Dr Robert A. Gabbay Highlights the Development of Joslin Diabetes Center's Clinical Guidelines

The Joslin Diabetes Center published its new Clinical Guidelines in the June issue of Evidence-Based Diabetes Management™, a publication of The American Journal of Managed Care^® (AJMC^®). Here, Robert A. Gabbay, MD, PhD, FACP, senior vice president and chief medical officer of Joslin, explains the development of the guidelines and the audience Joslin hopes to reach by publishing in journal.

Transcript

What went into the development of the Joslin Clinical Guidelines? Why is publishing them with The American Journal of Managed Care^® an important milestone?

Joslin has been creating guidelines for a number of years, and it even dates back to Elliot Joslin, himself, who wrote the definitive textbook on diabetes. And over the years that has morphed in a lot of different ways, and it has sort of been condensed, in a sense, into these guidelines. And the guidelines involve a group of specialists across Joslin, based on the different topic areas that we are creating guidelines around; it’s an exhaustive review of the literature; a series of spirited discussions to develop consensus on what we think is really the best evidence to recommend not only internally to our own providers at Joslin but through our affiliates and partners, literally, around the world.

As I’ve said, the guidelines have been reviewed periodically and developed for a number of years. Dr Om Ganda has led that effort for a number of years, and he is a highly experienced diabetes expert that has been at Joslin for quite a while working on this. And really the milestone now is we’ve distributed this to some degree, but we’ve never had the opportunity to really publish this and, so, it’s very exciting for us to be publishing this with The American Journal of Managed Care®. In part, because of their audience. We want to not only influence providers, which certainly has been where we’ve always sort of taken this, but also to be able to have payers and employers understand what the evolving evidence is around diabetes, and it is a rapidly moving area, where there is a lot of change, and a lot of exciting new things. We’ve incorporated all of those into the guidelines, so we’re very excited to share this through AJMC^®.