In the Bronx, a New York City borough where nearly 1 in 10 adults has diabetes, researchers have found something that could change lives: regular family doctors can help their patients manage the disease just as well as specialists can.
Dr. Jovan Milosavljevic and his team at Albert Einstein College of Medicine studied 8,502 adults with diabetes who use insulin. These patients got their care at 18 primary care clinics — the kind of clinics where most people go for everyday health needs. The researchers wanted to know: could the doctors at these clinics successfully prescribe continuous glucose monitors, the small devices that track blood sugar in real time?
The answer was yes. About 28 percent of patients in the study were prescribed these monitors by their primary care doctors. After one year, those who got the monitors saw their blood sugar levels improve nearly four times more than patients who did not receive them — a drop of 0.66 percentage points compared to just 0.17 percentage points. Even better, these patients also ended up in the hospital and emergency room less often. They had 13 percent lower odds of repeated hospital stays and 18 percent lower odds of emergency room visits.
Continuous glucose monitors, often called CGMs, are small devices worn on the body that constantly measure blood sugar. They send readings to a phone or receiver, letting patients and their doctors see patterns and adjust treatment in real time. For years, many people assumed you needed to see a specialist like an endocrinologist — a doctor who focuses on hormones and diabetes — to get one. But this study suggests that primary care doctors, the physicians people see for checkups and common problems, can prescribe them just as effectively.
"As an endocrinologist, I have seen firsthand the positive impacts of CGMs, and with people visiting their primary care doctors much more often, we have an incredible opportunity to empower primary care teams and our patients in this setting," Dr. Milosavljevic said.
The findings, published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open in July 2026, come from a large safety-net health system, meaning the patients served were often people without private insurance. That detail matters: it suggests the approach could work well for communities that have historically had less access to specialists.
Diabetes affects more than 37 million Americans. Managing it well requires regular attention, and blood sugar that stays too high can lead to serious problems like vision loss, kidney disease, and heart issues. Making it easier to get helpful tools like CGMs — right at the doctor's office people already visit — could be a simple way to improve health for a lot of people.