Wiener klinische Wochenschrift
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Wien. Klin. Wochenschr. · Jul 2011
Randomized Controlled Trial Multicenter StudyQuality of diabetes care in Austrian diabetic patients willing to participate in a DMP - at baseline.
Diabetes mellitus type 2 plays an important role in population health worldwide, and diabetes care has been shown to be insufficient. Disease management programmes (DMPs) have been designed to overcome these deficiencies, but data on their effectiveness are inconclusive. One reason for the inconsistent extent of effects may be selection bias. Voluntary programmes might recruit preferably highly motivated patients who are already quite successful in managing diabetes. Other programmes enrol primarily patients with poor metabolic control which may lead to the demonstration of fairly large effects due to regression to the mean. We therefore investigated the baseline characteristics of patients willing to enrol in the Austrian DMP for diabetes mellitus type 2 ("Therapie aktiv"), and their quality of care. ⋯ Our results indicate that the majority of the patients receive treatment in adherence to current guidelines. Nevertheless there are deficits in care and hence room for improvement by implementation of the DMP.