Summary
Diabetes telehealth research to date has provided minimal description of its clinical protocols, including strategies used to foster behavior change and procedures to deliver diabetes self-management education (DSME) and medical care. Also, there has been a focus on time-limited research interventions but little on working clinical programs. We describe here an effective diabetes telehealth program (HouseCalls) that serves an urban Medicaid population living with poorly-controlled type 2 diabetes (T2DM). We also discuss barriers to the future scalability and long-term sustainability of such programs that our health care system will need to overcome if we are to provide population-level telehealth solutions for the growing epidemic of T2DM.