Groups of dedicated personnel at UF Health Jacksonville have worked diligently over the past few months to help raise low glucose levels among patients.

From July 2019 to January 2020, the hospital had room to improve its score on Vizient’s “Hypoglycemia in Insulin Use” metric. In response, a multidisciplinary group called the Glucose Committee formed and later split into four subcommittees that would work on specific tasks. Following is a listing of these four groups, along with a brief summary of their respective activities:

• The Order Set Subcommittee updated the insulin order set for providers, with the changes implemented into Epic on Dec. 1, 2020.
• The Policy Subcommittee developed and updated the policy on hypoglycemic treatment. Final approval was received in May 2020.
• The Education Subcommittee continued the rollout of the new hypoglycemic treatment policy and completed Healthstream training in January 2021.
• The Evening Snack Subcommittee implement delivery of evening snacks throughout the hospital for patients on long-acting insulin. Incidents of hypoglycemia typically occur between 5 and 9 a.m., which correlates with the timeframe prior to patients receiving breakfast. The evening snack was rolled out hospitalwide at UF Health Jacksonville in February and at UF Health North in May. As of May, the percentage of patients on long-acting insulin who receive an evening snack increased from 0% to 36.8%.

In March, clinical quality nurse leaders started receiving hourly updates on any hypoglycemic event greater than 50 that occurred on their units. Having this real-time alert allowed them to be proactive in educating the nursing staff and ultimately prevent further hypoglycemic events from occurring.

The quality team started working with units with the most hypoglycemic events higher than 50. As a result, we saw the number of above-50 hypoglycemic events decrease from 115 in March to 52 in May, based on Vizient metrics.

A collaborative spirit and dedication to excellent patient care have made these efforts and the related gains possible.