Department of Health and Human Services to Honor Diabetes Prevention Program

INDIANAPOLIS -- YMCA of the USA has been named the recipient of a 2011 Health Living Innovation Award from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a program developed by researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine to bring affordable diabetes prevention to the community.

Ronald Ackermann, M.D., associate professor of medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine, is the principal investigator of the research that spawned the award-winning project, “Taking the YMCA’s Diabetes Prevention Program to Scale.”

He and members of the IU Diabetes Translational Research Center (DTRC) demonstrated that the results of a landmark diabetes prevention program could be achieved for less than one-fourth of the cost by moving from an academic setting to a group intervention model offered in the community.

The original study, the U.S. Diabetes Prevention Program funded by the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, showed a structured lifestyle program that helps people with pre-diabetes to exercise and lose 10 to 20 pounds can cut the chances they will develop diabetes in half. The more cost-effective group program model developed by IUSM and the YMCA of Greater Indianapolis has gone on to expand from one to 116 sites in 22 cities in two years.

Dr. Ackermann is also co-director of the Community Health Engagement Program at the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI), associate director of the DTRC and a Regenstrief Institute-affiliated scientist.

Winners will receive awards from Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, at a public recognition ceremony in Washington, D.C.

For more information on this award, visit www.hhs.gov/secretary/about/healthyliving.