# Telemedicine for Reach, Education, Access,Treatment and Ongoing Support (TREAT-ON)

> **NIH NIH R34** · UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH · 2020 · $240,434

## Abstract

Abstract
Health care systems need to seek ways through quality improvement, care coordination, and workforce capacity
to support quality care. It has been proposed that new models of care coupled with technology are needed.
Diabetes mellitus (DM) provides an ideal model for testing new approaches as the number of people with DM
continues to rise, with an inverse shortage of health providers available to meet their needs. Most patients with
Type 2 DM (T2DM) are seen in primary care (PC) where providers report barriers to comprehensive care that
include limited time, educational resources, added workload and feeling ill-equipped to counsel patients on
behavior change. Efforts to restructure PC are underway, like diabetes educator (DE)-led planned management
visits, reported to improve healthy behaviors and outcomes in patients at high risk. DEs are well suited to support
the skills, decision making, self-care behaviors, problem solving and active collaboration with the care team that
serve as the foundation for diabetes self-management education and key to an effective planned visit. DEs
supporting care and self-management education in PC have been shown to improve access and outcomes. For
patients to sustain a lifetime of behavior to effectively self-manage, continued support to sustain the ongoing
skills, knowledge, and behaviors required to manage their condition is needed. Given the need for enduring
support and scarcity of providers, particularly in underserved rural areas, efforts to understand how best to re-
design practice to involve DEs in PC and utilize technology to enable and scale engagement in self-management
and ongoing support must be considered. The purpose of this application is to evaluate the deployment of
Telemedicine for Reach, Education, Access, Treatment and Ongoing Support (TREAT-ON), a DE-driven, PC-
based telemedicine model that relies on PC practice redesign to afford access to real-time ongoing support. We
hypothesize that the TREAT-ON model will help individuals identified as being high risk in an underserved rural
community to achieve and sustain improvements in clinical, psychosocial and behavioral outcomes, and aim to
demonstrate the model’s viability in terms of feasibility and acceptability to inform future testing of TREAT-ON.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10019529
- **Project number:** 5R34DK123370-02
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH
- **Principal Investigator:** LINDA M SIMINERIO
- **Activity code:** R34 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $240,434
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-09-17 → 2022-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10019529

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10019529, Telemedicine for Reach, Education, Access,Treatment and Ongoing Support (TREAT-ON) (5R34DK123370-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10019529. Licensed CC0.

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