PHILADELPHIA — The American College of Physicians' 3-year diabetes initiative is off and running, Dr. Vincenza Snow said at a press briefing during the college's annual meeting.
The program, announced last year, is funded by a $9.27 million unrestricted educational grant from Denmark-based insulin manufacturer Novo Nordisk. The initiative aims to “increase awareness of the gap between current practice and acceptable standards of diabetes care, provide educational interventions to improve diabetes care, increase physician awareness of what constitutes high-quality, evidence-based care, and recognize medical practices that improve their diabetes care,” according to an ACP statement.
To help meet those educational goals, the ACP meeting included 16 educational sessions on diabetes during 23 separate time slots (some were offered twice), compared with 8 topics in 16 sessions offered last year, said Dr. Snow, director of clinical programs and quality of care at ACP, and clinical director of the diabetes initiative.
Another element of the initiative, the new patient guide called “Living with Diabetes,” was developed under the guidance of experts in both diabetes and health literacy and a psychologist, based on input from patients, physicians, nurse-educators, pharmacists, and other members of the diabetes “team.” Written in English and Spanish, the guide is “conversational and warm. It leaves patients feeling confident and encouraged,” said Terry Davis, Ph.D., the psychologist who worked on the guide.
The guide organizes the information based on what's most important to patients. For example, the chapter on food is the longest and is placed at the front, explained Dr. Davis, professor of medicine and pediatrics at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, Shreveport.
Another aspect of the initiative, “Closing the Gap,” held its first training session at this year's meeting. Nineteen practices from across the country each sent two staff members to participate in intensive quality-improvement training, which they will take back to their practices and use to train their office staff.
Dr. Michael A. Weisz has made ACP's overall “Closing the Gap” program—aimed at training teams of health care providers to improve quality of care for patients with a variety of chronic conditions—central to his tenure as ACP governor for Oklahoma. Five Oklahoma physician practices attended the “Closing the Gap” workshops this year.
“I've been in practice now 18 years, and this is a totally different way of taking care of patients. Rather than focusing on single [patient evaluations], it's a way of focusing on diseases and changing the system of how we do that,” said Dr. Weisz, vice chairman of internal medicine and residency program director of the University of Oklahoma in Tulsa.
Physicians shouldn't look at quality improvement as a seismic shift, Dr. Weisz advised. “The idea is to go back and make small changes and see what happens. If something doesn't work, you can make [another] quick change.”