A New Year for Diabetes Collaboration

Greetings from the YMCA and ABIPA!

Over the past year, our team has been working together to better align our efforts to address diabetes disparities and explore how to best facilitate the collaborative programming of diabetes management across Community Partners. Together, as a coalition, we hope to increase the awareness and accessibility to diabetes programs/interventions. We are excited to bring everyone back together again…we know it has been awhile!

An email and calendar invite was sent to those of you who have been involved in the Buncombe County CHIP Diabetes work previously or have been suggested as a valuable addition to this work moving forward. Please forward any additional contacts who should be included in this work or reach out if you would like your name added to our email communication. 

Please reach out to Nicole Vertel with additions to the email list.

We look forward to taking on the New Year with clear priorities and aligned strategies. 

SAVE THE DATE: 

When:  Tuesday, January 29, 2019. 12:00pm-2:00pmWhere: MAHEC Education Building, Penland Board Room

Our Meeting Agenda will include:

• Work on a CHIP Diabetes action plan including:
• Process work around aligning common data points to capture the impact of our collective work
• Revisit and build on referral strategies to better serve the community 
• Receive feedback on scorecard content

Enjoy your holidays and we will see you in the New Year!

Brief August Diabetes Update

Our Diabetes workgroup meeting scheduled for August 20th encountered the "last of the summer" challenge of having far less than a quorum!  So much of our substantive work was placed on hold until our September 17th meeting.  We did welcome our new MAHEC pharmacist, Andy Carrington to the workgroup. If you want to review our last workgroup meeting minutes you can find them in the toolbar on the right-hand side of the page.

In the meantime, our Diabetes Leadership Team are finalizing data sharing agreements and will be holding a work session on September 6th to dig in to work on establishing shared performance measures for their respective agencies as well as for the leadership of the larger community work happening under the umbrella of the Diabetes Workgroup.  This will serve as the basis of beginning to "rebuild" our diabetes scorecard.

Reconvening the Diabetes Workgroup

Our Diabetes Workgroup reconvened  on Monday, July 23rd to revisit our successes over the past several years and begin considering where and how we want to move forward with CHIP 2.0. 

There are a couple of major changes in this work since the Diabetes Workgroup first convened in 2016.  First, our result is much more intentionally focused on reducing the Black White diabetes disparity.  Second, we will be shaping what our collective community efforts will look like in regard to both structure and strategies well beyond the CHIP cycle.  It has been an ongoing challenge to "reset" health priorities and approaches every 3-4 years in our community and the intent is to create a more intentionally community led process that is not contingent on the CHA or CHIP leadership.  The YMCA and ABIPA will be convening and leading this work moving forward under the leadership of Heather Caldwell and Je'Wana Grier-McEachin. While we still need to decide exactly what this looks like, an example would be the creation of a Buncombe County Diabetes Coalition with it's own steering committee and officers. 

A few highlights of the reconvening were a clear priority to 1) focus on "boots on the ground" activities in low-income communities and communities of color; 2) increase"buy-in" / patient engagement in participating in supportive/educational programs, and 3) a refresh look at quality performance shared data that helps us tell the story of this work. You can view a copy of the meeting process work here.

The Workgroup will meet again on Monday, August 20th from 2-4 in the Cherokee Room at MAHEC and will continue meeting monthly on the 3rd Monday of each month.

Continuing to Spread the Word among Providers and Community Members: 211 can help people who have or are at-risk for Diabetes find appropriate, affordable, high-quality, long-term education and support!

The Diabetes Workgroup is requesting "all hands on deck" to be distributing this information widely across Buncombe County. We are working toward a time when residents all over the county ask their physicians, Where can I find a program that helps me change my eating habits? I want to be able to control my diabetes without insulin--is there a program that will help me? A neighbor of mine went to a program where she learned to read food labels and make simple changes for her health, and I want to do the same thing." 

And we are working toward a time when medical providers say to a patient newly-diagnosed with pre-diabetes, If you start one of the diabetes prevention programs in our community, you may be able to avoid this disease and the complications (and expense) it comes with... Call 211 and they can help you find a program that can keep you out of my office!"

Please help us share this information widely! Our community has a WEALTH of resources to help people prevent and manage diabetes and other chronic diseases... Download these resources and use them to let people know how easy it is to get connected to these programs.

Half-page Diabetes-211 flyer (without program details) 

Full-page Diabetes-211 flyer for CLIENTS (with program details)

Full-page Diabetes 211 flyer for PROVIDERS (with program details)

Getting the word out to health care providers and community members: Call 211 to find the right diabetes prevention or diabetes management program for you!

We have completed the process of reviewing program descriptions in 211 and working with 211 call specialists to make sure they are attuned to comments callers might make that would indicate a need for diabetes support. Now all collaborative members are actively looking for ways to get this information out into the community! Download and share the flyers below to spread the word!

211 Diabetes CLIENT/COMMUNITY Handout

211 Diabetes PROVIDER Handout

Partnering with 211 to create a "single entry point" for community-based diabetes prevention and management programs

One of the most consistent things we hear medical providers say when we talk to them about the SEVEN+ evidence-based, community-based diabetes prevention/management programs in Buncombe County is, "Wow, that's GREAT, but I don't have the time in a patient visit to walk a them through seven programs to find the best fit. Now if there were one phone number we could call..."

One phone number. We already HAVE one phone number. Why reinvent the wheel? Asheville is home to one of the two 211 call centers in NC, so our CHIP Diabetes Workgroup invited Marla Browne, 211 Director, to our March meeting to educate us about all the amazing work they do connecting WNC residents to a huge array of resources, from housing to childcare to medication assistance and legal help. All of the diabetes programs were already in the 211 database, but our group has been working to update the program profiles to highlight the differences between the programs and focus on what is unique to each, so a 211 Referral Specialist will have the information they need to help a caller (patient or provider) identify the best program fit.At the end of May we will meet with Referral Specialists to give them an overview of the programs, answer their questions about referring to each, and also ask them questions about cross-referring, etc. And voila! One phone number where a provider can connect patients to find the diabetes program that fits their needs.

The next step is actually promoting this to both medical providers and community members--stay tuned!

Finalizing Work Plan and Beginning Outreach

January and February brought some new faces to the Diabetes Workgroup and some new energy to tackle the challenge for so many health programs--the gap between the NEED for high-quality programs (in this case, programs to help the tens of thousands of people in our community prevent the onset of diabetes or to better manage their diabetes through simple lifestyle changes) and the DEMAND for such programs. Here is a great article from Stanford Social Innovation about this very topic. We need to figure out how to design these programs and and package them and communicate about them in such a way that community members who need them most begin to seek them out tell their neighbors and friends about them and ask their doctors for the details! Part of this begins by working WITH the community members we want to enroll from the beginning, learning from them and inviting them to shape the messages and programs that will, indeed, be appealing and meet the needs they express and not the ones we imagine they have.

We walked through and discussed/added to our work plan, which we will revisit at each meeting and tweak as necessary. We are still looking for creative ways to engage with clinicians to let them know of all the community-based programs and resources that exist in Buncombe County and give them the tools to refer their clients directly, and progress has been made in that area with specific providers. Our next meeting, on March 20, will include a presentation from our local 211 director, Marla Browne, about how we might partner more closely with 211 to make that a "single entry point" for all the diabetes resources in the community.

For more information about this workgroup, its goals, action items, etc., please click "Workgroup Overview" on the right sidebar. You can also click here to see the Community Scorecard--local diabetes data, active partners, current initiatives and community strategies.