The Rich and Robust Data from CGM You Just Can't Get from Finger Sticks: A Talk with Thomas Martens, MD

"There's a lot of work involved with [manual blood glucose monitoring] and you don't quite get the same richness and robustness of data that you can get with the CGM," Thomas Martens, MD, medical director at the International Diabetes Center and a consultant in internal medicine at Park Nicollet Clinic, in Minneapolis, MN, told Patient Care at the 2025 ACP Internal Medicine Meeting.

Blood glucose monitoring (BGM) that requires multiple finger sticks per day for individuals with diabetes who use insulin, while long the only way to assess treatment efficacy, is progressively giving way to continuous glucose monitoring (CGM), Martens said. He referred to meta-analyses comparing the 2 methods of tracking serum glycemia and said that CGM looks to be "modestly better at improving glucose values compared with BGM." In the short video above, Martens discusses the differences in the metrics available for BGM and CGM and how they affect treatment outcomes.