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A Health Care Provider Intervention to Address Obesity in Patients with Diabetes

An education program offered health care providers information to assess patients’ daily calorie goal and prompted an increase in weight loss and dietician referrals.
Federal Practitioner. 2019 November;36(7)s:S16-S18
November 6, 2019|Federal Practitioner
Neeraja Boddu, MD;Sanaz Abedzadeh–Anakari, MD;Duvoor Chitharanjan, MD;Spyridoula Maraka, MD, MS
Author and Disclosure Information

At the time this article was written, Neeraja Boddu, Sanaz Abedzadeh- Anakari, Duvoor Chitharanjan, and Spyridoula Maraka were at Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Correspondence: Neeraja Boddu (drneeraja12@gmail.com)

Author disclosures
The authors report no actual or potential conflicts of interest with regard to this article.

Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Federal Practitioner, Frontline Medical Communications Inc., the U.S. Government, or any of its agencies.

Conclusion

At CAVHS a simple intervention was instituted to evaluate whether HCPs were discussing weight loss in patients with DM, providing them with information to assess patients’ daily calorie goal, and prompting them for intervention to achieve weight loss. The intervention led to better management of patients with DM and obesity and greater engagement in weight loss from patients.

This project was a team effort. The clinic nurse documented patient’s BMI on the check in slip. HCPs discussed the problem and specific intervention. The clinical dieticians provided focused education for patients. The clerks collected the patient responses to questionnaire. This project also improved communication within the Endocrine Clinic team. Documentation of HCPs pertaining to addressing obesity improved by 54%. Improved patient satisfaction and insight was evident on patient responses to the questionnaire.

We believe that HCP apathy is a major contributor to the problem of obesity. Small steps like these go a long way for further management of obesity. Most VA hospitals have MOVE programs that provide dietary advice and encourage behavioral changes. However, getting patients to commit to these programs is a challenge. Primary care and endocrine clinics are important services that may help with patient awareness.

This project helped us better recognize patients with obesity and provide them with initial counseling and dietary advice. We received help from clinical dieticians and gave patients the option to join MOVE in situations where initial advice did not yield results and for more consistent follow up.

We tried to improve the care for patients with DM who were overweight or obese at CAVHS by prompting HCPs to focus on obesity as a problem and perform interventions to address this problem. The activities carried out and the data collected were used for internal quality improvement and for encouraging further interventions in the care of these patients.

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