Insulin pump therapy training and management: an opportunity for community pharmacists.

Continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion (CSII), more commonly known as insulin pump therapy, was first established in the marketplace in the 1980s and is now one of 3 currently available modalities for the delivery of insulin in managing diabetes.1 Other modalities for insulin delivery include syringe-injected and pen-injected. In the United States in 2007, an estimated 569,000 patients, representing about 12% of patients taking insulin, used CSII for insulin administration; 75% used syringes and 22% used pens.2 CSII users currently represent about 3% of the 17.9 million patients diagnosed with diabetes in the United States.3