Adherence of office -based physicians to cholesterol management guidelines for patients with diabete

This study examined office-based physician adherence to the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP) cholesterol management guidelines for ambulatory patients with diabetes from 1989 to 2000. The primary objectives of this study were to develop a scale and measure the adherence of office-based physicians to the NCEP cholesterol management guidelines for their patients with diabetes from 1989 to 2000. The objectives were achieved by developing a cholesterol management scale that yielded yearly cholesterol management scores (CMS) based on the NCEP cholesterol management guidelines and the National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys (NAMCS) from 1989 to 2000.;The operationally defined study variables were patient age, sex, race, expected sources of payment, physician specialty, and year of the visit. A six-variable analysis of variance (ANOVA) procedure along with Tukey (HSD) post-hoc tests analyzed the extracted data. Based on the study results, conclusions showed that office-based physician adherence for patients with diabetes increased for non-government related expected sources of payment. After the issuance of the 1993 guidelines: (1) Adherence increased for white patients with diabetes; (2) Adherence did not significantly change for black patients with diabetes; (3) Adherence for White and Black patients with diabetes was the same; (4) Adherence of non-specialists increased for patients with diabetes; (5) Adherence of specialists did not significantly change for patients with diabetes; (6) Adherence of specialists and non-specialists was the same for patients with diabetes. According to the 2001 NCEP guidelines, physician adherence is still below the target levels established by the NCEP. To establish whether or not the adherence of office-based physicians for patients with diabetes in this study met the NCEP target levels require further analysis.