Grace Medical Home has been chosen by the Americares Foundation, Inc. as one of only nine clinic recipients of their Roadmap Addressing Disparities in Health Outcomes quality improvement grant.
“Grace Medical Home continually strives to improve our clinical operations with a proven track record of success,” said Stephanie Garris, Grace’s CEO. “This $30,000 grant will be a driving force to undertake a new quality improvement initiative focusing on Diabetes, particularly poor control of Hemoglobin A1C. While we review this outcome annually, we have never stratified the data to identify racial or ethnic disparities, until now. The data shows that our African American patients face a disparity in controlling or preventing diabetes. This grant will provide the resources and incentives to undertake an initiative to address this disparity.”
Specifically, the data shows that diabetic African Americans have a greater likelihood of having poor diabetes control (an A1C greater than 9%), with 29% of African Americans in this category, compared with 21% poor control of our Hispanic patients and 23% of our white patients. Our clinicians prefer our diabetic patients to be in the 7.0 to 8.9 range, so that is the goal for improvement as we work to eliminate this disparity. Additionally, African-American patients have pre-diabetes at disparately high rates. In a large sample of our adult patients who are not diagnosed with diabetes, 35% had A1c results in the pre-diabetic range. Unfortunately, a higher percentage of African American patients in this sample with 44% in the pre-diabetic range.
Targeted intervention with our diabetic and prediabetic African American patients will include a multidisciplinary team, led by our staff nutritionist, Ann Marie Cools, who has extensive knowledge in providing nutrition education in culturally-sensitive ways, Dr. Sherry Brooks, Medical Director, Dr. John Sanderson, Assistant Medical Director, Stephanie Garris, Chief Executive Officer, Nirvana Muniz, Director of Behavioral Health, and Sara Sullivan, Data and Evaluations consultant.
