Exploring the Needs of Health Professionals for a Type 2 Diabetes Remote Patient Monitoring Dashboard for Personalized Care: Focus Group Study

Background: Effective management of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) requires monitoring clinical parameters like blood glucose and medication, alongside lifestyle factors such as diet and physical activity. Decision support tools, including dashboards and shared decision-making tools, help with medication adjustments, glucose monitoring, and lifestyle. However, systems rarely integrate home-monitored lifestyle data with personalized guidance and rarely facilitate collaborative goal setting for behavior change. As a result, health care professionals (HCPs) are limited in their ability to support patients’ medical and lifestyle management. Blended care, combining in-person consultations with digital monitoring of patient data, can help bridge this gap by providing structured information and data-driven insights to support diabetes management. Objective: The study aims to identify HCPs’ requirements for a remote monitoring dashboard for people with diabetes that integrates clinical and home-monitored lifestyle data, supporting personalized, patient-centered care and collaborative goal setting in blended T2DM management. Methods: A qualitative study was conducted using 2 interactive focus group sessions with HCPs involved in the treatment of T2DM. Focus group participants shared experiences, identified practical needs, and collaboratively defined requirements for a dashboard to support personalized diabetes management. Transcripts were coded to identify recurring themes and ideas, which were then consolidated into distinct requirements. Requirements were labeled with an identification code (ID) and categorized in accordance with the FICS framework, distinguishing 4 types of design requirements: functions and events (F), interaction and usability (I), content and structure (C), and style and aesthetics (S). Prioritization of requirements was performed using the must/should/could/will not have method. Results: In total, 9 HCPs participated in 2 focus groups, each lasting approximately 1.5 hours. A total of 50 requirements for a T2DM dashboard were identified. Of these, 31 (62.0%) were functions and events (F), 9 (18.0%) related to interaction and usability (I), 7 (14.0%) concerned content and structure (C), and 3 (6.0%) pertained to style and aesthetics (S). The participants expressed the need for a dashboard that incorporates data-driven lifestyle (eg, physical activity and nutrition) with visual trend analysis and integration of psychosocial aspects. They also emphasized the importance of visualizing how nutrition, physical activity, and medication interact to influence glucose values. In addition, participants expressed the wish for a home screen that provides a quick overview, with the option to click through to more detailed views (eg, per day, week, or month). Conclusions: The findings demonstrate a demand among HCPs for an integrated dashboard that combines clinical, lifestyle data, and psychological data to support personalized, patient-centered care. By linking lifestyle behaviors with glucose outcomes, such a tool could support collaborative goal setting, strengthen blended care pathways, and promote data-driven diabetes management. The findings provide guidance for the design of digital health interventions tailored to the needs of HCPs.