Joslin launches initiative for primary care physicians to improve diabetes care

Joslin Diabetes Center has launched a groundbreaking initiative for primary care physicians to improve diabetes care. Joslin, with technology from Forward Health Group, Inc., is providing qualifying primary care practices in the United States with the critical capability to extract usefulness out of existing clinical data at the individual patient level, and to combine this information with practice improvement support and education. The initiative is supported via independent continuing medical education (CME) grant funding provided by GlaxoSmithKline and Merck & Co.

"To move the needle toward real improvement in diabetes, we need to know where the gaps are in order to provide targeted education and resources to improve," said Richard Beaser, M.D., Medical Executive Director for Joslin Professional Education. "This initiative does exactly that."

Using clinical informatics tools provided by Forward Health Group, Joslin is providing enhanced electronic clinical data capture and outcomes data visualization capabilities to qualifying practitioners.  Each practitioner is then directed to a suite of Joslin education, tools and resources targeted to individual gaps to support improvement over time well beyond the scope of the performance improvement (PI) CME activity alone.

"This initiative truly has the potential to be transformational," said Michael Barbouche, Founder/CEO of Forward Health Group. "The world's leading provider of clinical care, research and education in diabetes can now provide total population data for the busy primary care doctor.  Participating physicians can view their entire panel of patients, identify gaps in execution and delivery of care, and rely on Joslin education resources to improve. It's a great opportunity for practices to improve where they most need it and meet important quality benchmarks and certain CME and potentially Maintenance of Certification (MOC) requirements without having to invest many hours in manually abstracting charts."