While the overall health of Americans has improved, ethnic minorities (particularly African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians, and Pacific Islanders) continue to suffer from poorer health outcomes. During Phase I we developed and tested an interactive, case-based, online CME program designed to improve physicians' ability to understand and communicate with patients from different cultural backgrounds. We chose type 2 diabetes in Mexican Americans as a prototype illness and patient population around which to construct and subsequently test the effectiveness of this program.
The aims of the Phase II study are to: 1) expand and enhance our problem-based, online continuing medical education (CME) program, Delivering Culturally Effective Care to Patients with Type 2 Diabetes, 2) clinically validate our measurement tool, the Cultural Competence Assessment Tool (CCAT), and 3) test the effectiveness of the online CME program in improving the cultural competence of practicing physicians in a real-world setting. The primary research hypothesis for the Phase II study is that physicians taking the enhanced education program will demonstrate significant positive changes on a clinically valid version of the survey instrument (the CCAT) and that a randomly assigned control group of physicians will not demonstrate such changes. Our secondary hypotheses are that these changes will be stable over a moderate time period (4-6 months), that the physician results on the CCAT will correlate with measures of patient satisfaction, and that patients of physicians who have taken the education program will have higher levels of satisfaction with their providers at 6 months than patients of control physicians.
| Kutob, Randa M; Senf, Janet H; Harris Jr, John M (2009) Teaching culturally effective diabetes care: results of a randomized controlled trial. Fam Med 41:167-74 |
