Letter from the Editor #586

During the recent AADE meetings there was a lot of attention placed on the idea of the Patient Centered Medical Home and how diabetes educators might take an active role in bridging the gap between the prescriber and the patient.  Check out Patient-Centered Medical Home Reshapes Role of Diabetes Educators.

To help you with these concepts we have been providing information on how to incorporate Shared Medical Appointments into your practice. Last week I had the opportunity to present both these ideas to a group of doctors in Coral Gables. I also learned about some of the obstacles that physicians face while trying to implement these concepts.

The group was mainly individual practitioners who owned practices and worked with only 2-4 employees. They felt it would be very hard to set aside 2 hours for group visits and they were not sure their patients would like to be in the same room with each other. We spoke at great length about how it would benefit them and the patients if they only implemented some of the concepts. When I brought up the idea of using a pharmacist, nurse or diabetes educator for part of the visit they thought that was doable, as long as there was a way to justify the cost of the ancillary help. We discussed the idea of using a registry to increase documentation of events and there seemed to be a general consensus that everyone could do that.

There are tons of new studies out about the value of changing food choices to improve your patients’ outcomes and they are contradicting to say the least. This is why diabetes care has to be done on an individual basis: one size doesn’t fit all. Check out this week’s Item #5, High Carb, Low Fat Diet Works for Some to see why food genomics will become as important as pharmacogenomics.

 

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Topics: dLife looks at how diabetes disproportionately affects African-American, Native American, and Latino populations in America. Plus, low-carb home cooking in the dLife kitchen, and a visit to the Essence Music Fesitval. Sundays on CNBC at 7 PM ET, 6 PM CT, and 4 PM PT. Catch up on dLife.com.

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Dave Joffe, Editor-in-chief