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AACE President: Information infrastructure needed to improve glucose monitoring
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — In his push for passage of the National Diabetes Clinical Care Commission Act, the president of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists said the greatest need comes in creating an information infrastructure to monitor real-life outcomes in patients using glucose monitoring.
“One of the most important things that stands out to me after yesterday’s and today’s activities is the need we have for an informatics infrastructure that links all of these technologies to actual outcomes,” R. Mack Harrell, MD, FACP, FACE, ECNU, said in concluding the discussion portion of the Consensus Conference on Glucose Monitoring. “What we really want to know is that all this sophisticated glucose technology makes patients do better, and we don’t have the information infrastructure to determine that at the present time. It’s sad.”
R. Mack Harrell
Harrell pointed to a bill currently in Congress (House Resolution 1074/Senate Bill 539), titled the National Diabetes Clinical Care Commission Act, as a way to make this happen.
“We could do it, but we have to be of a mind to do it,” he said. “One of the things we emphasize is the need for registries that deal with cardiometabolic risk in the diabetic patient. If we can achieve this horizontal integration of information across the health care environment, all of the sudden we don’t have to do a lot of other things that cost money.”
This data would show how meters, even offshore meters, work in real-life patients and would show if glucose monitoring was improving outcomes.
“The long-term goal is to integrate our information structure so we can actually make intelligent decisions based on what happens to patients,” Harrell said.
On Tuesday, the Consensus Conference will culminate with a congressional hearing in which the experts will present their arguments toward this bill.
For more information: See the Endocrine Today Twitter feed for live updates of the congressional hearing: www.Twitter.com/EndocrineToday.