CareLink - Go Pro

Our "Sick Day" turned into a "Sick Month", but everyone is just about back on their feet again now - sorry for the gap in the posts.

I wanted to touch on the Medtronic CareLink package. By default, when your shiny new 640g arrives, you get access to the CareLink Personal software package. It's all browser driven with nothing to install (except for Java if you haven't done that already for other websites).

Once you've signed in, you have the option to upload a fresh batch of data or review data up to your last upload. For the 640g, this involves plugging in your Bayer Contour Next Link 2.4 BG meter, which is used to communicate with the pump and upload the data. In our experience, based on Windows 7 and 8.1, using IE, this rarely works first time... (We also tried Chrome, which isn't officially supported but is able to review data with no apparent problems).

The "solution" is to pull the BG meter out and start the upload sequence again. Two or three attempts are usually sufficient, whilst the Java stack and Windows sort themselves out... (It actually reminds me of some of my clunky efforts to establish serial comms with a detector in Windows 95/98 many moons ago at work!). Not great if you're trying to grab data quickly before heading out the door to preschool, work or a clinic :-)

Once you have overcome this hurdle, there are a series of Reports that can be run, generating PDF files for each:

I won't review each here, because others have done and excellent job elsewhere - see Tony Rose's post here for example.

There's definite value to these reports and getting data on to a big screen and over a longer period of time is more useful than peering at the 3-12 hours of data you can visualise on the pump (I like that feature on the 640g by the way - particularly when picking Janki up from preschool). CareLink is also great in that it allows you to share your PWD's data with your clinical team so they can keep tabs too. But, but (you knew there was a but coming right? ;-) ) none of the reports are interactive. None of them allow you to select particular days over a time period - for example, every preschool day, every swimming day, every sick day... You get to select one day or a continuous range of days. That's a shame because Janki at preschool does not equal Janki at home on a weekend and showing me an average of the two datasets isn't particularly useful.

The other shortcoming I've found (and judging by how we've seen our clinical team use the data, they might agree?) is that you can view a single day's results very clearly, with clear indications of when each bolus was given and (crucially for the 640g) when each basal suspend before / on low was triggered, as shown below (by the way, a post on breakfast responses is on my list of posts to do!):

But when it comes to viewing mutiple days, because there's no interaction, you're limited really to seeing a trace and an average (in this case as we descended into another round of sickness):

These are extracts from each full pdf report by the way.

I wasn't happy with the output from CareLink Personal so we've pursued two routes: 

1) Make use of the CSV (Comma Separated Values) data available through the last of the CareLink Personal "report" options

2) Make use of Medtronic CareLink Pro

There's an amazing amount of data locked up in the CSV file from the 640g, but more on that in another post.

Working with your clinical team - who should have access to CareLink Pro - you can review the data uploaded via CareLink Personal in more detail. Here's a brief summary of the features that we've found useful:-

Add Snacks

Pro allows you to specify wake-up, bedtime, and meal time-periods. You can also add other regular events, such as school snack-times. Personal only allows you to specify breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus an evening and sleeping period.

Select Days

With Pro you can select out only those days within a range of dates that you're interested in for detailed analysis, but annoyingly (for me at least) it still insists on presenting the 24-hour analysis (and the average SG plot) for a continuous range of dates...

Detail

A typical Pro report is around six pages of data analysis over the whole date period, including a useful sensor and meter overview page) and a snapshot of your device settings (two more pages, which always appears to be based on the date of the last upload rather than what might have been set on the days being analysed) and a page summary of each selected day's events:

So in summary, my two pence on CareLink is that it's a great tool to share your pump data with your clinical team despite the best efforts of the Java uploader :-). 

CareLink Personal also allows for basic visualisation of your data. CareLink Pro takes it one step further, with more in depth analysis, which may or may not be of direct use to us as parents, but has clearly been developed with the input of clinical teams and experts. It's also quick and easy to manipulate when time is short (at your clinical appointment for example).

So whilst we find CareLink Pro a very useful tool, I was still keen to see what else could be done, and that's where mining that CSV data comes in - up next... - and getting access to that data is, for me at least, the biggest single advantage of CareLink.