CareOregon to launch diabetes outreach

CareOregon wants to promote healthier living for members living with diabetes. This fall, Quality Improvement and Health Education staff will work with providers and directly with members to boost the number of members who receive all recommended diabetes preventive screenings.

Outreach to providers

“We are here to support the work of our providers and to offer assistance by developing tools that can assist clinics in managing their patients’ care,” says Denise Johnson, CareOregon health education coordinator.  

“For this project, we ’ll sort our data by provider groups,” she says. “We’ll supply each clinic or provider office with a roster of members who may not have received all of the recommended screenings in the past 12–24 months, such as getting an annual eye exam. We suspect that this may be a useful tool for offices that do not have electronic medical records.”

Johnson says providers are encouraged to give feedback about the tool.

“We understand that our medical providers are very busy, so we want to be sure we are supplying a tool that is useful,” she says.  

Provider Groups are also invited to share the strategies and successes they’ve had to ensure patients receive quality preventive care.

“We ’d like to know what our large and small groups are doing, ” Johnson says. “We ’d like to know about their best practices and to share them with other clinics.”

Outreach to members

The member outreach likely will include more than one approach in addition to the key connection through their PCPs.

“We are exploring using a telephone reminder to encourage members to obtain health screenings, such as eye exams, ” Johnson says.

One of the goals of the project is to provide patient-centered health education to help those  members who may need a brief review of important self-management behaviors. A simple, clear brochure highlighting key elements of self management may be enough for some members. Others may appreciate a follow-up phone call from a CareOregon staff member or community partner.

The Quality Improvement Unit plans to partner with community resources to place follow-up calls to some diabetic members who may need additional guidance. The call would give the members a chance to ask questions and to get information about community resources to support their self-management efforts.  

HEDIS will provide measurement of success

CareOregon will use the Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS*) as one data source  to gauge the effectiveness of the outreach. CareOregon’s first HEDIS report, based on 2006 data, provided the basis for quality improvement initiatives, including the diabetes outreach.

“We decided to focus on diabetes care because it is a prevalent condition and it crosses population groups, ” Johnson says. ”We have identified some key areas in HEDIS in which we would like to see some improvement for our members.”

In one of these areas, HEDIS showed that in 2006 just under 46.5 percent of the CareOregon Advantage Medicare plan members with diabetes had the retinopathy exam. That compares to 66.5 percent for the overall Medicare population nationwide.

We ’d like your help

If any provider has good ideas to share, or knows of steps CareOregon can take to help improve preventive diabetes care, contact Denise Johnson by telephone, 503­416­3689, or e-mail, johnsond@careoregon.org; or contact Ann Blume, Quality Improvement manager, 503­ 416­ 1723, blumea@careoregon.org.

*The Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS®) is a registered trademark of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA). Since 1991, HEDIS results have provided standardized measurements of health plan performance.