Web and computer telephone-based diabetes education: lessons learnt from the development and use of a call center.
Diabetes is a chronic disease that causes a great deal of morbidity and mortality and poor quality of life for millions of people. Continuing care and patient education help maintain a good control of the disease and prevent complications. Since current available resources are limited to providing such an education during clinic or physician visits only, alternative ways to educate people about diabetes need to be identified. In this article we discuss the implementation of an automated diabetes education call center, we define the evaluation procedures we adopted, we summarize general guidelines for the implementation of the entire system based on our experience, and we present preliminary results about the use of the call center. We believe our system is providing "active health" since we deliver educational messages to patients at regular intervals and at the time of their choice without waiting for their actions.
De Leo
Gianluca
G
School of Public Health, Saint Louis University, 3545 Lafayette, Saint Louis, Missouri 63104, USA. deleog@slu.edu
Krishna
Santosh
S
Boren
Sue
S
Fato
Marco
M
Porro
Ivan
I
Balas
E Andrew
EA
D003920:Diabetes Mellitus; D015277:Hotlines; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008923:Missouri; D019982:Organizational Case Studies; D010353:Patient Education as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D013685:Telecommunications / Q000458:organization & administration*; D017216:Telemedicine; D014481:United States