Westmed Medical Group has joined a national consortium of health care organizations looking for better ways to fight Type 2 diabetes.
The campaign will allow Westmed to compare results and identify and adopt the best practices from across the country.
“I suspect we already provide high performance,” said Dr. Caroline DeFilippo, Westmed”™s associate director of internal medicine. “This will allow us to ascertain where we stand and make our services even better.”
More than nine percent of the population, 29.1 million people, has diabetes. Left untreated, the disease puts them at higher risk of serious health complications, like heart disease, stroke, blindness and kidney failure. Type 2 diabetes is known as adult-onset diabetes but also is seen in teenagers. It accounts for 90 to 95 percent of all diabetes in adults.
Westmed regularly treats 7,000 diabetes patients a year at its nine locations in Westchester and Fairfield counties. More than two-thirds of its patients have achieved good control over the disease, the medical group says, and more than 90 percent have been seen for lab tests in the past year.
The national campaign has set a goal of improving health care for one million patients by 2019. The participating medical groups have agreed to use at least one evidence-based process that empowers patients, improves delivery of health care and leverages information technology.
Westmed already practices many of the ideas advocated by the campaign organizer. For instance, doctors have begun discussing the importance of cholesterol medication with their patients because of greater recognition in medical literature of the connection between diabetes and heart disease.
Westmed will focus on standardized care and measurements, using electronic medical records to prompt actions. Quarterly blood tests will be monitored closely to make sure patients are hitting their goals. Staff will track patients who are harder to get in for exams. The team will coordinate care with specialists, such as eye doctors.
Internal measurements and data from other members of the consortium will enable Westmed to tweak its programs, DeFilippo said.
“The patients may not notice a difference,” she said, “other than we”™re all behaving in a more uniform fashion.”
She said Westmed”™s size, many areas of medical practice and coordinated records system give it an advantage in implementing programs like the diabetes initiative.
“We can get creative,” she said, like “hiring a case manager and providing that free of charge to patients.”
More than 120 other health care organizations across the country have signed on to the campaign. It is organized by the AMGA Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the American Medical Group Association, a trade group headquartered in Alexandria, Va., whose members serve about one in every three Americans.
