Physicians can get a firsthand glimpse into how the YMCA Diabetes Prevention Program works, from the costs associated with type 2 diabetes to how the program can improve patients’ health outcomes, by taking a look at the YMCA’s online "storybook." AMA President Ardis Dee Hoven, MD, (pictured left) is featured in the multimedia resource.
Dr. Hoven highlights the staggering costs associated with type 2 diabetes—a disease that affects nearly 26 million people and costs the United States about $245 billion every year. Another 79 million people have prediabetes, and one out of three Americans is expected to have diabetes by 2050, according to an estimate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As part of its Improving Health Outcomes initiative, the AMA is focusing on systematic prevention of diabetes to save lives, improve health and reduce health care spending, partnering with the YMCA to create clinical-community linkages. As part of the AMA’s work, pilot practices underway in three states (Delaware, Minnesota and Indiana) will establish a process for physicians to increase screening for prediabetes and refer patients to the YMCA Diabetes Prevention Program in their communities.
“We need to establish and strengthen links between physicians, physician practices and communities,” Dr. Hoven said in another YMCA video. “Health care is local, and we need to develop those relationships. The YMCA has done an excellent job of making this happen.”
The storybook highlights more perspectives on improving outcomes around diabetes, including another video featuring Mart J. Amick, MD, who practices internal medicine in Delaware. Dr. Amick refers his patients with prediabetes to his local YMCA Diabetes Prevention Program as part of the AMA’s pilot.
“I immediately started seeing a decrease in patients’ body weight,” Dr. Amick said in the video. “There really are no side effects other than beneficial side effects … it reduces the [health care] cost of the patient and hopefully increases their health benefits.”
The YMCA Diabetes Prevention Program is based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health that showed, among those with prediabetes, a 58 percent reduction in the number of new cases of diabetes overall, and a 71 percent reduction in new cases for those over age 60. A pending Medicare bill would cover a similar program for eligible Medicare beneficiaries, saving an estimated $1.3 billion over 10 years while reducing the incidence of diabetes in seniors by more than a third.
More videos in the YMCA storybook highlight the perspectives of lifestyle coaches, who lead groups of program participants in weekly and monthly sessions to discuss healthy eating, physical activity, reducing stress, problem-solving and more.
Program participants set goals and report their data at the beginning of each session, which coaches use to evaluate each participant’s success. Coaches can then provide data to participants’ physicians to help physicians support their patients’ larger health goals. Part of the AMA’s work in the pilot programs will be to establish a mechanism for standardizing this “feedback loop.”
