Got Type-1 diabetes? Then you might want to thank Jeffrey Johnson — he saved you a bundle last month. Alberta Health and Wellness agreed to plunk down $13.
Got Type-1 diabetes? Then you might want to thank Jeffrey Johnson — he saved you a bundle last month.
Alberta Health and Wellness agreed to plunk down $13.3 million for diabetes tests strips for people with Type-1 diabetes in mid-February - a decision one senior government official says will save seniors hundreds of dollars a year.
That change happened in part because of Johnson's advice. The St. Albert-based doctor is one of the top diabetes researchers in the country and a member of the provincial panel that helps decide what drugs are covered by health care.
“Efficiency is about cost-effectiveness,” Johnson says, and it's his job to make the health-care system cost less to run. “It's a way of shifting our resources to those who can benefit the most.”
Prairie hockey boy
Johnson, 47, grew up on an acreage near Saskatoon with his parents, three siblings and numerous horses, chickens, turkeys and cows. Like many Prairie boys, he was big into hockey and dreamed of making it in the NHL.
Johnson's younger brother, Steve, remembers tagging along with him to many of those hockey games. “We were quite close,” he said, and Johnson always made sure he could take part as well, even if it was just as a stick-boy.
Johnson is pretty much the same now as he was as a kid, Steve says: honest, respectful and engaging. He was very athletic and a hard worker, he says, and very dedicated to whatever he did.
The influence of his dad, Dennis, who was a professor of pharmacology, steered Johnson towards the University of Saskatchewan and pharmacology. He worked in the diabetes education centre while he was there, which led him to start researching the causes and cures of the disease.
About 15 years ago Johnson came to St. Albert and the University of Alberta, where he now holds the Canada Research Chair in Diabetes Health Outcomes. His expertise on health policy and diabetes earned him a spot on the province's Expert Committee on Drug Evaluation and Therapeutics, which advises the province on what drugs it should pay for.
Dr. Diabetes
Unlike most doctors, Johnson prescribes policies instead of pills, and deals with the health system as a whole instead of individual patients.
Diabetes accounts for almost a quarter of Alberta's health-care costs, says Steve Long, the province's executive director of pharmaceutical funding and guidance at Alberta Health, and those costs will only rise as what experts call a tsunami of diabetes hits the province in the coming years.
Alberta's health-care costs could rise up by 230 per cent in 30 years if it doesn't do something about diabetes and other chronic illnesses associated with it, such as obesity, Johnson's research suggests. All these illnesses can be prevented through lifestyle change, and preventing them would save Albertans piles of cash on hospital bills.
Johnson is now working with his brother Steve on the Healthy Eating and Active Living in Diabetes study at Servus Credit Union Place to do just that. By paring diabetics with fitness experts and pedometers, they hope to teach people to exercise more and better manage their disease to keep it from getting worse.
Johnson is also researching where best to put our diabetes dollars. He headed up development of the Alberta Diabetes Atlas, Long notes as an example, which lets the province track the locations of their diabetes patients and resources to better target their health dollars.
He also co-authored a study on diabetes test strips. For years, Long says, doctors have been telling diabetics to test their blood sugar regularly — up to seven times a day in some cases.
“It's 75 cents a strip,” he notes. “If you do it four times a day, it starts to add up.”
Johnson and his team found that Canadians were spending about $330 million a year on these strips for little benefit — the strips told patients their blood sugar level, but not what caused those levels to change.
Diabetics who were not taking insulin could ditch the strips and save their fingertips, they concluded, while those on insulin could test themselves far less often.
That research, says Long, convinced the province to spend $13.3 million more on test strips for insulin-dependent diabetics last February, a move that will help about 22,000 people save hundreds of dollars a year each on health care. Significantly, it elected not to spend more money on test strips for diabetics who didn't take insulin, a move that could save the province millions.
Johnson says he hopes his work will help scale back diabetes in the future by convincing more people to live healthier lives. He and his family love hanging around Servus Place for that reason, he adds, as you can see everyone from overweight young adults to 70-year-old couples jogging around the track.
“For us, that's inspiring.”
Jeff Johnson, Q&A
If you could be an animal, what would you be?
“The family dog. She's got a pretty good life.”
What's the coolest thing you've ever done?
“I had a beer with Wayne Gretzky (in the Air Canada lounge on a flight from Toronto). I had about a 15-minute conversation with him before he started getting swarmed by the rest of the people who recognized him.”
