Prediabetes Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices at an Academic Family Medicine Practice

Purpose: Lifestyle change programs are an effective but underutilized approach to prevent or delay type 2 diabetes in people with prediabetes. Understanding clinician prediabetes knowledge, attitudes, and practices can inform implementation efforts to increase lifestyle change program referrals.

Methods: We surveyed clinicians at an academic family medicine clinic about their prediabetes knowledge, attitudes, and practices. From the same clinic, we reviewed electronic health records to assess prediabetes screening, diagnosis, and treatment coverage in the cohort of adults seen from 2015 to 2017.

Results: Thirty-one clinicians (69.6%) completed the survey. Clinicians believed prediabetes was an important health issue (n = 29; 93.7%) and that prediabetes screening (n = 20, 64.5%) and diagnosis (n = 31, 100%) were important for prediabetes management. About half of the respondents (n = 14; 45.2%) reported familiarity with the National Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP). Electronic chart review included 15,520 adult patients. Most of the 5360 nondiabetic patients meeting US Preventive Services Task Force diabetes screening guidelines (n = 4068; 75.9%) received a hemoglobin A1c test. Of the 1437 patients with an A1c result diagnostic of prediabetes, 729 (50.7%) had the diagnosis in their chart. Prediabetes patients receiving point-of-care A1c testing instead of laboratory testing had 4.7 increased odds (95% CI, 3.5 to 6.4) of metformin prescription. No patients were referred to a DPP.

Conclusions: Clinicians' positive attitudes toward prediabetes screening, moderate knowledge of prediabetes management, and low awareness of DPPs were reflected by high diabetes screening coverage, limited prediabetes diagnosis, and no DPP referrals. We will tailor our implementation strategy to overcome these prediabetes care barriers.