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.