Innovation Awards: Diabetes, Heart Disease, and Stroke

In September 2018, CDC awarded funds to state and local health departments to design, test, and evaluate new ways to address diabetes, heart disease, and stroke in the United States.

The 29 awardees funded by this new 5-year cooperative agreement include:

• 22 state health departments.
• 5 large city and county health departments.
• 2 groups of city and county health departments.

With CDC’s support, these health departments will develop new ways to make proven public health strategies more effective and available to more people. They will focus their efforts on groups with diabetes or heart disease and stroke. They will also evaluate their efforts so CDC and others can learn from this work.

These new approaches aim to:

• Prevent or delay the development of type 2 diabetes in people at risk and improve the health of people living with diabetes.
• Prevent and manage cardiovascular disease.
• Recipients will develop and evaluate new approaches for diabetes management, type 2 diabetes prevention, and cardiovascular disease prevention and management. CDC supports state health departments to conduct activities in the following areas:

Diabetes Management and Type 2 Diabetes Prevention

• Increase access to, enrollment in, and retention of people with prediabetes in the National Diabetes Prevention Program (National DPP) lifestyle change program in areas where people have less access to resources and higher rates of disease.
• Explore and test new ways to make it easier for people to join the National DPP lifestyle change program and receive diabetes self-management education and support (DSMES) services.
• Use tailored messages to reach people at higher risk of type 2 diabetes and raise awareness of prediabetes and the National DPP lifestyle change program.
• Train National DPP lifestyle coaches how to recruit and keep participants in the program.
• Work with health care systems to encourage the use of telehealth to increase access to DSMES services or retinopathy screening for people with diabetes or to increase access to the National DPP lifestyle change program for people at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
• Increase the use of clinical systems and care practices to improve the health of people with diabetes and promote early detection of chronic kidney disease.
• Increase electronic referrals between health care systems and CDC-recognized organizations that deliver the National DPP lifestyle change program.

Cardiovascular Disease Prevention and Management

• Monitor clinical measures shown to improve health care quality and identify patients with high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol.
• Use team-based care for patients with high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol and look for new ways to add nonphysician members to health care teams.
• Link community resources and clinical services that support bidirectional referrals, self-management, and lifestyle change for patients with high blood pressure or high blood cholesterol or who have had a cardiac event. This goal can be met by:
  • Using community health workers and patient navigators.
  • Increasing referrals between health care systems and community programs and resources.
  • Expanding the use of telehealth, including mobile health technology.
  • Finding new ways to increase referrals to and participation in cardiac rehabilitation programs in traditional and community settings, including home-based settings.

Of the 29 awardees funded:

• 17 received both diabetes and heart disease and stroke awards.
• 8  received heart disease and stroke awards.
• 4 received diabetes awards.