Home Glucose meters

We do not allow patients to document glucose results from their home meters. They can use them to check their own glucose and compare to our meters, but only hospital-performed glucose results can go into the chart. I had an instance in the past where a patient told us that our meters were "wrong" because their meter gave them a different result--one that was normal. Our meter gave an abnormal result. We let the patient know that we verified the meter performance when it came in and ran quality control daily, so we were sure our meter was accurate. He did not run any QC on his meter. I told the patient he might want to call the manufacturer for guidance.

We do not enter results from home glucose meters into our EMR, and those results cannot be used for clinical decision making within our hospital. Our reasoning is that the method has not been validated by our team or approved by our medical director. We also have no way of verifying that proper QC and maintenance have been performed to ensure result integrity.

At our organization, only the hospital meter result will be documented in the EHR and utilized for insulin administration. However,  if patient request it, she/he needs to obtain physician order for self-testing. If approve, the patient’s nurse is expected to examine the patient’s meter, strips and other testing supplies and perform one comparison between patient self-testing and the laboratory or patient care area glucose meter. 
Nurse will collect the capillary sample for lab or unit meter analysis and ask the patient to perform the test (with blood from the same puncture) using her/his own meter and supplies. Document the results of the comparison in the patient’s medical chart within Progress Notes. Results should agree within 20%.