Objective: Digital therapeutics manage chronic diseases by leveraging structured data like blood glucose/pressure, diet, etc. Addition of free-text notes associated with this data may help patients/providers make sense of trends by tracking unique concerns, providing the benefits of deeper cognitive processing. We explored the impact of contextual annotation in a digital therapeutic on A1C.

Method and Results: Free-text note usage from 3,142 users of BlueStar® digital therapeutic was summarized using NLP techniques. 941 users (29.9%) recorded 31,443 notes. A lexicon of note content was generated from the most common words (Table 1). We tested if note usage was associated with A1C reduction in a subgroup (N = 378) with two lab A1C values. A repeated measures ANCOVA, controlling for demographics and usage, showed the highest note takers exhibiting significantly larger declines in A1C (-2.13%) compared with those who took no notes (-0.86%) or very few notes (-0.79%), F(3,357) = 3.55, p =.02.

Conclusions: A substantial subgroup used free-text notes in BlueStar reflecting a diverse range of self-management themes from nondiabetes physical/mental health issues to core diabetes concerns like BG, medication, diet, and activity. Contextual annotation was associated with greater A1C improvement, suggesting that note-taking may offer unique benefit to digital therapeutic users; future studies should address causality.
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Disclosure

M. Dugas: None. K. Crowley: None. W. Wang: None. A.K. Iyer: Employee; Self; WellDoc, Inc. M.M. Peeples: Employee; Self; WellDoc, Inc. M. Shomali: Consultant; Self; WellDoc, Inc. G. Gao: None.

© 2019 by the American Diabetes Association.
2019
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