Lack of clear metrics
A significant defect in the infrastructure of many glucose management programs is the lack of clear metrics for outcomes, Dr. Maynard said. Nearly one-third of hospitals in the United States have no standardized metric to track the quality of their inpatient glycemic management, a sobering statistic considering that the first step in any QI initiative is to define and measure the problem at hand.
“I believe the main reason that glycemic control has been left off hospitals’ radar screens is that we still have not adopted national, publicly reported quality measures for glycemic control, although those were proposed recently by a government interagency work group,” Dr. Maynard said. “Until that happens, we’ll continue to see uneven response.”
The first step for frontline hospitalists is to learn and understand the basics of glucose control, for example, basal bolus insulin administration, and to stop writing orders for sliding scale insulin as the sole means of controlling hyperglycemia.
“Develop and adopt standards of practice for insulin administration in your hospital,” Dr. Maynard said. “Be part of the solution, not the problem. Once you get into the weeds – patients on steroids or on total parenteral nutrition – it can get tricky. But it’s important to get the basics right and move beyond inertia on this topic.”
Shelly Lautenbaugh
The glycemic team at Nebraska Medicine includes, in addition to Dr. Drincic and Dr. Thompson, an endocrinology fellow, diabetes case managers, resource nurses, nurse leadership, pharmacists, inpatient care transitions coordinators, and representatives from pediatrics and critical care, all working to impact the overall quality of glycemic management in the hospital. Jon Knezevich, PharmD is diabetes stewardship pharmacy coordinator, and Shelly Lautenbaugh, RN, CDE, is diabetes lead care manager and diabetes coordinator for the Joint Commission certificate program. Diabetes stewardship also includes online and live training courses and a class in acute glucose management for the diabetes resource nurses, who bring the knowledge back to their units.
The glucose team’s job is to make sure patients are cared for safely, using appropriate policies and procedures, education, and training, Ms. Lautenbaugh said. “We have a mission as a hospital to transform people’s lives. We try to live our values, and everything follows from the focus on patient safety,” she added. “If our patients can receive extraordinary care and leave better informed about their condition than when they came in, and then we don’t see them again, we’ve achieved our ultimate goal.”
Hyperglycemia is most often not the primary reason why patients are hospitalized, Ms. Lautenbaugh said. “But we need to give them appropriate glucose management regardless. We’ve worked with bedside staff, nurse leadership, and teams to develop plans to raise our outcome scores. We have a lot of different outcomes we examine, and it’s always evolving.”
Dr. Jon Knezevich
Quality metrics are incorporated into the electronic medical record, but those reports are not timely enough for day-to-day management, Dr. Knezevich said. “So we created a diabetes dashboard, constantly updated in real time to identify patients who are out of glycemic control.” The measures tracked include a mean patient day glucose score, percentage of readings within recommended limits, mean time between measured low readings and next documented reading or resolution of hypoglycemia, readmission rates, and diabetes nutrition assessments.
For hospitals with diabetes certificates, the Joint Commission also requires that every patient with hyperglycemia receives a clinic visit 30 days after discharge to make sure they are receiving appropriate follow-up care. Other facets of the Nebraska glycemic initiative include utilizing the hospital’s voluntary “Meds to Beds” program, which brings prescribed medications to the patient’s room at discharge. “We offer a diabetes discharge kit for patients who are self-pay, with all of the insulin and medical supplies they will need to get to the 30-day follow-up visit,” Dr. Knezevich said. “We can dream up amazing treatment regimens, but if they can’t afford the medications, what have we accomplished?”
SHM’s external benchmarks have provided an objective format for comparing and improving outcomes, Ms. Lautenbaugh said. “We like to see where we are and use the data to make significant improvements, but we’re also focused on internal assessments. If we make changes for a given metric, how does it affect performance in other areas?” One important metric is percentage of glucose readings within target range hospitalwide. “Our overall goal is 75%. It was 72% in April 2018, and we’ve raised it to 74.4%. It’s a small gain but it shows steady progress. Little steps make small but steady improvement,” she said.
“One area where we were not pleased was the occurrence of hypoglycemia,” Ms. Lautenbaugh said. “We did a root cause analysis of every hypoglycemic event, including several reports for patients who didn’t have diabetes at all. We had to weed out some that weren’t pertinent to our quality questions, but for those that are, the diabetes case manager calls the provider to make sure they were aware of the incident. We were able to identify the outliers in noncritical care, which we’re now able to tackle using a systematic approach.”
