Pharmacist's role in addressing barriers to continuous glucose monitoring within underserved communities

Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) has transformed diabetes care by enabling real-time tracking of glucose levels, improving glycemic control, reducing hypoglycemia, and enhancing quality of life. Despite their clinical benefits, CGM adoption remains inequitable, with underserved populations facing barriers such as low digital and health literacy, financial hardship, limited provider engagement, and fragmented healthcare system infrastructure. Pharmacists, trusted and accessible providers embedded within communities, have emerged as key collaborators for CGM use through patient education, data interpretation, and treatment optimization. Evidence from community-based settings demonstrates that pharmacist-led CGM interventions are associated with significant reductions in HbA1c, improvements in time-in-range, and enhanced patient engagement, although studies focusing specifically on underserved populations remain limited. Persistent barriers at patient, provider, and system levels must be addressed to achieve equitable CGM system access, including challenges related to cost, digital access or literacy, language barriers, health care professional training and patient education. By advancing pharmacist-led CGM initiatives tailored to the social and cultural needs of underserved populations, there is an opportunity to reduce disparities in CGM utilization and improve diabetes outcomes. This commentary highlights current evidence, identifies gaps, and issues a call to action for expanding pharmacist-led CGM programs in high need populations as a critical step toward promoting health equity in diabetes management.