The doctors, nurses, and support staff at the Barbara
Davis Center for Diabetes are amazing people, but with everything going on during your visit, you might not have had a chance to really get to know them personally. So, we sat down with Dr. G. Todd Alonso to learn a little bit more. Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, Dr. Alonso. How long have you been at the BDC? I joined the BDC right out of fellowship training in August 2013. CDF’s role is to raise funds to support patient care and research at the BDC. Have we made a difference for your patients or made an impact on your work? The CDF is a great resource for our center and our patients. In 2017, CDF made a large investment in the BDC’s electronic medical record system by hiring a fulltime programmer for two years. This has been a fantastic success, giving us the opportunity to make changes to how we use the system with more agility than other diabetes clinics around the country. The result is that we are moving to more proactive, streamlined care. One example of improvements we’ve implemented is the automatic generation and delivery of school health plans, which used to be slow and inefficient for families, cost us hundreds of staff hours each year to generate, print, and fax, and require frustrating and wasteful rework when faxes were mysteriously not received. This year we went a step further and automated a Sick Day Action Plan as well, complete with calculations of children’s insulin doses for use on days with high blood sugars and elevated ketones. Furthermore, our programmer has helped us change how we record and access data, which has allowed us to make a host of changes, including how we order insulin pumps and CGMs, how we identify care gaps and make it easy for providers and patients to address them, and how we reach out to families who need additional help getting scheduled for clinic attendance. Building on the CDF-funded pilot phase, we transitioned our programmer’s support to a grant from Colorado Medicaid to keep this important asset active. You grew up in Texas – anything you miss about the Lone Star State now that you live in Denver? My wife and I were born and raised in Texas, and we moved here in 2013 with our three young boys. With a new baby on the way in March, we’re excited to have our first true Colorado native! We do miss family and friends, Mexican food, and Texas bar-b-que, and we’re still getting accustomed to the concept of snow during baseball season. With frequent visits to and from family, though, we’re happy to live in a city with so many outdoor activities and much farther from hurricanes and mosquito swarms!
Do you have a favorite place to get outdoors around Denver? I love the week I get to spend at Camp Colorado in the Pike National Forest each year. It feels so wonderful to give such a great gift to the kids, to work with people who feel the same, and to do it in such a beautiful place. The last few years, I have taken to spending an extra day before camp riding my mountain bike up there and enjoying the quiet beauty of the National Forest. After growing up as a Boy Scout who attended camp in July in North Texas, where it gets down to a balmy 85 degrees at night, I finally appreciate how wonderful camping can be! What’s one thing someone visiting Colorado has to check out? Most of my Texas friends come to Colorado to ski or catch a concert at Red Rocks, but I think Denver summers are the best kept secret. With parks, pools, and trails in our neighborhood, I enjoy all the things I can do outside with my family.
BARBARA DAVIS CENTER
BDC STAFF SPOTLIGHT
What is your favorite comfort food? I really enjoy a nice chicken-fried steak, so big it drapes off the sides of the plate, drizzled with a white gravy and served with a large side of fried okra. File that under both “guilty pleasure” and “comfort food.” What has been one of your best experiences from your work at the BDC? Several years ago, we did a ski camp research study at Breckenridge testing out an artificial pancreas system with 16 of our patients. It was a great group of kids, many of whom I had known since their diagnosis with diabetes. Riding on Insulin ran a superb program, and we got to see some really cutting-edge diabetes technology tested to its limits. That, and I never imagined myself getting to ski and call it an honest day’s work.
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