" (80%), and "more support in therapy decisions" (78%), while the greatest disadvantages were the "error-proneness of digital applications" (36%), the "risk of misuse of patient data" (32%) and the "fear that digitization will replace the doctor in many cases" (31%). The possibility of evaluating and analyzing glucose data by means of software, automated insulin delivery (AID) systems, and improving the interoperability of the various applications are currently rated as the most significant topics. Conclusions People with diabetes are very positive about new technologies in diabetology and associate it with high hopes that it will improve and simplify their diabetes therapy and reduce the burdens associated with diabetes. Especially people with type 1 diabetes (or their parents) have high expectations for AID systems to significantly improve treatment of their diabetes.