Summary Diabetes is currently the world's fastest growing chronic disease and it is caused by deficient production of insulin by the endocrine pancreas or by abnormal insulin action in peripheral tissues. This results in persistent hyperglycaemia that over time may produce chronic diabetic complications. Determination of glycated haemoglobin level is currently the gold standard method to evaluate and control sustained hyperglycaemia in diabetic people. This measurement is currently made by high‐performance liquid chromatography, which is a complex chemical process that requires the extraction of blood from the antecubital vein. To reduce the complexity of that measurement, we propose a fully‐optical technique that is based in the fact that there are changes in the optical properties of erythrocytes due to the presence of glucose‐derived adducts in the haemoglobin molecule. To evaluate these changes, we propose to perform quantitative phase maps of erythrocytes by using telecentric digital holographic microscopy. Our experiments show that telecentric digital holographic microscopy allows detecting, almost in real time and from a single drop of blood, significant differences between erythrocytes of diabetic patients and healthy patients. Besides, our phase measurements are well correlated with the values of glycated haemoglobin and the blood glucose values.