The Online Bolus Calculator

Integrated Diabetes Services has put together a mealtime insulin-dosing calculator. This is a great tool to help patients learn how to “optimize” the amount of insulin taken for meals, which can be pretty tough. The idea is that you can download the calculator as a spreadsheet, insert your target blood glucose levels, sensitivity factors, carb-to-insulin ratio, and/or exercise factor, and have a customized spreadsheet. This is a great opportunity to work with your diabetes educator to establish or refine what these levels should be! They recommend printing off the chart, and we think this will be particularly helpful for newly-diagnosed patients. For patients with a bit more experience with carb-counting, we think the calculator at the top of the chart will be the most useful component – this is a very user-friendly insulin-on-board calculator with a simple “this is how much you should dose” box. We hope someone takes the time to write the code for the calculator into a small application for computer desktops, Blackberrys, iPhones, and other PDA devices, for people with diabetes living their lives on the go!