People who work in digital health still grimace at me when I say the word “diabetes.”

PHTI’s very first assessment examined digital diabetes management solutions for type 2 diabetes, and we found that most solutions failed to deliver meaningful clinical outcomes and increased total healthcare spending. Unsurprisingly, those findings made some people very unhappy. But they also catalyzed discussion and action within the industry: in the years that followed, employers, health plans, and health systems renegotiated their contracts for these tools while the companies we evaluated sent us a steady stream of new evidence to review.

No other PHTI report generates as many questions. I am regularly asked, “when will you revisit diabetes?” Now we’re doing it.

We have consistently said that we would return to a condition area when the solutions available in the market have evolved, or when sufficient new evidence emerges that supports revisiting our conclusions. Both are now true of digital diabetes management, which is why we are announcing a new evaluation to give employers, health plans, and health systems the evidence they need to make purchasing decisions to better serve patients with diabetes.

It is clear that the market has changed in meaningful ways since 2024. Our initial evaluation looked specifically at solutions built around noncontinuous glucose monitors, reflecting the prevailing treatment approach and coverage policies for most people with diabetes at that time. Today, expanded reimbursement pathways, access to continuous glucose monitors (CGMs), and use of GLP-1s have become standard of care and broadened the approaches to diabetes management.

Employers, health systems, and health plans have also shifted how they purchase digital health solutions by increasingly implementing performance-based contracts that tie payments to clinical outcomes. They will no longer accept high patient satisfaction scores as a success metric, and instead, they want to see measurable declines in blood sugar readings that result in changes to patients’ treatment plans and improvements in their overall health.

This is what a strong, responsive health technology sector looks like: a finding exposes a gap, that gap pushes the industry to focus on the outcomes that matter, and that focus is what drives better innovation that ultimately better serves patients. I am excited to take a fresh look at this category, with years of industry response to the challenge we issued behind it. People with diabetes deserve great digital tools to help them manage their disease.

We look forward to sharing what we find.