Harnessing Digital Innovation for Diabetes Care: Insights from the Action4Diabetes–CorrelAid Data4Good Collaboration (Preprint)

Recent decades have seen a dramatic proliferation of real-world data use and evidence generation from non-research settings. Data utilisation is particularly revolutionising the operations and impact of non-governmental organisations worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income countries. Action4Diabetes, which has incrementally been providing sustainable diabetes care for children, adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes (aged 0-25 years) across South-east Asia since 2015, is one such organisation. Recognising the importance of data, Action4Diabetes have collaborated with CorrelAid e.V. As part of this, Action4Diabetes has been exchanging patient data with the local program hospitals monthly. A preprocessing pipeline was implemented, extracting patient and medical product data in a standardised and unified manner. Data collected are anonymized and subsequently uploaded to secure public cloud storage, where it is processed and stored in a centralized database. The model employed by Action4Diabetes shows that much can be achieved and can perhaps be utilised elsewhere.