Welcome Statement
Dear Diabetes Hospitalist, We are pleased to invite you to join us for the First Annual International Hospital Diabetes Meeting in San Diego, California, on October 8 and 9, 2010. The field of diabetes technology has advanced rapidly over the past few years to produce powerful products for monitoring and managing diabetes in the hospital. This meeting has been designed for busy clinicians and will present practical information about establishing treatment goals and utilizing these advances for care of diabetes. This meeting will consist of four half-day sessions devoted to “Glycemic Goals,” “Tactics for Diabetes Management,” “Technology for Diabetes Management,” and “Quality of Care.” The faculty for this international meeting will include thought leaders in hospital medicine representing endocrinology, internal medicine, intensive care medicine, surgery, anesthesiology, laboratory medicine, nursing, and hospital administration. The meeting’s four goals are for diabetes clinicians to learn how to: 1. Establish safe and effective therapeutic goals for glycemia. 2. Develop practical tactics for achieving glycemic goals. 3. Use appropriate technology for inpatient monitoring of glycemia. 4. Document quality of diabetes care to maximize reimbursement. Management of diabetes in the hospital requires specialized skills and a specialized perspective focused on the acute perturbations of glycemia that occur in this setting. Compared to outpatient diabetes management, the care of diabetes in the hospital requires different goals, strategies, monitoring technologies, and metrics for documenting quality of care. The International Hospital Diabetes Meeting was developed by and for endocrinologists, internists, intensivists, surgeons, anesthesiologists, laboratory medicine specialists, critical care nurses, floor nurses, and diabetes educators. The purpose of the meeting is to present the latest information and dissect the controversies in hospital care of diabetes. Management of diabetes in the hospital requires a coordinated multidisciplinary approach to achieve a high quality of care. As reimbursement for hospital care is increasingly linked to achievement of metrics, the quality of diabetes management will be increasingly scrutinized both as a primary endpoint as well as an enabling factor for better reimbursement. The International Hospital Diabetes Meeting will address medical, nursing, laboratory, regulatory, and reimbursement issues with the goal of improved outcomes for hospitalized patients with diabetes. Our Meeting Planning Committee includes creative and caring diabetes experts from leading medical centers. The International Hospital Diabetes Meeting will emphasize informal panel discussions, case presentations, questions from the audience and surveys of the audience with instant tabulation. Formal presentations will be brief. We will present posters of innovative research in hospital diabetes. A syllabus of abstracts and slides will be provided. The emphasis on discussions will bring out solutions, which can be used or modified as needed by meeting attendees. The sessions on “Glycemic Goals” and “Tactics for Diabetes Management” will be on Friday, October 8, 2010, and the sessions on “Technology for Diabetes Management” and “Quality of Care” will be on Saturday, October 9, 2010.We look forward to seeing you in San Diego. With best wishes,
