Association of Diabetes Care & Education Specialists (ADCES)
Sectors Served
Education, Health
Challenge
ADCES (formerly American Association of Diabetes Educators or AADE) focuses on improving diabetes care through innovative education, management and support. When ADCES approached CauseLabs for help, they had 40 member sites with multiple cohorts of 15-20 participants each, running through their year-long program. On an annual basis, each site is responsible for reporting the results of their program to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). As part of this goal, ADCES wanted to develop a performance management system to help their member organizations deliver better care and make real-time decisions about their programs based on how their data compares to CDC standards.
Solution
CauseLabs designed and built a web platform that allowed ADCES to review and track progress at the organization, site, and cohort level through the educational programs offered by ADCES. Real-time metrics and reporting has helped inform decisions in days or weeks instead of months or years.
What We Did
Growth Strategy
Digital Strategy
Software Development
Software Design
Results
The platform that CauseLabs built for ADCES helped them scale their offering from 40 sites to 100+ sites around the nation in less than two years.
As of April 10, 2023, the DAPS platform had a total of 928 active sites registered.
A Program Ready To Scale
With established programs and 40 member sites to offer guidance and feedback, we believed that ADCES was poised to expand its reach through new digital strategies. We felt that technology could play a significant role in scaling AADE by facilitating new methods of delivery, user engagement, data reporting and analysis.
What would ADCES member sites learn and improve from real-time data? What trends might the team uncover about the highest and lowest performing sites? What impact would programs make if they could identify which key indicators delivered the best care and support or prevented diabetes? And with the knowledge about things to improve, how might ADCES better scale their program to more sites?
With multiple cohorts per site and a potential for hundreds of sites, how many lives would be improved as a result? This was the opportunity that excited us!
How We Helped ADCES Scale
We designed and built a web platform that allowed ADCES to review and track individual’s progress at the organization, site, and cohort level through the educational programs offered by ADCES. We also automated the process of pulling the appropriate data and formatting it in the right way to send to the CDC for review, a process that had been substantially resource intensive. When the CDC updates their data requirements, instead of a drawn out process of making sure all of the individual sites have their systems updated, ADCES is able to make the change to the platform, and all member sites receive the update automatically.
By providing AADE with digital tools, they have begun to collect real-time data for review and analysis so that partnering sites are better informed about their performance. This has resulted in improved practices and program outcomes. Real-time metrics and reporting has helped inform decisions in days or weeks instead of months or years.
Technical Challenges
Besides creating basic intake and participant maintenance forms, we also designed complex aggregate reports that required a lot of custom SQL to be efficient and fast. After an initial stab at identifying metrics we were able to increase efficiency by several orders of magnitude, taking pages with over 11k queries down to 50-60 queries, and response times down under one second. We also designed a solution that integrated this cloud-based application into the client's network, all while maintaining HIPAA compliance.
"We have been offering the NDPP for 4 years but not until the Prevention Network do I feel that I have the tools I need as a program coordinator to manage a truly successful program. The DAPS program is unparalleled in providing real time data to program coordinators. I am able to see how each cohort is performing individually and collectively. With that information, the Lifestyle Coaches and I can have regular “huddles” to discuss the challenges and problem-solve to get the cohorts to where they need to be in terms of reaching their goals."
Ronda Merryman-Valiyi
Baptist Health Louisville, Louisville, KY