Targeting Diabetes Prevention Among Medicare Beneficiaries
Recent might suggest an increase of Type 2 diabetes among children and young adults, but the real low hanging fruit, according to diabetes and policy experts, may be among the Medicare population.
Those 65 and older tend to be a costly population for health care services, according to Michael Mawby, the government affairs officer for drugmaker Novo Nordisk. Intervention and prevention programs for pre-diabetics could be a more effective means of care, Mawby said during a policy panel on Tuesday.
鈥淭he irony of the Medicare benefit for diabetes screening is you can have that screening once a year if you鈥檙e in the Medicare program, but if you are identified as having pre-diabetes then you qualify for a screening every six months,鈥 Mawby said. 鈥淪o my joke is there鈥檚 nothing to do except measure it every six months and watch them get diabetes at which point then there鈥檚 things you can do.鈥
, a professor at Emory University鈥檚 Rollins School Of Public Health, said intervention programs should be introduced during these screenings. Thorpe, who also chairs 聽and spoke on the policy panel, said there are already cost-effective models of intervention and care coordination to help with diabetes prevention.
One program in particular that has gained momentum since 2002 is the . The DPP is a lifestyle intervention program that operates in 25 states, caters to pre-diabetics with a physician’s referral and has been shown to delay the onset of diabetes by 58 percent. Thorpe said that intervention models like these, that usually cost around $275 per person, should be scaled nationally and incorporated into the Medicare program as a covered benefit.
鈥淲e know that the diabetes prevention program is effective,鈥 Thorpe said. 鈥淭he challenge has always been translating the DPP protocol into a group setting so we can get the unit cost down, so we can save money with it.鈥
Novo Nordisk invested $250,000 in YMCA programs in Georgia, Kentucky and Arizona in the form of 鈥榮cholarships鈥 for Medicare-eligible pre-diabetics who can鈥檛 afford the cost of the program. Thorpe said that data from the DPP has shown the most improvement for older pre-diabetics.
Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said聽 the recent allocation of $10 million from the Affordable Care Act to the could be invested in prevention programs for the elderly and save Medicare money in the long run.
鈥淐onservative estimates show that offering the NDPP to overweight and pre-diabetic adults age 60-64 could actually save the Medicare program alone as much as $2.3 billion over 10 years and as much as $9.3 billion over a lifetime,鈥 Dashcle said on Tuesday.
