Joslin Physician Discusses Diabetes Management Program at Annual AMA Meeting
Program Employs the Web to Better Manage the Care and Cost of Diabetes
BOSTON — June 14, 2002 — Caring for the nation's burgeoning number of adults and children with diabetes requires a focused effort on the part of the nation's primary care doctors and other health professionals to help diabetic patients reduce the risk of long-term complications such as heart disease, blindness and limb amputations, according to James L. Rosenzweig, M.D., Director of Joslin Diabetes Center's Disease Management Program.
Dr. Rosenzweig spoke about Joslin's Disease Management Program on Monday, June 17, at the American Medical Association's Annual Meeting at the Hyatt Regency Chicago Hotel in Chicago.
"Joslin's Disease Management Program includes a Web-based, diabetes-specific patient information system that stratifies patients into risk categories, tracks outcomes and stimulates physicians to improve care," said Dr. Rosenzweig, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
Long before research studies in the 1990s proved Joslin Diabetes Center clinicians correct, Joslin clinicians were urging patients to keep their blood glucose as close to normal as possible and were providing patients with the programs and educational materials to achieve good control. Joslin's Disease Management Program was initially developed for use with a Massachusetts-based managed care organization. The program currently operates in four diverse practice sites in the Boston area that serve a total of about 1,000 diabetic patients. To date the program has:
- reduced average per patient costs by 20 percent;
- reduced overall yearly costs for diabetes patients in the program to half the national average;
- led to the development of Joslin's Risk Stratification System that enables health providers to identify patients at various level of risk for developing complications; and
- led to the development of programs to decrease the likelihood of complications for patients at each level of risk.
Diabetes, which affects at least an estimated 17 million Americans and is increasing at an epidemic rate, is a major cause of vascular complications, including kidney disease, stroke and other disorders. The American Diabetes Association estimates that the total annual economic cost of diabetes is over $98 billion. This figure includes $44 billion in direct medical and treatment costs and $54 billion for indirect costs due to disability and mortality. What's more, type 2 diabetes, once considered mostly a disease of middle-aged and older adults, is increasingly occurring in younger people, including young children believed primarily due to obesity and sedentary lifestyle.
"The new services combine Joslin's century-old tradition of excellence in diabetes treatment, research and education with modern Web-based technology and in-person education and educational publications to bring the latest in diabetes management to health professionals, medical institutions and to patients. Our Web-based disease management tool creates a patient information system that triggers health providers to track the patient's progress," Dr. Rosenzweig said. "Unlike many other tools that are based on billing data, this tool focuses on actual patient medical information, and stratifies patients on the basis of that medical data. Physicians are then cued by the system to focus on those interventions that can most benefit the patient."
