Samuel L. Abbate, MD, CDE, is the director of the Diabetes Care Center and Hospital Diabetes Program for Intermountain Health Care in Salt Lake City, Utah. His passion is to bring quality improvement principles to the health care system to improve clinical outcomes for people with diabetes across the health care continuum.

Dr. Abbate earned his medical degree at the University of Illinois in Chicago. His internal medicine residency was at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also served as chief resident before completing his endocrinology fellowship at the University of Washington in Seattle. His training in health care quality improvement includes the Advanced Training Program in Health Care Delivery at Intermountain Health Care in Salt Lake City, Utah. He has been a certified diabetes educator since 1991.

He serves on the Steering Committee and the Health Care Provider Work Group of the National Diabetes Education Program, for which he participated in the development of the Better Diabetes Care website (www.betterdiabetescare.nih.gov). He has been an active ADA volunteer since 1991 and has served on the association's national board of directors and research foundation board and chaired its programs committee. He is an associate editor of Diabetes Spectrum.