The American College of Cardiology (ACC) and patient active network PatientsLikeMe have launched a partnership to explore innovative ways to make real-world patient feedback and experience more central to diabetes research and care. The partnership will focus on encouraging people living with diabetes to offer perspectives to enhance and accelerate the ACC’s Diabetes Collaborative Registry®.
Diabetes Collaborative Registry® Overview
The Diabetes Collaborative Registry is the first global, cross-specialty clinical diabetes registry designed to track and improve the quality of diabetes and cardiometabolic care delivered to patients across the primary and specialty care continuum. The registry’s founding industry sponsor, AstraZeneca, is also a PatientsLikeMe partner and shares the goal to bring the patient voice into the center of scientific discovery and development.
Next Steps
The collaboration’s first step calls for the ACC and PatientsLikeMe to reach out to people living with diabetes to identify priorities for the registry’s research and program development agenda. Practices participating in the Diabetes Collaborative Registry will be able to offer their patients access to the PatientsLikeMe website so they can become part of the online patient community, which is open to any patient living with diabetes. Nearly 20,000 people already use the website to connect in forums and to track and share their experiences living with diabetes, including reporting the severity of symptoms such as fatigue, pain and depressed mood, quality of life, and the effectiveness of various treatments or non-drug interventions.
As part of the collaboration, Sally Okun, Vice President of Patient Advocacy, Policy and Safety at PatientsLikeMe, will hold a position on the Diabetes Collaborative Registry Stakeholder Advisory Panel, which provides guidance and recommendations to the registry’s member governance committees. Okun said the collaboration has the potential to reach millions of patients given 1 in 3 Americans is expected to develop diabetes during their lifetime. “We’re excited to be partnering with the ACC given their deep experience with registries and unparalleled partner support. We expect that patient-generated data and data from clinical encounters will help create a vision of health for all people living with diabetes—a vision focused on improving outcomes that matter most to patients.”
PatientsLikeMe invites anyone living with type 1 or type 2 diabetes to join patientslikeme.com for free at www.patientslikeme.com.