Online Blood Glucose Tracking Tools: Reviewing 7 options

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Permalink Reply by BarbraW on March 2, 2009 at 6:53am

I've been using SugarStats pretty extensively for about two months now. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. I bought a monthly subscription, and have been tracking all my food/meds/activity/blood glucose.

Pros:

- Entering data is really easy. I like that you can do "add multiple entries" and in one screen, add meds, food, glucose readings, and activities. It's really fast.

- It's nice you can tag things with custom tags (like "1 hour after dinner" or whatever)

- It's nice you can comment on all the stats.

- it has nice drop-downs that remember previous entries. For example, I type in "yo" and my standard "yogurt & honey" breakfast auto-populates the food description and # of carb text boxes.

Cons:

- BIG ONE: They have NO WAY to easily print out graphs/stats in a format that I can bring to my doctor. Yes, they have a few graphs that you can do a printscreen on, and that's somewhat helpful, but things like a 30 day graph of my fasting number is pretty important, and there's no easy way to do it.

I'd also really like a printable stat report. I don't know about everyone else, but my doc will not take the time to look at my stats on the computer, even if I make it available to him (which you can). I need something that will print out everything I enter in a compact and easily readable format, and it doesn't have this.

I've talked to the sugarstats guys, and they say they are working on additional reports, but I haven't seen anything yet.

- You can export blood glucose numbers so that you can look at them in Excel or other software apps, but only glucose numbers. I'd like to see activity/food/meds as well.

- I wish there was a way to specify Fasting numbers. It seems like that's a stat that a majority of people track, and there should be a checkbox to specify Fasting. I can mark it "fasting" with a tag, but that's kind of a hassle.

- I wish there were more options for graphing tagged numbers. I tag fasting and 2 hours after breakfast/lunch/dinner. I can see the average number for each tagged item, but I can't make a 7-day graph of my "2 hour after breakfast" number, for example.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin on May 21, 2009 at 4:02am

I've been using healthengage for several months; since I have a blackberry its easy to update by going to their mobile web site and updating my readings its alot easier if you are not near a computer

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Permalink Reply by Todd T. on June 2, 2009 at 10:28pm

Sounds great but it is out of service. Is this just temporary? Does it happen often?

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Permalink Reply by Todd T. on June 3, 2009 at 8:48am

So I got on this morning and signed up. I do not find the app for my blackberry, is that in the pro version?
Looks like a pretty cool website though.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Goffe on June 23, 2009 at 7:23am

I must admit that I've looked into some of the online diabetes management sites, but I've decided not to participate. I am concerned with privacy, and the lack of control that could arise from what happens with my personal, private health information.

Any thoughts abouut my concerns?

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Permalink Reply by Tiffany Rodriguez on June 29, 2009 at 1:32pm

I forgot how i found this site but i did,

http://www.healthengage.net/index.cmd#

you can put in what your BS was at what times and before or after meals exercise and so on.
Then there's another tab to put in how many units of insulin you injected when and what kind and if its a correction or mealtime or whatever else
You can graph/chart your numbers from that day to up to 3 months in i think 6 different styles, and you can print it out

I love it!!

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Permalink Reply by Manny Hernandez on August 20, 2009 at 9:42pm

I signed up for an account with HealthEngage a while back. I later learned (through a friend) that they seem to be leaking email addresses:
http://benlog.com/articles/2009/08/03/healthengage-leaking-email-ad...

So I decided to remove my account: I have yet to get a response from them about this. They neither have responded to me nor have they removed my account. It's been a few weeks since I started actively requesting this.

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Permalink Reply by Tom Goffe on August 31, 2009 at 7:32am

American veterans can also use an online tool at http://www.myhealth.va.gov/ . Once they establish an account, they can enter BG results and other health information. They can also use the site to order prescription refills online without leaving the comfort of their sofa.

One downside is that test results from VA physician ordered tests (like A1C) are not yet available online, nor is your physician able to access the information entered by the patient on this site. It'd be nice if that were to become reality one day, as it would avoid needless duplication.

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