Patient Characteristics of our Partner Practices

Tables 3a through 3f describe selected characteristics of patients with diabetes cared for in our partner practices.

Collectively, the 30 EMR-based practices (Cleveland Clinic, Kaiser Permanente, and MetroHealth) report their care for 23,461 adult patients with diabetes seen in their practices at least twice during calendar year 2007. Individual practices vary considerably in their number of diabetic patients, with nine practices reporting care for more than 1,000 patients (one practice reported over 2,000) and three practices reporting care for fewer than 200. There also is considerable diversity by insurance category (Table 3a), race (Table 3b) (note: race data are not available for Kaiser Permanente practices), and estimated neighborhood income and educational attainment (Table 3c).

As shown in Table 3a, 37% of our partners’ diabetic patients are insured by Medicare (range across practices, 22-48%), 51% by commercial health plans (range across practices, 15-73%), 6% by Medicaid (range across practices, 0-28%), and 6% are uninsured (range, 0-38%). In the two systems that report patient race in Table 3b, patients reported as Hispanic reflect 4% of our overall sample (range, 0-60%), although Hispanic patients represent more than 10% of only three of the 30 practices. African-American patients reflect 33% of our sample (range, 2-96%). Table 3c summarizes household incomes and high school graduation rates of our patients, using census-based estimates provided by each system. Across the 30 practices, estimated median income of our patients’ households in the year 2000 was $39,500, with a range from $22,000 to $67,800. We estimate that almost 4 in 5 of our patients graduated high school, with a range across practices from 63% to 90%.







Tables 3d – 3f provide the same information for samples of 50 patients from each of our three partner Federally Qualified Health Centers – Care Alliance, Neighborhood Family Practice, and Northeast Ohio Health Services, Inc. (NEON). While the FQHCs are quite diverse in the proportion of patients insured by Commercial insurers (range, 2-40%), Medicaid (range, 6-34%) or who are uninsured (range, 20-78%) (Table 3d), ranges were much smaller by estimated household income ($22,500-$28,400) and educational attainment (range of estimated high school graduation rates, 68%-72%) (Table 3f). Reflecting their different catchment areas in Greater Cleveland, two of the three FQHCs serve predominantly African-American patients, while almost half of the patients self-report as Hispanic in the third system (Table 3e).