Nightscout for clinicians
Tip
Unless specified, links within the text are for advanced explanation of the underlying mechanisms but don’t necessarily add value for clinicians use of Nightscout.
What is Nightscout?
Nightscout is an open-source cloud application used to visualize, store and share in real-time:
data from continuous glucose monitoring sensors
manually or automatically logged treatments
basal rates from pumps (optional)
How can I access patient data?
Your patient should share a unique web URL with you, it will look like https://name.domain.ext.
Since the URL is open for viewing to anybody having internet access to it, patients or caregivers can decide to make the access secure and will share a tokened read-only access URL looking like https://name.domain.ext?token=clinic-48aed625abb0ec86.
You need to use the full URL provided to access your patient Nightscout site.
Any device connected to the internet can be used to visualize patient data.
Cannot access patient URL
Should you experience issues to access the Nightscout site, check with your IT team if the domain used by your patient is not blocked by a local internet safety rule. Many patients or caregivers who build their own Nightscout site rely on platforms as a service or free DNS providers that can get classified as unsafe by cybersecurity systems. Ask your IT and cybersecurity teams to perform all necessary verifications to allow access to your patient site: Nightscout itself is safe for infrastructures, it doesn’t contain any sort of cyberthread or malware.
Since Nightscout can be hosted in a large variety of platforms, you can expect the site domain to be (but not only) in the following list:
heroku.com, azurewebsites.net, railway.app, fly.dev, onrender.com, t1pal.com, ns10be.de, nightscout.pro, mooo.com, chickenkiller.com, crabdance.com, strangled.net, code.run …
Read only access
Writing data into Nightscout is protected with a password called API_SECRET that should not be shared with you by the patient.
What should I see when I open a Nightscout site?
What will display should be similar to this:
If you see this, it means your patient forgot to send you the link with a read-only token:
Next steps:
Follow the links below.
Setup the main view to add or view all available information.