Care Management For Patients With Type 2 Diabetes: The Roles Of Nurses, Pharmacists, And Social Workers.

Managing patients with type 2 diabetes takes time. Clinicians in primary care, where most diabetes visits take place, lack that time. Planned visits by diabetes care managers-nurses, pharmacists, social workers, and other team members-assist clinicians and are associated with improved glycemic control. Particularly effective is care management featuring nurses or pharmacists adjusting medications without prior physician approval. Care management programs need to pay close attention to inequities in diabetes care and outcomes. The widespread implementation of diabetes care management in primary care faces several barriers: lack of an adequate, diverse, trained care manager workforce; regulations limiting care managers' scope of practice; and financial models not supportive of care management. Wide-ranging policies are needed to address these barriers. In particular, payment reform is needed to stimulate the spread of diabetes care management: adding fee-for-service codes that adequately pay care managers for their work, adopting shared savings models that channel savings back to primary care, and increasing the percentage of health care spending dedicated to primary care. In this article we explore key questions around type 2 diabetes care management, review the published evidence, examine the barriers to its wider use, and describe policy solutions.

Diabetes peer coaching: do "better patients" make better coaches?

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to identify characteristics of peer coaches associated with improvement in diabetes control among low-income patients with type 2 diabetes. METHODS: Low-income patients with type 2 diabetes who spoke English or Spanish from 6 urban clinics in San Francisco, California, were invited to participate in the study. Twenty participants received training and provided peer coaching to 109 patients over a 6-month peer coaching intervention. Primary outcome was average change in patient glycosylated hemoglobin (A1C). Characteristics of peer coaches included age, gender, years with diabetes, A1C, body mass index (BMI), levels of diabetes-related distress, self-efficacy in diabetes self-management, and depression. RESULTS: Patient improvement in A1C was associated with having a coach with a lower sense of self-efficacy in diabetes management (P < .001), higher level of diabetes-related distress (P = .01), and lower depression score (P = .03). CONCLUSIONS: Coach characteristics are associated with patient success in improving A1C. "Better" levels of coach diabetes self-efficacy and distress were not helpful and, in fact, were associated with less improvement in patient A1C, suggesting that some coach uncertainty about his or her own diabetes might foster improved patient self-management. These coach characteristics should be considered when recruiting peer coaches.

Primary care: proposed solutions to the physician shortage without training more physicians.

The adult primary care "physician shortage" is more accurately portrayed as a gap between the adult population's demand for primary care services and the capacity of primary care, as currently delivered, to meet that demand. Given current trends, producing more adult primary care clinicians will not close the demand-capacity gap. However, primary care capacity can be greatly increased without many more clinicians: by empowering licensed personnel, including registered nurses and pharmacists, to provide more care; by creating standing orders for nonlicensed health personnel, such as medical assistants, to function as panel managers and health coaches to address many preventive and chronic care needs; by increasing the potential for more patient self-care; and by harnessing technology to add capacity.

Pharmacists belong in accountable care organizations and integrated care teams.

Effective health care workforce development requires the adoption of team-based care delivery models, in which participating professionals practice at the full extent of their training in pursuit of care quality and cost goals. The proliferation of such new models as medical homes, accountable care organizations, and community-based care teams is creating new opportunities for pharmacists to assume roles and responsibilities commensurate with their capabilities. Some challenges to including pharmacists in team-based care delivery models, including the lack of payment mechanisms that explicitly provide for pharmacist services, have yet to be fully addressed by policy makers and others. Nevertheless, evolving models and strategies reveal a variety of ways to draw on pharmacists' expertise in such critical areas as medication management for high-risk patients. As Affordable Care Act provisions are implemented, health care workforce projections need to consider the growing number of pharmacists expected to play an increasing role in delivering primary care services.

Care management of patients with complex health care needs.

Patients with complex health care needs account for a high percentage of annual medical expenditures. Care management is a set of activities intended to improve patient care and reduce the need for medical services by helping patients and caregivers more effectively manage health conditions. This synthesis reviews the evidence on care management and its ability to improve patient care and reduce costs. Key findings include: care management can improve quality of care, although it takes time; studies that followed patients longer were more likely to reveal improvements. Care management's impact on cost reduction is less consistent. Programs that support patient transitions from hospital-to-home were the most successful because they reduced hospital readmissions. Care management within primary care settings may also generate savings. Elements of effective programs include: good identification of patients who could benefit from care management; specially-trained RN/care managers with low patient loads, working with physicians and a multidisciplinary team; and in-person patient contact. Finally, the current fee-for-service systems present barriers to widespread use of care management.

Hospital-physician portals: the role of competition in driving clinical data exchange.

Recent policy efforts to encourage the use of health information technology are emphasizing development of communitywide health information exchanges to share clinical data across patient care settings. Interviews in twelve U.S. communities show that most large hospitals have or are developing physician portals to provide admitting physicians with remote access to patient records, but there is little data sharing among unaffiliated organizations. Competition among hospitals for physicians is a key factor driving adoption of these proprietary systems. In contrast, provider and health plan competition and adversarial relationships between providers and plans are viewed as major barriers to communitywide clinical data sharing.