Nurse-run, telephone-based outreach to improve lipids in people with diabetes.

Background: There is a need for randomized, prospective trials of case management interventions with resource utilization analyses.

Objectives: To determine whether algorithm-driven telephone care by nurses improves lipid control in patients with diabetes.

Design: Prospective, randomized, controlled trial.

The impact of tailored diabetes registry report cards on measures of disease control: a nested randomized trial.

Background: Most studies of diabetes self-management that show improved clinical outcome performance involve multiple, time-intensive educational sessions in a group format. Most provider performance feedback interventions do not improve intermediate outcomes, yet lack targeted, patient-level feedback.

Methods: 5,457 low-income adults with diabetes at eight federally-qualified community health centers participated in this nested randomized trial.

Changes in insurance status and access to care in an integrated safety net healthcare system.

This paper focuses on a cohort of uninsured patients that have accessed outpatient healthcare services in an urban safety net, evaluating the degree to which they switch insurance status and the impact this switching has on access to care. The results indicate that in an integrated safety net system, there is a high frequency of insurance status switching by the uninsured. Uninsured patients who switch to insured status were found to be more likely to visit specialty points of care and less likely to visit urgent points of care than the continuously uninsured.

Can America's urban safety net systems be a solution to unequal treatment?

Eliminating disparities in care for racial and ethnic minorities remains a challenge in achieving overall quality health care. One approach to resolving issues of inequity involves utilizing an urban safety-net system to address preventive and chronic care disparities. An analysis was undertaken at Denver Health (DH), an urban safety net which serves 150,000 patients annually, of which 78% are minorities and 50% uninsured.