August 2, 2025
A new IMPACT pilot study reveals that electronic health records (EHRs) relying on fingerstick blood glucose (FBG) data may significantly underreport hypoglycemia among long-term care (LTC) residents.
Researchers assessed how well FBG measurements recorded in EHRs aligned with continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data, analyzing two cohorts of LTC residents with diabetes. One dataset was derived from the Long-Term Care Data Cooperative’s 2023 EHR-linked CGM records, and the other from direct LTC facility EHR and CGM data collected between 2022 and 2023.
Outcomes showed that EHR FBG measures of hypoglycemia had high specificity but failed to identify four out of every five hypoglycemic events among LTC residents. Such findings indicate that researchers and healthcare providers should consider the substantial risk of measurement error when using FBG-derived hypoglycemia data for clinical decisions and research.
Read the full article here.