LOS ANGELES — The California Academy of Family Physicians has launched a widespread initiative designed to help its members optimize the care of patients with diabetes.
Called “New Directions in Diabetes Care,” the 4-year program “will be bringing together lots of advances that have been learned in the field of disease management, such as registries, tracking chronic disease patients, [and] identifying [patient] populations,” Bo Greaves, M.D., said at the academy's annual meeting.
“The Institute for Healthcare Improvement has been working for several years on a breakthrough collaborative to analyze what the systems of care are in mom-and-pop family practice and other physician offices, and how can we make some quantum leap improvements in those systems of care,” added Dr. Greaves, a Rohnert Park, Calif.-based family physician who is the CAFP's president-elect.
“There's a lot of material out there and yet a lot of it has not yet been implemented. We hope this initiative will be a big step for our academy to help fuse that,” Dr. Greaves said.
The project's goal “is directed at inducing organizational changes in physicians' offices to better accommodate care management systems and streamline patient care to lead to improved efficiency and greater provider and patient satisfaction,” according to a fact sheet.
The CAFP is currently recruiting 15–20 practices from across the state to take part.
Starting this fall, physicians in the practices will participate in a series of online learning sessions, implement changes based on what they learn, and then report back to the other members of the collaborative.
Listservs and other online forums will enable physicians to share information and experiences.
“By 4 years [from now] we hope that we have spread a new approach to diabetes care based on population management, access, and high quality care, not just at a visit, but throughout the relationship with the patient,” Dr. Greaves said.
Partners in the project include the department of family and community medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and Lumetra, the Medicare Quality Improvement Organization for California.