Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Scalable Decision Support for Diabetes Care

Diabetes is a significant medical problem in the United States and across the world. Despite significant progress in understanding how to better manage diabetes, there is oftentimes still uncertainty in the optimal management strategy for a specific patient. As a result, providers and patients must often use a trial-and-error approach to identify an effective treatment regimen. The project team has previously developed a Diabetes Dashboard that summarizes relevant patient information (e.g., medication history and recent hemoglobin A1c trend). This dashboard allows a clinician to select a target hemoglobin A1c level for the patient in 3 or 6 months, then compare and contrast different options for treatment, including weight loss and the use of different medication regimens. Included in this comparison are known benefits and side effects, as well as the likely chances of achieving the treatment target given the experience of past, similar patients. The Diabetes Dashboard is already available as an optional tab in the EHR system. The project team has also previously developed the Disease Manager App for evidence-based chronic disease management and health maintenance. The Disease Manger Application is fully integrated with the EHR, and it provides care guidance via individual chronic disease modules as well as a unified module that encompasses all relevant modules for chronic diseases and health maintenance. The initial modules that have been developed are for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and health maintenance. The objective of this research is to evaluate the Diabetes Dashboard integrated with the Disease Manager App. The Intervention consists of the diabetes module of the Disease Manager App, which incorporates content from the Diabetes Dashboard for pharmacotherapy prediction and provides a link to the Diabetes Dashboard.