NCT01751061

Improving Decision Making for Patients With Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 416 (actual)
• Sponsor: Duke University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Deciding about prolonged life support for critically ill patients can be very difficult. Therefore, the investigators are doing a study to see if an internet-based decision aid can improve the quality of decision making for substitute decision makers of patients who are in the intensive care unit (ICU).

Detailed description

The process of making a decision about whether or not to provide prolonged life support is seriously deficient among clinicians and the surrogate decision makers for critically ill patients. To address this problem, we propose a randomized, controlled trial to determine if an innovative web-based decision aid compared to usual care control can improve the quality of decision making (defined as clinician-surrogate concordance for prognosis, quality of communication, and medical comprehension), reduce surrogates' psychological distress (depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress syndrome disorder (PTSD) symptoms), and reduce patients' health care costs over 6-month follow up. We will enroll 410 surrogate decision makers for 273 patients (expected average of 1.5 surrogates per patient). This study has the potential both to improve how clinicians and surrogates interact in intensive care units and to increase the likelihood that life support decisions are aligned with patients' values.

Conditions

• Surrogate Decision Makers
• Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Decision aid	A web-based decision aid to assist surrogate decision makers in prolonged mechanical ventilation decisions
OTHER	Usual care	usual ICU care

Timeline

• Start date: 2013-01-01
• Primary completion: 2016-05-03
• Completion: 2017-01-06
• First posted: 2012-12-17
• Last updated: 2019-05-02
• Results posted: 2019-05-02

Locations

4 sites across 1 country: United States