Diabetes management: Teamwork for the public good

The release of common measures for the management of adult diabetes is a milestone in cooperation by leading medical organizations, with far-reaching implications.

Editorial. June 11, 2001.

No controversy, no new health scare, no blockbuster pill. No wonder the public will never hear about "Coordinated Performance Measurement for the Management of Adult Diabetes" on the evening news.

But this document promises to improve the care many Americans receive. Its publication also marks the first significant step in a medical odyssey that may transform many treatment modalities.

The release, in April, of these common measures for the management of adult diabetes is the result of more than two years of combined effort by the American Medical Association, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations and the National Committee for Quality Assurance, with the assistance of a panel of diabetes experts. It lays the groundwork for evaluating a single-source approach to measuring performance of care provided to diabetes patients in multiple settings.

The three sponsors point to it as a model of the efficiency possible in today's health care systems. They note that improved efficiency is one of the six major goals of the recent Institute of Medicine report, "Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century."

The new diabetes management measures will make it possible for the collaborative partners to collect the data only once and use those data to fill the various health information needs of the entire health care system. The first result should be a sharp reduction in the cost of data collection activities. The second will be to assure that physicians, health care organizations and managed care plans receive consistent information about the important aspects of diabetes care. Over time, of course, the real beneficiaries of this project will be the nation's 15.7 million people with diabetes. [...]