Journal of general internal medicine
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Reliable systems that track the continuation, progression, or resolution of a patient's symptoms over time are essential for reliable diagnosis and ensuring that patients harboring more worrisome diagnoses are safely followed up. Given their first-contact role and increasing stresses on busy primary care clinicians and practices, new processes that make these tasks easier rather than creating more work for busy clinicians are especially needed. ⋯ Working with systems engineers, we are developing prototypes for such systems and are working on their implementation and evaluation. In this commentary, we describe approaches to this essential, but underappreciated, problem in primary care.
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Broadcast media is a method to communicate health information to the general public and has previously been used in prior public health emergencies. Despite the current ubiquity of social media, traditional news programming retains relatively large audiences, which increased during the COVID-19 pandemic's early days. Viewership of broadcast media networks' evening news skews toward older groups (age 65 and up) which were vulnerable to health complications related to the COVID-19 pandemic. ⋯ Although coverage included COVID-19 prevention content, more of the coverage was on other pandemic-related issues (e.g., economic impacts). Because public network news outlets have broad reach and accessibility, they could be an effective partner for public health agencies disseminating prevention messaging for current and future disease outbreaks and threats to public health.
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Patients with type 2 diabetes frequently have both medical- and health-related social needs that must be addressed for optimal disease management. Growing evidence suggests that intersectoral partnerships between health systems and community-based organizations may effectively support improved health outcomes for patients with diabetes. ⋯ The views and experiences of patient and essential staff stakeholder groups reported here thematically according to CFIR domains may inform the development of other chronic disease interventions that address medical- and health-related social needs in additional settings.
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Rural populations are older, have higher diabetes prevalence, and have less improvement in diabetes-related mortality rates compared to urban counterparts. Rural communities have limited access to diabetes education and social support services. ⋯ The SMHCVH PHT model was associated with improved hemoglobin A1c among less well-controlled patients with diabetes.