Course Goals

The goals of this EQIPP STEP Up Diabetes Care course is to help you create plans for improvement and to address gaps identified in key activities of diabetes care. These activities focus on improving ongoing medical care and patient self-management education and support. You will collect baseline and follow-up data as you work to improve care and processes through Plan, Do, Study, and Act (PDSA) cycles.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you will:
• Be familiar with the following:
• The guidelines for pediatric diabetes care that direct recommended actions for the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of diabetes in the pediatric population
• The policies that outline the responsibilities for care coordination between the pediatric medical home, the diabetes care team, and other providers
• Recognize how these key activities contribute to high-quality ongoing diabetes care and implement ideas for change to improve your delivery of care to patients in your practice:
• Confirm the diagnosis of diabetes.
• Form a multidisciplinary diabetes care team that considers the needs of the individual patient and develop processes for regular, ongoing communication among team members. 
• Identify and address psychosocial issues including concerns about adherence to treatment regimens.
• Define, prioritize, and review individualized diabetes goals.
• Provide diabetes education at every visit.
• Demonstrate ongoing completion of essential ADA-recommended diabetes assessments and measurements. Such assessments are generally completed by the pediatric endocrinologist and diabetes care team.
• Ensure appropriate influenza and pneumococcal immunizations are recommended/administered—generally the responsibility of the general pediatrician.
• Measure and improve diabetes care delivery and processes for the above key activities by doing the following:
  • Collect and analyze baseline data to establish a starting point for improvement.
    • Identify one or more performance gaps in one or more key activities of diabetes care.
    • Create an improvement plan for closing identified performance gap(s) by clarifying the improvement idea to be tested:
      • AIM: What are we trying to improve or accomplish?
      • MEASURES: How will we know that a change made is an improvement?
      • CHANGES: What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
    • Test your ideas quickly, on a small scale, so you can determine if the changes lead to improvement.
    • Collect and analyze follow-up data to measure the results of your test.
    • Determine how to sustain successful changes and how to systematically integrate them into the culture, processes, and workflow of your practice.
  • Create additional improvement plans and repeat PDSA cycles until you reach the maximum potential of providing optimal diabetes care in your practice.