The Diabetes Australia Grand Innovation Challenge launches today and it’s tackling something the sector desperately needs. Australia is in short supply of early-stage funding for medtech and digital health solutions that put people with diabetes at the centre of innovation, not as an afterthought.
As someone working in market access who’s also lived with type 2 diabetes since 2022, I’ve learned that the best technology for chronic conditions is the technology you forget you’re using. Add even one minute of daily friction to someone’s busy routine and you’re asking them to fail. In diabetes care, that failure isn’t just inconvenient. It can mean commercial failure.
“I tried three different health monitoring apps last year. Eventually I gave up on the tech route and just kept to basics: taking my meds, eating well, exercising and tracking HbA1c with my doctor. It’s less ‘innovative’ but actually working well for me.”
– Roy Ramiscal, Associate Director, Pulse Economics & T2D patient
Non-adherence doesn’t just hurt patient outcomes; it destroys the health economic case these technologies depend on. To secure reimbursement, new technological interventions must prove they deliver clinical and economic benefits equal to or better than current standard care. Diabetes requires lifelong management. If patients stop using your device or app because it’s clunky or exhausting, you never generate the outcomes data you need. No sustained use means no glucose improvements, no medication reductions, no cost savings. Your cost-effectiveness model collapses, your real-world evidence looks weak, and your HTA submission is dead on arrival.
Each stakeholder in the diabetes innovation ecosystem operates rationally within their own constraints and incentives. Innovations are optimised for measurable success within each stakeholder’s domain: engagement metrics for investors, safety endpoints for regulators, trial adherence for HTAs. Yet trial adherence with dedicated support staff doesn’t predict real-world sustainability when that same patient is managing their condition alone while juggling intense work, schooling and/or family life. A digital therapeutic might achieve statistical significance in a controlled trial yet fail in the real world because daily data entry becomes impossible when running late for a high-value client meeting. A continuous glucose monitor might meet TGA requirements but remain inaccessible to those patients who need it most because fit-for-purpose reimbursement pathways in Australia are significantly lacking for wearable devices, digital health and AI innovations.
Exhibit: Diverse stakeholder priorities aren’t perfectly aligned with patient lived experience
Each stakeholder in diabetes innovation operates within structural constraints that can inadvertently work against patient interests. Patient co-design forces these tensions to be resolved early, ensuring innovations are built for real-world sustainability not just regulatory approval or investor metrics. (Note: Tensions shown reflect structural incentives and constraints, not individual intent. Patient needs can vary by disease duration, comorbidities, health literacy and socioeconomic context.)
This is exactly why the Grand Innovation Challenge focus on patient priorities matters so much. Patient co-designing is not a box-ticking exercise. It’s strategic risk mitigation for commercialisation. By forcing innovators to solve data fatigue and usability problems upfront, the funding program ensures that technologies emerging from the funding valley aren’t just scientifically clever. They’re built for adherence, built to generate value and built to actually get paid for.
How will Diabetes Australia assess these innovations? What outcomes actually matter most to people living with diabetes and do those priorities shift across different populations? A continuous glucose monitor might be transformative for a well-resourced patient with strong health literacy but become an expensive barrier for someone from a culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) background navigating an unfamiliar health system or for someone in a lower socioeconomic group where diabetes prevalence is highest but digital access and health engagement are most challenging.
True patient-centred assessment means confronting these trade-offs directly. We need evaluation frameworks that balance two critical dimensions: (i) the comprehensive long-term clinical and economic benefits an innovation could deliver, and (ii) the perceived value from the patient’s actual lived context. The most technically sophisticated solution isn’t always the one that creates the most value for the people who need it most. Patient co-design at technology readiness levels (TRL) 5 to 7 means these tensions get resolved before they become commercially fatal. This happens before the regulatory submission, before the HTA dossier, before the clinical rollout.
Read more about the Diabetes Australia Grand Innovation Challenge here.
