Future Enhancements
DiaTrends®,
carefully designed by practicing clinical endocrinologists, is a quality-improvement tool for providers of diabetes care. It monitors and enhances the quality of diabetes management,
both at the level of the individual patient and the population of patients.
DiaTrends provides physicians, their staff, diabetes educators and other diabetes care providers with
a state-of-the-art, user-friendly, software solution focused on diabetes and
associated cardiovascular risk factors. It continuously tracks and prompts the processes of diabetes care in an effort to produce the best possible outcomes for diabetes patients.
DiaTrends improves workflow productivity, helps assure patient satisfaction, and
provides a means to demonstrate the value of the care we provide.
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DiaTrends familiar Windows® interface and relational database format allow easy entry of data pertinent to diabetes care such as demographics, type and duration of diabetes,
office visit dates, weights, blood pressures, pertinent lab results, eye and foot exams, pertinent medications, diabetes education, hospitalization and ER visit history, risk factors, preventive services, diabetes complications
and cardiovascular events.
Data can be easily updated at the time of each clinical encounter, and trends
can be reviewed in a consistent, comprehensive and simple format.
DiaTrends is an efficient and comprehensive aid to timely, preventive care. It is designed to complement, not replace, the medical record.
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DiaTrends features multiple built-in provider performance reports that give the provider instant access to the most often asked questions about the population whose diabetes is being managed, allowing immediate quality improvement opportunities. In addition, it allows the user the ability to easily generate a multitude of other custom reports.
DiaTrends fully integrated database query and report capabilities provide data for population health management. Multiple queries can be performed, at various levels of specificity. Overall results can be reported
and printed in a variety of formats. This gives the physician or other diabetes care provider the capability to quantify the processes and outcomes of diabetes care. This robust reporting capability facilitates development of systematic strategies for improving the delivery of diabetes care and achieving diabetes management goals within a medical practice or clinic.
These capabilities will provide the physician, diabetes educator or other diabetes care provider with the ability to tell his or her patients how they compare to others in the practice.
Practices can compare their treatment outcomes with other practices. This, in turn, can be used to further enhance the quality of care. Reporting capabilities also provide the important ability to inform managed care and insurance companies that high quality care is being provided.
The introduction and aggressive expansion of managed care throughout the United States has added clear emphasis to the need for monitoring and reporting the quality of diabetes care.
DiaTrends specifically fulfills this need.
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- Easy, familiar InstallShield® Wizard installation process.
- Single-PC or network versions.
- Intuitive, user-friendly Windows graphical interface.
- Compatible with Windows 98/Me, Windows XP, Windows NT 4.0 (with
service pack 6), Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista.
- Slick navigational tools (navigation bar; quick jumps to related
screens; right mouse functionality with context-sensitive dropdown menus; logically linked navigation buttons; hot-links to
"Help" files and to clinical guidelines, etc.).
- User-friendly data entry (e.g. dropdown lists; auto-date entry as new data entered, smart
popup calendars for entering dates,
default date on Quick Data Entry panel).
- Tracks multiple data types including:
- Office visit dates
- Weights and heights (with autocalculation of BMI's)
- Blood pressures
- Glucoses, HbA1c’s, fructosamines
- Lipids (total cholesterol, triglycerides, HDL, LDL)
- Microalbumins
- Serum creatinines, estimated GFRs and measured creatinine clearances
- SMBG frequency
- Eye specialist exams
- Foot exams
- Relevant medications (diabetes, lipids, BP, antiplatelet)
- Smoking status
- Vaccinations (influenza, pneumococcal)
- Diabetes patient education
- Acute and long-term complications and comorbidities
- Cardiovascular events
- Hospitalizations, ER visits
- User-defined fields
- Patient notes
- And more
- Field-level validation of dates and quantitative data.
- Color-coded (red/gray/black) lab and exam results (normal, borderline, abnormal).
- Patient-specific missing data alerts.
- Reminder messages.
- Longitudinal data tracking and graphing (including weight/BMI, BP, HbA1c, lipids, renal parameters, and more). Graphs are linked to graphical time-line representation of medication chronology (for diabetes, lipids, BP, renal meds).
- Real-time prompts (red/yellow/green) to flag procedures that may be "due;" linked to explanatory
pop-up legends.
- Pop-up messages (e.g. if blood pressure is high and patient is not already shown as
hypertensive, get "Set hypertension indicator to
Yes on blood pressure and long-term complications and co-morbidities screens?").
- Context-sensitive links to current published diabetes guidelines and practice standards (American Diabetes Association "Clinical Practice Recommendations;" and American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists "Guidelines for the Management of Diabetes Mellitus"), using a convenient browser interface.
- Optional user entry of summary charges & reimbursements.
- Context sensitive "Help" screens and screen tips.
- "Tip of the Day."
- Multiple application and user options (many options are user-specific).
- System automatically calculates body mass index (BMI), estimated GFR, etc.
- System calculates corresponding average glucose from HbA1c.
- Features specifically designed to help validate the role of intensive diabetes care (e.g.
recording that a patient was referred due to uncontrolled diabetes; and
filters to allow patients new to the practice or newly diagnosed patients to
be excluded from certain types of reports).
- Provider performance reports (e.g. Key Indicators; HbA1c Trends; bar graph showing HbA1c
distribution in patient population, etc.).
- Provider-specified goals linked to Key Indicators, with graphical presentation of progress toward achieving those goals.
- "Minimum Data Set" compliance screen.
- Missing "Minimum Data Set" utility.
- "Unaccessed Patient List" to help identify inactive patients.
- "Medication Start Date Utility"
- Robust, easy-to-use, real-time "Report Generator" with over
175 preconfigured reports. Features include multiple menu-driven user-defined variables and filters.
Reports can easily be viewed, printed and exported.
- "Report Generator" can export demographics to Excel, and can also be used to obtain data for targeted mailings related to patient care matters.
- HEDIS® diabetes measures estimator report.
- System-of-care tools including:
- Print summary of current patient information
- Print graphical A1c "report card" for patient
- Print DCCT summary for patient
- Print ADA membership application (blank, or with patient name and date preprinted) for patient
- Print knowledge assessment for patient
- And more
- Website links.
- “Blinded (De-Identified) Data Export Utility” allows users participating in certain patient registry and quality improvement projects to submit their database files (stripped of
all patient-identifiable data) via diskette, CD or Internet upload to
a secure website, while leaving the original database intact on the user’s local hard drive.
- Medication database update tool.
- Database merge capability.
- Data export utility (data can be exported to Microsoft Access file).
- Numerous security features (to facilitate compliance with HIPAA)
including full password-protection, assignment of security level to users,
ability of administrator to make a user inactive, optional requirement for
all users to periodically change passwords, optional user lockout after
failed login attempts, optional inactivity lockout, comprehensive audit
trails, etc.
- Built-in database backup tools.
- Full documentation.
- Annotated demo.
- And much more!
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DiaTrends uses an industry-standard software development platform and state-of-the-art development tools.
The underlying programming language is Microsoft Visual Basic® and
the database is Sybase (iAnywhere) SQLAnywhere®. Specifications are written to insure an "open" product that can in the future be adapted to work in other database environments (such as Oracle®, etc.) without substantial modification. Other integrated components include Sheridan® controls, Visual Components®, Crystal Reports®, InstallShield® and RoboHelp®
This is a first-class product with all the benefits of an object-oriented event-driven native Windows® application.
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Our plans for 2007 and beyond call for continued enhancements of
DiaTrends, with the next major new version release in
2008.
As always, we encourage our users to suggest additional features
so we can make
DiaTrends even more useful.
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