Unclear evidence for chronic disease management interventions

The Diabetes Elf, 2012

Chronic diseases such as diabetes inflict a huge burden of suffering on patients and costs on health systems worldwide.
Increasingly, health systems are being encouraged to take an integrated approach to their management.  This systematic rewiew looked at what sorts of interventions work best in these chronic disease management models.
In the delivery of health care for chronic diseases, what interventions  are effective at improving patient outcomes, provider behaviour and cost-effectiveness?
The reviewers looked for controlled trials of primary care and community interventions that specifically targeted patients more than one clinical condition.  They found ten randomised controlled trials (RCTs), with a total of 3,357 patients included.  Study duration ranged from eight weeks to two years.
The reviewers found that, due to lack of data,  they could not draw broad conclusions reflecting general health outcomes or costs.
Given the unclear conclusion of this review, it may be better to look for a good quality individual study that reports on an intervention that specifically relates to your setting.
The literature search was done in April 2011.  It is likely that relevant studies have been published since.
This is a difficult topic to search accurately for.  Did the reviewers use the right index terms and keywords, including synonyms and spelling variants?
They only searched medical and health care databases.  We might expect to find relevant publications in management science and social science databases.
Only one of the studies specifically looked at diabetes interventions, although in all but one of the other studies, diabetes would have included diabetes as one possible condition among patients identified as having multiple morbidities.