Restaurant challenge offers healthful meal options and builds diabetes awareness.

Purpose: The Frederick Restaurant Challenge is an innovative project based on a collaborative effort among community organizations and partners designed to offer delicious healthful meal options at local restaurants during the month of November for American Diabetes Month. Local restaurants were challenged to participate and submitted recipes for healthful meals to the Frederick County Diabetes Coalition for review by registered dietitians. Diners voted on meals to determine the challenge winner(s), and were eligible to win prizes as well.

Measures of disease control in Medicare beneficiaries with diabetes mellitus.

Objective: To investigate measures of disease control for Medicare beneficiaries with diabetes and their outpatient care in the fee-for-service setting.

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Settings: Office practices in Alabama, Iowa, and Maryland of 293 primary care physicians (PCPs) who volunteered to participate in the Ambulatory Care Quality Improvement Project.

Diabetes care for Medicare beneficiaries. Attitudes and behaviors of primary care physicians.

Objective: To obtain information related to primary care physician (PCP) attitudes, knowledge, and practice patterns, as well as perceptions about barriers to care and the use of materials to assist in the delivery of diabetes care for elderly patients in the office setting.

Research Design And Methods: A survey was mailed to a random sample (n = 900) of PCPs (internal medicine, family practice, and general practice physicians and endocrinologists) from the states of Alabama, Iowa, and Maryland who met selection criteria and provided diabetes care to > or = 25 Medicare beneficiaries during calendar year 1993.

Results: Respondents provided self-reported information regarding diabetes care for elderly patients.

Quality improvement activity directed at the national level: examples from the Health Care Financing Administration.

Quality improvement projects coordinated by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) are currently underway to improve the care provided to Medicare beneficiaries. We describe five national quality improvement projects, the End Stage Renal Disease Core Indicators Project, the National Anemia Cooperative Project, the Ambulatory Care Quality Improvement Project, and the Cooperative Cardiovascular Project. We outline the types of intervention strategies employed and compare the approaches used for fee-for-service sites and for managed care plans.

Effects of restricting levothyroxine dosage strength availability.

We conducted a prospective, randomized, controlled trial to assess whether hospital formulary restrictions involving limiting dosage strengths of levothyroxine affect physicians' ability to manage patients effectively and provide pharmacy cost savings in a tertiary care federal government research hospital. Thirty-three endocrinologists were randomly assigned to prescribe levothyroxine from a restrictive (dosage strengths of 25, 50, 100, 125, and 150 micrograms) or a nonrestrictive (dosage strengths of 25, 50, 75, 100, 112, 125, 150, 175, 200, and 300 micrograms) formulary through a central computer system. Their 241 respective outpatients' laboratory results and drug compliance were outcome measures.

Knowledge about hypoglycemia in young women with type I diabetes and their supportive others.

Hypoglycemia is a common stressful occurrence for people with type I diabetes, is disruptive to daily activities, and is a source of embarrassment, fear, and anxiety. Adequate knowledge about hypoglycemia is needed to recognize, treat, and prevent this condition. Families and friends also need adequate knowledge about hypoglycemia to provide helpful support.

Automated therapeutic drug monitoring in an ambulatory care endocrine clinic.

Objective: To develop and implement an automated therapeutic drug monitoring system for accessing data from endocrine clinic patients who had been prescribed insulin, oral hypoglycemic agents (OHA), or levothyroxine.

Data Sources: We designed a computer system to retrieve clinical data from the Medical Information System (MIS), a centralized hospital computer system, and import this information directly into a Macintosh personal computer. Physician entry of prescriptions for insulin, OHA, or levothyroxine into MIS formed the basis for a computer program to retrieve daily diagnostic and prescription information, demographics, and laboratory analyses, including blood glucose and glycosylated hemoglobin for insulin and OHA orders and free and total thyroxine, total triiodothyronine, and thyroid stimulating hormone for levothyroxine orders.

Perceived and actual level of knowledge of diabetes mellitus among nurses.

The purpose of this study was to survey staff nurses on their perceived and actual level of knowledge of diabetes mellitus. A convenience sample of 184 professional staff nurses from both inpatient and outpatient settings of a large research-teaching hospital was surveyed. The Diabetes Self-Report Tool (Cronbach's alpha = .