Elena Toschi, MD
- Adult Diabetes, Young Adult Diabetes, Type 1 Diabetes
- Clinical Behavioral and Outcomes
Research Associate and Staff Physician
Director, Young Adult Program
Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Elena Toschi, MD works as a physician in the adult clinic mostly focusing on type 1 diabetes and the adoption of technology to improve diabetes management. She is the Director of the Joslin Diabetes Technology Program. Her research focuses on the use of technology in a clinical setting to improve diabetes outcomes.
Elena Toschi, MD, a native of Italy, completed medical school and clinical training at the University of Pisa in 1996. Dr. Toschi came to Joslin Diabetes Center in 2001 as a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Susan Bonner-Weir’s lab where she worked on a project funded by NIH and Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund focused on finding markers for newly formed beta-cells and looked at metabolic differences between neonatal and adult islets. The results were published in Diabetologia. The identification of those markers has aided in determining the process of differentiation from progenitor/stem cell to mature beta-cell.
In 2005, Dr. Toschi completed her residency in Internal Medicine at St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center and her Endocrine, Metabolism and Diabetes fellowship at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Joslin Diabetes Center. In 2014, Dr. Toschi joined Joslin as a full-time staff physician.
Her clinical work has focused on the use of technology in type 1 diabetes to improve outcomes. She has been involved in several multi-center trials on the use of technology for the management of diabetes including the REPLACE-BG and DIAMOND study among others. These studies have evaluated the benefit of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM) used by patients on multiple daily injections of insulin, and have led to changes in healthcare policy, including the recommendation of CGM use for all patients with type 1 and coverage of CGMs by Medicare.
She is currently working on the use of technology to improve diabetes management and reduce the risk of hypoglycemia for elderly people with type 1 and on the restoration of hypoglycemia awareness in people with type one diabetes and problematic hypoglycemia.
She is also Director of the Young Adult Program in Joslin's Adult Diabetes Section.
She has been involved in multi-center clinical trials evaluating the effectiveness of CGM in Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes on multiple daily injections (MDI), the safety of bolus insulin based on CGM data with or without self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG), and the development of a mobile app to help manage diabetes. She is an investigator on the only online registry for Type 1 diabetes in the US, as well as industry-sponsored trials examining the effectiveness of new insulin in continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion.
Medical School: Pisa University, Italy, 1996
Residency: Internal Medicine, St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center, Boston, MA 2010
Fellowship: Endocrinology and Diabetes, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center / Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston MA 2014
Board Certification: Internal Medicine, Endocrinology