Comparative Effectiveness of Diabetes Shared Medical Appointment Models

Type II Diabetes is a prevalent chronic disease with poor outcomes, and requires daily self-care, including blood glucose monitoring, following a diabetes-friendly diet, engaging in regular physical activity, and medication adherence. Patients with diabetes benefit from comprehensive diabetes self-management education (DSME) and self-management support (SMS) in primary care. Shared medical appointments (SMAs) are one way to efficiently and effectively provide DSME and SMS. SMAs can have a variety of different features, but it is not known which features are most effective for which types of patients. Patients and other stakeholders engaged in planning this study proposed a model with "diabetes' veterans" (i.e., diabetes peer mentors) who co-facilitating group visits with a variety of diabetes care professionals, and then working one-on-one with patients to help apply what they learned. The group visit curriculum should include topics on physical activity, healthy eating, taking medication, acceptance and coping, and social support, and each cohort of patients should get to select topics most relevant to them. The practice stakeholders want to do more comprehensive group visit models, but need to know the extent to which SMA participation and patient-centered outcomes are improved compared to the more common standardized approaches they tend to use now. In this study, the investigators will compare the effectiveness of patient-driven diabetes SMAs to standardized diabetes SMAs. The curriculum to be used is Targeted Training for Illness Management (TTIM), a 6-session modular group intervention for chronic illness self-management, and has been tested in diabetes. The standardized group visit model will consist of diabetes SMAs with the full TTIM 6-session curriculum, led by a health educator. For the patient-driven SMAs, patients choose the topics and the order of sessions from the TTIM curriculum, which is delivered collaboratively by the multidisciplinary care team consisting of several professional providers (health educator, medical provider, and behavioral health provider) and a lay worker (diabetes peer mentor). The primary patient-centered outcome, selected by patient stakeholders, is diabetes distress. Secondary outcomes include autonomy support and diabetes self-management behaviors, clinical outcomes (hemoglobin A1c, blood pressure, and body mass index), patient reach and engagement, and practice-level value and sustainability. Patient, caregiver, practice, health plans, and research stakeholders will be engaged in all aspects of the research. Patients and other stakeholders will inform the process of implementation of patient-driven and standardized SMAs, help finalize the research protocol (including data collection and recruitment), and contribute to interpretation of findings and dissemination of findings, including messages that help other patients make decisions about whether or not to participate in SMAs.