摘要：Viva la Vida (Live Your Life) is a call to action for older Latinos to take charge of their diabetes and live life to the fullest. Lumetra, California’s federally designated Medicare quality improvement organization, developed the Viva la Vida project to improve diabetes care among Latino Medicare beneficiaries in 4 Southern California counties. After researching barriers to good diabetes care among Latino seniors, Lumetra designed a multifaceted program targeting health care providers and Medicare beneficiaries through bilingual, low-literacy health education materials and tools, community and provider partnerships, and the mass media. The project succeeded in helping to reduce the disparity in glycosylated hemoglobin testing between White and Latino Medicare beneficiaries in the 4 program counties. THE CENTERS FOR MEDICARE & Medicaid Services has funded quality improvement organizations in each state to monitor and reduce health care disparities in the Medicare population. 1 The quality improvement program works to ensure that Medicare patients—particularly patients from underserved populations—receive appropriate care at the appropriate time. Lumetra, the Medicare quality improvement organization for California, developed the 3-year Viva la Vida (Live Your Life) project to improve diabetes care for Latino Medicare beneficiaries and decrease the disparity in annual glycosylated hemoglobin (A1C) testing rates between White and Latino beneficiaries in 4 counties. The program targeted Latinos because they are the largest and fastest growing minority group in California 2 and they suffer from a high prevalence of diabetes and associated complications. 3 – 7 The A1C test gives an integrated picture of blood glucose levels over the past 2 to 3 months and is an important tool for diabetes management. 8 Lowering A1C values can prevent or delay the development of many diabetes-related complications. 8
