NCT02831439

A Statewide Intervention to Reduce Use of Unproven or Ineffective Breast Cancer Care

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 400,415 (actual)
• Sponsor: Medical College of Wisconsin · Academic / Other
• Sex: Female
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The goal of this project is to examine the effectiveness and potential cost savings of two organizational interventions aimed at reducing the use of ineffective or unproven care among women with incident breast cancer.

Detailed description

Challenged by public opinion, peers and the Congressional Budget Office, a number of specialty societies have recently begun to develop "Top Five" lists of relatively expensive procedures that do not provide meaningful benefit to at least some categories of patients for whom they are commonly ordered. The Choosing Wisely® campaign is the most visible example. The extent to which the development of these lists has influenced the behavior of physicians or patients, however, remains unknown. In this study, investigators partner with the Wisconsin Collaborative for Healthcare Quality (WCHQ), a statewide consortium of hospitals, medical practices and health systems, to examine the effectiveness of two organizational interventions in reducing unproven or ineffective breast cancer care. Two interventions will be tested: (a) A "basic" public reporting intervention which summarizes on a public website practice-level statistics regarding use of targeted ineffective or unproven interventions for breast cancer and (ii) an "enhanced" intervention, augmenting public reporting with a smart phone-based application (App) that gives providers just-in-time information, decision-making tools, and personalized patient education materials that support reductions in the use of breast cancer interventions targeted based upon Choosing Wisely® or national oncology society guidelines. Specifically, the aims are: (1) To examine whether basic public reporting reduces use of targeted breast cancer practices among a contemporary cohort of patients with incident breast cancer in the intervention state relative to usual care in comparison states, using Marketscan and Medicare claims data while adjusting for possible confounders and temporal trends; (2) To examine the effectiveness of the enhanced intervention relative to the basic intervention; and (3) To simulate cost savings forthcoming from nationwide implementation of both interventions (relative to each other and to usual care) and to describe the implications of these findings for reimbursement policy and program initiatives. The results will provide rigorous evidence regarding the effectiveness of a unique all-payer, all-age public reporting system for influencing provider behavior that may be easily exportable to other states. Findings will be further relevant to the ACO environment, which is expected to provide financial disincentives for providing ineffective or unproven care.

Conditions

• Breast Cancer

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Basic public reporting	The basic intervention will comprise public reporting through the WCHQ website. Individual-level, claims data submitted for billing to third party payers by participating healthsystems will be used to (i) identify cohorts of women with incident breast cancer at the practice-level and (ii) construct the metrics for public reporting and individual benchmarking information. These data are consistent with Medicare and Marketscan claims in both format and content thereby ensuring seamless application of the validated algorithm as well as construction of outcome variables as proposed in Aims 1 and 2 of the study.
BEHAVIORAL	Enhanced intervention	The enhanced intervention adds an app comprising a decision tool, patient education and communication information that will be delivering concise, readily accessible information about the main components of the intervention. Specifically, physicians in participating practices will be provided a smartphone-based, point-of-care application that will include i) a list of the unproven/ineffective interventions with statements about a) scientifically proven appropriate use; b) proven or suspected downsides to inappropriate use; ii) clinical calculators that allow physician to input individual patients' clinical/tumor characteristics for each test; iii) practice-specific summary of publicly reported results; and iv) printable patient information adapted from the ASCO Choosing Wisely website.
BEHAVIORAL	Control group - observational	Comparison states will be used to evaluate the interventions in light of possible secular trends in the region and the nation. The design strategy will enable estimates of the effectiveness of the basic intervention (Aim 1) by comparing (i) the pre-intervention rates to post-intervention rates as well as by comparing (ii) changes between the pre- and post-intervention periods for the "treatment" state (WI) relative to comparison states, neighboring states and others. A similar approach will be used in Part II to provide estimates of the enhanced intervention's impact relative to the basic intervention and contemporary usual care provided in control states, thereby enabling the cost-savings analyses proposed as part of Aim 3.

Timeline

• Start date: 2014-09-01
• Primary completion: 2019-12-01
• Completion: 2019-12-01
• First posted: 2016-07-13
• Last updated: 2020-01-22

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States