Those that follow Kerri Sparling may have already perused this article on Six Until Me, and for those that haven’t Kerri while a paid Ambassador at Tandem has been involved with the Tandem Control-IQ trials at UVa. I think if accurate, the algorithm shoes great promise for the insulin using community.
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This is a really impressive endorsement! It is exactly what I was expecting a decent closed-loop experience to be.
Of course, the guest poster who describes her experience is possibly an easier use case in the range of difficulty: woman (no male hormone spikes), post menopausal ( I think she wrote she is 60, so no worries about cycles), no young child instability, no puberty peaks, and 35 years of D experience as a cutting edge user. She may be an ideal user—although I may well be missing some other conditions she has that could make her control worse than I think.
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After @Nickyghaleb experience with the 670G, it would be interesting to see what she would say about this algorithm after using it.
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Uh oh. Better edit my post right away. I’ll read her post again.
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I could have sworn she wrote that number. I am going through her post with a fine tooth comb right now, you frightened me.
@Thomas, we were both right! It is the guest poster, Celia, who wrote about her age and D years. I’ll edit post to reflect that.
You guys are killing me here with the “post withdrawn by author” exchange…
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Done
A snap chat way to use Discourse 
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It’s okay. I’m just gonna full it all in the way I think it went. 
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I’ve got thoughts about this, but my kids have lost their minds and must be tended to first. I’ll be back though… because there’s talking to be done. 
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We are really hoping you are correct. The Basal IQ + G6 has been very good to us, and when the Control IQ gets released we will be jumping on that bandwagon, unless the upgrade cost is really high. If Tandem is smart they will release it in Q4 when everyone OOP max has been fulfilled. Assuming there is a charge to upgrade.
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I’m in the process of moving to Tandem. I hope there isn’t an upgrade charge for control iq, but i guess it wouldn’t surprise me. Maybe we’ll get more insight at the next earnings call.
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I agree, I was fully expecting a charge for Basal-IQ and when none was required, I did a little happy dance. Maybe we will be 2 for 2 on that front.
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Tandem had promoted for almost a year, no upgrade charges through the end of 2018. Those that upgraded to Basal - iq made out
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My guess is $200 extra.
Personally I think they should eat the cost. From a business point of view, I just can’t see it being worth the negative publicity and the aggravation to charge $200 (which I really don’t think it would be higher anyhow) for the upgrade.
AND, the pumps that come out after it is released would have it included in the initial cost so the insurance would pick up the increase.
AND, for the pumps already on the market, everybody would not upgrade. I forget the stats but about a third or so maybe?
SO, why bother? Just give it out to all in-warranty X2 pumps at no additional charge, write the upgrade cost off as a marketing expense or something and bump the pumps up by $200 going forward. As it is, Tandem only gets about $3900 per pump - not like they are making cash by the barrels. Actually as Q4 is not released yet, they are burning cash each quarter and not yet (per released Q3 numbers) profitable.
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The Basal-IQ upgrade is still available. The offer was all updates that were approved by the FDA in 2018 were going to be available at no additional charge. So the date in question was based on when the FDA made the approval - not when the end user downloaded and applied the update.
So if anybody did not yet apply the Basal-IQ, they are still eligible AFAIK.
So far no public statement from the CEO either way about charges for updates approved in 2019. Really could go either way. Almost positive we will hear a definitive answer in the upcoming conference call on Feb 26th. Maybe not, but I certainly expect to have a firm answer. $200 was only a guess from me.
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Completely agree, and I think that’s exactly what they will do. Tandem is making all the right moves, and they are well positioned to gain market share. Based on what I’ve seen, control-IQ will be a great closed-loop system (I count on it as a backup option in case Tidepool Loop does not materialize for whatever reason).
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I saw a recent article on Control-IQ at http://www.diabettech.com/artificial-pancreas/tandems-tslim-x2-and-control-iq-what-do-we-know/ . It tells considerably more than I knew about how Control-IQ works, and it also says the trial has been (briefly?) suspended while they fix a “bug” that leads to hypos (the speculation is that jitter in the CGM graph that crosses above 160 one or more times can cause too many unneeded corrections to be given.)
They say the target range is 112.5-160 with a sleep range of 112.5-120 (but no correction boluses are given during sleep mode, just basal adjustments.) They only add basal and correction boluses after the BG is predicted to rise above 160. They do a little bit of auto-tuning of the pump parameters once a day, but the pump settings (ISF, Carb ratio, basal schedule) kind of need to be right for the algorithm to work well (which is my experience running diy-LOOP which does not auto-tune.) Evidently the expected A1C from the built-in target range is 6.5, which actually is an improvement over what most folks are getting on their own. There’s speculation that folks who want a lower A1C may try running their pump in sleep mode all the time for the lower 112.5-120 target range.
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