The Health Performance Institute (HPI) has released this call to action on October 26, 2015.
We are calling on all employee benefits brokers, employee benefits specialists, HRA vendors and all related professionals to start including the hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) test in their annual testing or Health Risk Appraisals (HRA’s).
A recent publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) evaluated the prevalence and trends of diabetes in America from 1988 to 2012. The conclusion? More than 50% of Americans have some form of diabetes: diagnosed, undiagnosed or pre-diabetic.
Further, the report from JAMA used the same dataset as the report from the CDC. However, the authors of the JAMA report included an additional criterion: HbA1c. This resulted in a signficant difference in numbers between the two reports. For example, the total American population with some form of type 2 diabetes was 115.1 million in the CDC report and 129.3 million in the JAMA report.
As there are issues with sensitivity and specificity with a simple finger prick to measure blood glucose levels, this Call to Action requests the more stable and accurate HbA1c measurement to be administered from this point forward.
We are calling on all related professionals to go beyond fasting glucose when conducting HRA’s by including HbA1c measurements.
This will help to properly identify those being missed by current methods.
For additional information and/or background, see this related article.
Should you have additional questions or need assistance, we can help.
Thank you,
Brian Sekula, PhD
President / CEO
The Health Performance Institute
For inquiries, email us, fill out our contact form, or call us at 713-494-6871.