Taking on Diabetes Best Practices Workgroup Meeting, August 5, 1999

Mission: The Best Practices Workgroup studies, reviews, and sets criteria for reviewing diabetes interventions focusing on issues of the intervention’s success, significance, and replicability.

Duties: AAHP staff facilitates collection of these interventions, while the workgroup develops criteria for selecting best practices. The Workgroup oversees creation of a dissemination vehicle to share its finding with other health plans.

Membership: Membership in the Workgroup includes staff, sponsors and representatives from Taking on Diabetes health plans and ADA members.

Participants

Jill Arent, AAHP

Lynn Barker, First Choice Health Network

Beth Carvette, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Maine

Gail Grammatica, Tufts Health Plan

Cindy Halstenson, HealthPartners

Richard Kahn, ADA

David Larsen, IHC Health Plans

Discussion Issue: Searchable Database of Best Practices

AAHP has developed a searchable database of published best practice programs in the delivery of health services to people with diabetes. The database currently contains abstracts of published articles that were developed as a part of the compendium of best practices which was distributed at the August 1999 Taking on Diabetes: Care in the New Millennium conference. Additional abstracts and program descriptions will supplement this information as they are received, both through health plan submission of programs and through additional literature reviews. Eventually the database will include both published and unpublished programs.

All programs will be evaluated prior to inclusion in the database. The Workgroup discussed possible evaluative criteria for inclusion in the database. Evaluation forms utilized by AAHP’s existing best practice awards programs were discussed as sources of evaluative criteria. Workgroup members felt that these existing criteria would not provide sufficient information to assess the merits of a submitted program. They suggested that the evaluation of programs should take into consideration the return on investment that the program offered. Workgroup members also agreed that the best practices evaluative criteria should reinforce the measures used to evaluate the Taking on Diabetes initiative.

Workgroup members agreed to submit ideas for evaluative measures to AAHP. Upon receipt of these suggestions, AAHP will blend them with the overall initiative measures developed by the Measurement and Evaluation Workgroup to develop an evaluation form for all submissions to the database.

Next Steps

AAHP will continue working on the development of the database. A draft of the evaluation form will be available for Workgroup evaluation by the next conference call, which will occur in the Fall.