Resources for Patients with Diabetes Mellitus.

In the United States, diabetes has reached epidemic proportions. Thanks to science and technology, we are undergoing a rapid expansion of treatment tools including new drugs, continuous glucose monitoring devices as well as insulin pumps among other gadgets, aimed to help patients with diabetes take control over this disease. Unfortunately, people affected with diabetes face multiple barriers and cannot take advantage of these. This article uncovers multiple educational and financial resources that are often underutilized and not very well known by those providers responsible of taking care of this vulnerable population.

Primary Care Diabetes Fellowship Programs: Developing National Standards.

The rapid and constant increase in the number of people living with diabetes has outstripped the capacity of specialists to fully address this chronic disease alone. Furthermore, although most people with diabetes are treated in the primary care setting, most primary care providers feel under-prepared and under-resourced to fully address the needs of their patients with diabetes. Addressing this care gap will require a multifaceted approach centering on primary care training in diabetes and its complications. One-year diabetology fellowship programs are well situated to provide this training. Previous research has shown that the higher the diabetes-specific volume of patients seeing a primary care physician was, the better the quality outcomes were across six quality indicators (eye examinations, LDL cholesterol testing, A1C testing, prescriptions for ACE inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers, prescriptions for statins, and emergency department visits for hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia). Primary care diabetes fellowships have existed for many years, but the number of fellowships and fellowship positions has recently grown dramatically. This article proposes a standardized curriculum for such programs and makes the case for increasing their number in the United States.