The Royal Veterinary College has created a revolutionary Pet Diabetes App, which brings veterinary diabetes management into the 21st century to support patients, vets and research.

The free App was designed by Dr Stijn Niessen, head of the Internal Medicine Service and Senior Lecturer in Internal Medicine, supported by the Rumba Foundation, which assists projects benefiting companion animal health.

Launched at the BSAVA Annual Conference this April, the App is designed to ensure that pets with diabetes enjoy a good quality of life. It allows owners to help control their pet’s diabetes by recording factors that are important indicators of success or failure in diabetes treatment and control.

Information gathered by the App enables the patient’s veterinarian to fine-tune its diabetes management, thus reducing complications associated with low and high blood glucose.

A Diabetes Log feature allows owners to record, and easily share with their vet, parameters and clinical signs that are essential to monitor for diabetes management. These include weight, appetite, thirst and urination changes, as well as urine and blood sugar values where applicable. 

The App also features a medication reminder function, a reminder to change insulin injection sites, a scientifically validated tool which calculates and monitors quality of life, a scientifically validated tool to score the pet’s clinical signs (the Diabetic Clinical Score), and a tool to calculate the number of calories and amount of food each pet needs. The App also has space for owners to save useful information, such as contact details for their veterinary practice, and questions they would like to ask their vet.

Dr Niessen explains: “In recent years we performed a large survey among hundreds of owners of diabetic pets. They gave us one clear message: ‘we would like to be more involved in the diabetic management of our pets’. So, if we want to improve the owner experience, we need to offer them the opportunity to routinely actively engage and even take leadership in their pet’s diabetic care. This free App helps them get involved, feel empowered and truly become part of the diabetic care team.

“The App helps owners to focus on, and record, those facets of the clinical picture that we vets need to know in order to make a clinical judgement. Human diabetology realised many years ago that to get the best results, treatment should be patient-driven, not doctor-driven. Veterinary diabetology needs to follow suit, and this App can help make that happen whilst also encouraging and facilitating communication between owners and veterinary teams.”

Using the RVC Pet Diabetes App, trends, pertaining to parameters like weight, fructosamine, blood glucose values and urine ketones, can be presented on graphs and it is easy for the data and graphs to be exported to the veterinary practice.

The App also includes links to useful pet diabetes videos on the RVC diabetic remission clinic Facebook site (www.facebook.com/RVC.Diabetic.Remission.Clinic).

As well as providing owners with a tool that allows them to actively participate in the medical management of their pet, by gathering information valuable to their vet, the App allows anonymous data on diabetic pets and their management to be gathered. Therefore, each animal for which the App is used contributes to research leading to better treatment options.

The App is available for download onto smartphones and tablets, from Android (http://bit.ly/1q3jCV5) and iPhone App stores (http://apple.co/203OoK2).

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Case Study

I wish I’d had the app when Bert was first diagnosed. It can be really overwhelming learning how to care for a diabetic cat, especially if you decide to home test, but this information has been key to stabilising Bert. Unfortunately, Bert is difficult to control and predict, mostly through his love of scavenging carbs. We ended up with a sliding dosage scale for his insulin, so we often test his BG. The app lets me quickly record the BG and dose given, and is great for the days I do a full or even partial curve to monitor how the insulin/dose is working. It’s easier for my vet to keep track of how well Bert is doing because I can regularly export the data for my vet to look at. It works much better as a long term record than all those scraps of paper I had on the fridge before! It’s helping build up a better picture of how Bert’s diabetes responds, and we’ve been managing him really successfully at home for the last year.” (Mrs Joanne Leonard, owner of Bert)