I recently read this article posted on Endocrine Today, Demand for Diabetes Educators Projected to Increase Sharply. My first question when I read this is if the demand is going up, then is the supply going to increase as much? I am not going to give an economics class here because most of you all know this, but when the demand increases, the supply tends to go down. But the supply for diabetes educators is already low, so, I’m not a genius but this doesn’t sound look a good situation. I think that we already knew that the demand for diabetes educators is going to increase sharply because the disease itself is increasing, so this article does not really tell me much or help the situation.
One question that was some-what answered in this article that I was interested in is how Medicare and insurance companies would reimburse for these diabetes education classes. Would they cover only one a year, or 50% of each visit, or not cover any of them at all? I think that it is important for diabetes education to be covered by insurance because people just don’t have the money to spend on education. So if they don’t have the money to show up to a physical classroom setting or one-on-one lesson, or even a group diabetes education session, where else are they going to turn to? Pick me, pick me, I know, I know. The Diabetes Online Community, the DOC. I mentioned this briefly in a post the other day also.
I think that it is essential to take diabetes education online. There may not be live sessions on the internet, but quality recorded videos may be able to provide essential answers to some of the top diabetes questions. One way to do this may be to submit your questions before hand and the diabetes educator can answer all the questions in one sitting and provide answers to all of the questions.
I know you are asking…. who’s going to pay for this? Well, the answer is, I don’t know yet. Who is going to produce the videos, edit them, finalize them, distribute them, what CDE is going to do this, how are we going to collect the e-mail questions? I don’t know the answers to all of these questions, but I truly feel that the more I ask these questions, the more people are going to step up and answer these questions.
We all have specialties in the DOC, it is about damn time that we start pulling all of our personal resources together and start putting them together and start kicking ass with our skills.
Beginning today, Diabetes Education has now been put on my top todo list. It was always on there, but it wasn’t as high as it is now.