Barbara Davis Center Events and Announcements

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Lori Sussel, PhD. Awarded the 2020 Brownlee Visiting Professor Lectureship

Dr. Lori Sussel, Director of Basic and Translational Research at the Barbara Davis Center received the Brownlee Visiting Professor Lectureship at the Joslin Diabetes Institute, Harvard Medical School in recognition of her achievements in islet biology research.  The visiting professor lectureship was established by family members and friends of the diabetes researcher Dr. Michael Brownlee and was awarded for the first time in 2007. Dr. Brownlee is Professor Emeritus at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. Throughout his career he has made notable contributions to understanding the biochemical basis of diabetic complications. His contributions to the field have been extensively recognized, including the 2004 Banting Medal, the highest scientific award of the American Diabetes Association.

Barbara Davis Center Pediatrics team wins national quality improvement award

In November the Barbara Davis Center Quality Improvement team was presented with an award for the Outstanding Pediatrics Team at the T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Collaborative’s annual meeting in Houston, Texas for their work in improving delivery of care to pediatric patients with type 1 diabetes.

Formed in 2010 through a grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust, T1D Exchange is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing therapies and improving care for individuals with type 1 diabetes. In 2014 T1D Exchange embarked on a mission to improve the quality of healthcare delivery for individuals with type 1 diabetes through the establishment of T1D Exchange Quality Improvement Collaborative (T1DX-QI). A multicenter initiative, T1DX-QI aims to accelerate quality improvement (QI) through shared learning and continuous review of best practices and is the first learning collaborative in the U.S. dedicated to the care of people with type 1 diabetes. Quality improvement is the framework used to improve healthcare delivery, involving continuous, systematic efforts to reduce variation and improve outcomes.

The Barbara Davis Center joined the Collaborative in 2016, spearheading efforts to develop a common data standard for clinical information. Although this may sound like a very dry topic, seamless, noncompetitive data sharing is crucial for diabetes clinics across the nation to understand variation and communicate with each other about interventions and improvements. This sharing of ideas allows diabetes specialists to identify best practices and adopt improvements quickly.

The BDC’s strong data infrastructure is the key to allow us to co-lead this work. In addition to a robust clinical database led by Bing Wang, we are thankful for a generous two year pilot grant (2017-2019) from the Tied to a Cure golf tournament that allowed us to hire a full time electronic medical record programmer, Anne Rottler. In an age where medicine has gone digital, the ability to track trends and drive workflows at the click of a button results in our clinics being able to stay up to date with the most current treatments and to maximize the value you get out of your relationship with our clinic.

Some examples of the recent improvements that you may have encountered are care reminders for monitoring of diabetes related conditions such as high cholesterol, thyroid disease, and eye disease; the new appointment reminder system that automatically provides the parking code when you confirm the appointment; influenza vaccinations; and healthcare provider orders (school plans) and a sick day action plan with insulin dosing recommendations based on your child’s current weight and insulin doses, automatically delivered to the MyChart patient portal at every clinic visit. For those of you who use MyChart, I would remind you that it is a convenient tool for scheduling appointments, requesting refills, and messaging your healthcare team for nonurgent medical advice, all of which has been built out over the last several years.

This spring we also added a Patient Navigator, Katie Thivener, to the QI team. Katie uses data tools to identify pediatric patients who need a little extra help getting back into clinic and to facilitate the visit by identifying patient needs and coordinating their care. Delivering good healthcare has become increasingly complex, and at times, impersonal. Katie exemplifies our mission by using computing power to identify needs, allowing us to add that personal touch back into our work.

As our team grows, every Pediatric Clinic employee has become a QI stakeholder, and continuous improvement is a part of our culture. I am tremendously thankful for Sarah Thomas, our QI Program Manager, who somehow keeps all this work organized and moving forward.

As we look towards 2020 and beyond, we are planning to steal shamelessly some of the best ideas from leading diabetes centers around the country. Clinic visits will be more efficient, we will proactively identify patients at the highest risk for hospitalization, and we will tailor office visits to deliver higher value healthcare. Likewise, innovations at the Barbara Davis Center will be shared quickly and widely, with the goal of improving diabetes care across the nation. I am proud to work with such a fantastic team, pursuing the Center’s mission to deliver state-of-the-art care to children and adults with type 1 diabetes.

-Dr. Todd Alonso, MD

2019-2020 Speaker Series Schedules

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