The article reports the results of the first two years of an initiative to increase diabetes awareness among the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's (UPMC) 220 primary care physician practices, called UPMC Community Medicine, Inc. (CMI), and the implementation of a structured program to improve care and outcomes.

"This is a rather extraordinary accomplishment," said Francis X. Solano Jr., M.D., vice president, physician services division and chief medical officer of CMI. "Our physicians have provided interventions on more than 15,000 patients that have exceeded outcome measures reported in The New England Journal of Medicine last year. The dramatic accomplishments in such a large population of patients is remarkable and demonstrates the UPMC physician service division's commitment to leading edge quality care in diabetes mellitus."

"At the beginning of the initiative, we found that primary care physicians were not uniformly delivering diabetes care based on evidence-based guidelines. Since over 90 percent of patient visits were to primary care providers (PCPs), it became critical to determine if PCPs could adopt a process delivery system that included use of evidence-based guidelines," according to Linda Siminerio, Ph.D., executive director of the University of Pittsburgh Diabetes Institute and assistant professor of medicine and nursing at the University of Pittsburgh. "After two years we found that physicians made major strides in the improvement of health care practices and patient outcomes," Dr. Siminerio continued.

A review of 15,687 laboratory test results found that, at the end of the two-year period, the patients' average HBA1
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Contact: Frank Raczkiewicz
RaczkiewiczFA@upmc.edu
412-647-3555
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
6-Apr-2004