The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has awarded a $250,000 grant to Cook County Health (CCH) and two other Chicago health centers to evaluate methods to monitor low blood glucose events among hospitalized diabetic patients.

The goal of the study is to standardize a way to measure low blood glucose events, so that healthcare providers can prevent low glucose events through quality improvement activities.

“Low blood sugar among hospitalized diabetics is far too common and can have a devastating impact on their health. Standardized methods to monitor these events exist, but are not commonly in practice,” said Dr. William Trick, lead researcher of the study and director of the Collaborative Research Unit at CCH’ John H. Stroger, Jr., Hospital.  “Through this research, investigators will work with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to identify efficient and practical methods to track these events, which will provide the tools needed to measure progress in avoiding low blood sugars.”

Dr. Trick will be working in conjunction with other principal investigators at Loyola University Chicago, Rush University Medical Center and Medical Research Analytics and Informatics Alliance (MRAIA) on the study, which is being called Capture of Hypoglycemic Events Among Inpatients Using PCORnet Common Data Model (CHIN-UP).  Those principal investigators are Dr. Holly Mattix-Kramer from Loyola, Dr. Carlos Santos from Rush and Dr. Craig Conover from MRAIA.

The CDC awarded the grant on September 21, 2017.