Check in with your medical, pharmacy, disease management and/or wellness vendors as you plan your strategy. There are ways they can support your efforts, including no cost patient education materials, online information and tools and communication resources. Work with the account manager from each vendor to identify available resources, programs and services related to diabetes and prediabetes. Make sure you look into support offered at no cost. You can even consider buy-up options; just make sure they provide value for the investment, such as a report on patient improvements like reductions in A1C or glucose.
These are some of the vendor, provider and community partners that can support your diabetes management efforts:
- Health plans – medical claims data and disease/lifestyle management programs
- Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBM) – medication adherence programs, strategies and tools
- Wellness program vendors
- Wellness clinical/biometric screening vendors
- Disease management vendors – may be internal to your health plan or a standalone vendor
- Diabetes management vendors – may be internal to your health plan, PBM or a standalone vendor
- Hospital and local medical groups – may offer clinical screening programs and/or educational programs
- Community groups – YMCAs, local health departments, fitness centers, etc.
To dig deeper into what role your vendors, providers and partners can play in your diabetes management strategy, ask these questions:
- Can they help you gather data about the prevalence of diabetes in your covered population (both the number already diagnosed and using services and those at high risk (prediabetes)?
- What outreach, support and education is offered for those diagnosed with diabetes? How is this delivered?
- What is the criteria for a person to get into a program? Does it capture those with prediabetes?
- How actively and frequently are the programs being offered to your covered population?
- Do they offer services to help employees improve self-management of diabetes?
- Does the health plan support physicians in providing the most effective treatments?
- Does the PBM do soft handoffs to pharmacist coaches for monitoring and patient education?
- Do they use performance guarantees/outcomes measures to track program value?
- Do they offer any innovative approaches to diabetes management, e.g. technology-based tools and resources?