$9.8 million coming to U-M for type 2 diabetes project

The center is studying populations at risk for type 2 diabetes in four under-served counties in North Carolina, Mississippi and West Virginia.

More than 3,000 proposals were submitted for the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Innovation's Health Care Innovation Award grant - 26 of which were chosen to receive $122.6 million in funding from the 2010 health care law.

The grants are intended to fund projects in communities for three years to help people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.

"This will allow researchers to visualize complex relationships among the locations of diabetes patients, patterns of health care and available social resources," said Marie Lynn Miranda, dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment and director of the Center for Geospatial Medicine, in a news release. "The information will serve as the basis for intervention design, decision support and real-time monitoring of interventions."

The U-M program is working with a multi-state research team to reduce death and disability from the most common form of the disease. The center uses spatially based methods for analyzing environmental threats to communities.

U-M's Center for Geospatial Medicine is partnering with the Durham County Health Department, Cabarrus Health Alliance, Mississippi Public Health Institute, Marshall University and Mingo County Health Department.

The program will train about 88 health care workers and create about 31 jobs in the study area. Local care teams will be deployed to provide in-home care to reduce hospital and emergency room admissions.