Exterior view of the Diabetes Center of Excellence at Asan Medical Center.

Asan Medical Center looks to enhance care of people with diabetes

Saturday, November 1, 2008

In recent months PHMI has been working with longtime collaborator Asan Medical Center in Seoul, South Korea as  it explores the development of a new Diabetes Center of Excellence.

Back in April 2008, PHMI facilitated a site visit and review at the hospital by a team of diabetes professionals in the Partners HealthCare network. The site visit team included Jo-Ann Barrett, RN, CDE, who is Diabetes Education Program Manager at Partners HealthCare; Merri Pendergrass, MD, PhD, then Director of Clinical Diabetes at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Alexander Turchin, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine at the Brigham. The team worked with PHMI to develop an assessment tool to first understand the approach to diabetes care at Asan, identify opportunities for further development, and prioritize areas where the PHMI team could focus.

More recently, PHMI teamed with the Institute for Nursing Healthcare Leadership to develop a clinical observership program that enabled two Asan nurses specializing in diabetes care—Jeong Rim Lee and Uoon Jeong Shin—to learn about diabetes-related programs offered in numerous Boston-area medical centers. Their intensive course of study included activities at Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, and the Joslin Diabetes Center.

Asan Medical Center, an affiliate of the Ulsan Medical College, is a 2,200-bed tertiary care center. Asan offers postgraduate training programs in all specialties and has a rapidly growing research effort in basic, translational, and clinical research. The institution commenced a relationship with then-Harvard Medical International in 1996, and has since collaborated with HMI and now PHMI on a variety of initiatives, including faculty and program development and observerships for physicians and nurses. PHMI and Asan jointly sponsor a biennial international symposium in Seoul on cutting-edge issues in medical science and technology. Planning is underway for the sixth symposium, “Present and Future of Neuroscience: From Molecules to Human Disease,” to be held in June 2009.