Study limitations
T2DM
DISEASE, STILL
The limitations of this study should be mentioned. First, it was a single‐centre study with a relatively short follow‐up. Secondly, cardiovascular benefits during the follow‐up period were not comprehensively assessed. Thirdly, the research population was mainly young and middle‐aged patients living with T2DM, and elderly patients were not well‐represented. Fourthly, information security should be enforced to maintain data integrity and promote the patient's use of the platform. The intervention should be tested in more than one site before it would be generalizable to the wider population. A multicentre study with a follow‐up of 48 months is currently being planned. Finally, there were some differences between the results of the PP and ITT analyses. The sample size of this study was not large enough, and seven patients were missing or dropouts before the first follow‐up (3 months after intervention), including two in the online group (one moved and one dropped out due to disease) and five in the conventional group (three were lost to follow‐up and two withdrew their consent). For these patients, no data could be collected besides those at baseline, so only the data of those 113 patients were enrolled in ITT analysis. Considering the small sample size, this difference in the number of patients may cause an important bias in the results, and the true effect of the online intervention cannot be reflected. Still, the two analyses reported similar outcomes for glucose control.