Best Practices Workgroup

Taking on Diabetes relies on the expertise available in health plans. To gather this expertise, the Initiative has developed workgroups in four areas: collecting and disseminating best practices, building community partnerships, developing work site educational materials, and evaluating the success of the initiative. Each workgroup is composed of representatives from health plans, the American Diabetes Association (ADA), and initiative sponsors. Workgroups are responsible for reviewing Taking on Diabetes materials and providing input to the initiative’s advisory committee on the direction of the initiative.

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.

Six Month Goals – Timeline

May/June 1999: Initial Workgroup conference call.

July 199: Review best practices abstracts for content quality and to establish effective search criteria for the searchable AAHP database of health plan programs and systems for the management, treatment, and education of people with diabetes.

Recommend an outreach approach to promote use of the database.

August 5, 1999: Workgroup meeting to be held in conjunction with the annual diabetes conference in Washington, DC.

October 1999: Finalize a data collection mechanism utilizing the criteria determined by the Measurement and Evaluation Workgroup for the evaluation of a "best practice" in diabetes health services delivery.

The data will be used to supplement the searchable database mentioned above.