Stepping Back to Move Forward: Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Diabetes Prevention Program Within a Large...

To evaluate the short-term effectiveness of the Intermountain Healthcare (IH) Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) for patients with prediabetes (preDM) deployed within primary care clinics.

A quasi-experimental study design was used to deploy the DPP within the IH system to identify patients with preDM and target a primary goal of a 5% weight loss within 6-12 months of enrollment.

Adults (aged 18-75 years) who met the American Diabetes Association criteria for preDM were included for study. Patients who attended DPP counseling between August 2013 and July 2014 were considered as the intervention (or DPP) group. The DPP group was matched using propensity scores at a 1:4 ratio with a control group of patients with preDM who did not participate in DPP.

Of the 17,142 patients who met the inclusion criteria for preDM, 40% had an in-person office visit with their provider. On average, patients were 58 years old, and greater than 60% were women. Based on multivariate logistic regression, the DPP group was more likely to achieve a 5% weight loss within 6-12 months after enrollment (OR = 1.70; 95% CI = 1.29-2.25; p < .001) when compared with the no-DPP group.

Diabetes Prevention Program-based lifestyle interventions demonstrated significant reduction in body weight and incident Type 2 diabetes mellitus when compared with nonenrollees.