Diabetes, as other chronic diseases, is a complex illness that requires a comprehensive approach to manage and treat; it requires ownership by the patient with long term support by a multidisciplinary healthcare team. It also requires continuous supervised monitoring and modification of management plans.

The Virtual Diabetes Center (“VDC”) is a Diabetes Electronic Medical Records (DEMR) system, consists of two integrated modules for healthcare professionals and patients. The healthcare professionals’  module is an Electronic Health Record system with specialized modules for Diabetes Visit Records based on diabetes care practical guidelines.

It facilitates the coordination among the integrated medical care team and patient self-management to provide better patient care, improve workflow and productivity of the health care system. VDC can also be used as a diabetes registry and could be customized for pharmaceutical and medical research. The patient module  is an on-line health data recording tool for organizing, tracking, and sharing their records with their healthcare team.

VDC is a single source of patient information database with knowledgebase. It includes a comprehensive library of multimedia information about medications and clinical guidelines for healthcare team, and education for patients. Modules of the diabetes education can be customized online by the physician to improve that patient’s skills in self-management. It also allows specialists to take a more active role in managing the health large number of patients with chronic illness.

Although well-known practice guidelines exist, real-life clinical performance often falls short of benchmarks due to a number of factors such as time and available resources. VDC addresses these issues by providing users with simple easy to use forms that can be used by Diabetes Nurses, and variety of reports that allows Primary Patient Care and Specialists to diagnose and treat the patients.

Benefits

  • VDC helps in standardization of various procedures like medical examination and clinical examination
  • Clinical decisions can be made rapidly leading to better and faster medical intervention
  • Complete follow up data and retrieval of past medical data and team recommendations.
  • Patient summary sheet with complete clinical and medical information facilitate patients understanding of his / her health status
  • Comprehensive medical reports and automated Chromic Management Diseases forms
  • Provide cost effective and better care for more patients with the existing healthcare resources
  • Built with the most-up-to-date secure technology
  • Can be easily customized to meet different operation environments

                 


Functions

  • Diabetes Registry
  • Diabetic worksheet used during clinic visit
  • Patient monitoring
  • Treatment recommendation (health care team relation)
  • Management recommendation (health care team / patient relation)
  • Patient interactive multimedia education
  • Healthcare professionals’ interactive multimedia education

VDC and the Mobile Diabetes Clinic


The Mobile Diabetes Telemedicine Clinic is a FNIHB, Health Canada funded service that provides diabetes-specific health consultations to First Nations in British Columbia.

Specially trained nurses and an Eye technician serve members of the non-urban on reserve communities who are known to have diabetes and wish to have increased health care knowledge and advice on their current status and recommendations for improved care. The staff members travel to the community and personally take the history and complete an examination of clients requesting help. In addition, a full laboratory Point-of-Care testing as recommended by the Canadian Diabetes Association Guidelines and full 7 field retinal photographs are completed. The system enables immediate transfer of the information obtained to consultants in Endocrinology and Ophthalmology and in turn a complete recommendation for changes in therapy are provided “on line” via a secure system to the primary care physicians identified by the client.

We have used a variant of the IT program for over seven years in Northern British Columbia in which over 1000 patients have been cared for. In the past one year, the Web-based program has been used in the new program in southern BC in which over 200 patients have been seen.

The program used is robust and allows less comprehensive data collection if desired, but is directive in that all the information (and more) that one would wish for management of the chronic disease diabetes and for the management of its’ complications is provided.

Outcome data in the original Northern program has shown significant improvement in diabetes endpoints, as has been reported at the International Diabetes Federation meeting in Montreal, 2009.

Endpoint data is not as yet available for the new program, but it provides more complete and more rapid service and is anticipated to be even more successful in improving education and care for this population.

Keith G. Dawson MD, FRCPC
Endocrine Consultant


VDC monitors the patient’s response to treatment and changes in the self-management of diabetes. In addition health care team can review historical medical records and carry out detailed analysis through the dynamic query feature of the program. The Virtual Diabetes Center was developed by a group of diabetes specialist and patients with input from diabetes nurses, nutritionists, and other specialists. Please contact us for more information about VDC and how it can be customized for your operation.