Refilling LIlly Disposable Insulin Pens

As promised, here is the blog entry on how to refill the Lilly brand disposable insulin pens, for those of us that prefer the convenience of a pen vs. a traditional insulin vial and syringe, but may have issues with the increased cost of these units when compared to the much lower pricing of insulin in a vial.

Right up front, I want to acknowledge that I did not personally originate this concept. That credit goes to a diabetes forum user named Eric, who is a co-founder of the FUDiabetes forum. Eric originally worked up a method for refilling the Lilly produced Kwikpen®, which is a disposable insulin pen which contains either Humalog®, or Humilin® insulin. Eric demonstrated a method whereby one of the Lilly Kwikpen® devices could be refilled with insulin from a vial, and re-used numerous times, which results in a substantial cost savings over purchasing the Kwikpen® and then tossing them away, and buying new ones. This cost savings is particularly significant for folks that are in the dreaded "doughnut hole" on their prescription coverage, or for folks like me, whose insurance will not cover the more convenient Kwikpen®, or it's Novo Nordisk equivalent, the Novolog® FlexPen® for their daily insulin needs. 
Rather than detail those steps on how this process is accomplished, I will refer you to Eric's excellent write up on how this can be done. You can find that solution by visiting his original forum post at FUDiabetes by following this link: Refilling the Lilly Kwikpen disposable pen

 So what, you might ask, did I add to Eric's excellent idea? Basically that boils down to two things:

1) On the FUDiabetes forum where this procedure was discussed, there were numerous inquiries and speculations as to whether or not it would be possible to do the same refill process on other brands of disposable insulin pens. Since I did have access to several of these devices, from personal use, or from empty donor units from family members, I began to experiment with trying to do the same refill process with those pens, instead of a Lilly Kwikpen®. For my experiments, I used several Lantus® Solostar® disposable pens, a couple of Levemir® FlexTouch® pens, and a Novolog® Flexpen®.

And try as I might, even resorting to attempts to completely disassemble and reassemble them, I could not, in any way shape or form, get these disposable pens to permit anything other than the single use application they were engineered to deliver. There is something in the internal workings of each of these pens that absolutely will not reset the way that the Lilly Kwikpen® units will permit. At best case, the only thing that I was able to do with these disposable pens was to scavenge the emptied dispensing vials from the pens, on the off chance that they could be converted for use in a non-disposable insulin dispensing pen device. More on that in a future blog entry!


2) I did, however, manage to successfully refill a couple of the newly released, Lilly produced Basaglar® KwikPen® units. 

To be honest, I did this project as a proof of concept more than anything else, plus the fact that I had two Basaglar pens on hand that my PCP supplied, but inadvertently gave me pens that were 4 months past the expiration date on the pens. Since his office advised me to not use them, I first ejected some of the contents, and tried turning them backwards as described in Eric's post on refilling the Humalog® disposable pens. Once I determined that this could be done, I finished emptying them out, syringed out the residual, flushed a bit with the new insulin, and then refilled them both completely, one with Lantus®, the other with Novolog®, both of which I had on hand in vials, since my insurance company refuses to cover these medications in a disposable pen.

I do plan to use some colored tape on each, blue for the Novolog®, and red for the Lantus®, around the body, to make it glaringly obvious which is which.

And when my current supply of Lantus® in a vial is used up, my PCP has me switching over to the Basaglar® pens anyway. Hopefully by that time the Lilly Luxura® and Luxura HD® pens that I have ordered from Canada will have arrived, which I plan to use for my Novolog® going forward. I also plan to have these reusable pens set up for use with the OTC available insulins, Relion® Novolin R® and Relion® Novolin N®, in the case of an insulin supply shortfall, which can, and does, happen when my insurance company decides to implement one of their arbitrary "re-certification" paperwork pushing sessions with my PCP. When this happens, it can sometimes take weeks to restore their approval for coverage of my insulin. Now that I am no longer using a combination of oral meds and insulin, and am completely dependent upon insulin for treatment of my diabetes, not having the insulin I need can become quite deadly, to put it bluntly. It was the ability to use this alternate source for insulin that helped me in my decision to agree to the use of an insulin only therapy, since I know from experience that it's not a matter of IF my insurance company will do this, it's only a matter of WHEN.

At this point, with the success of these efforts, I’ll be more than happy if the one Novolog® refilled pen is all I need to get me by until I can start using the reusable pens with refillable cartridges instead.

But until that time, it’s nice to know that these pens, like the Humalog® disposables, can be refilled, if that is what you have to work with. Certainly a less costly option than the proposed alternative of purchasing a box of Humalog® disposable pens out of pocket, simply to gain some refillable pen options for those of us that have insurance companies that won’t cover the disposables.

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