NCT04107935

Telemedicine for Reach, Education, Access and Treatment-ongoing

• Status: Terminated
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 43 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of Pittsburgh · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years – 75 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Diabetes (DM) management requires health care providers to provide patients with the appropriate amount of time, education and support that are necessary for quality care. Unfortunately, this is often impeded by limited access to resources, particularly in rural communities where DM rates are high and providers are scarce. Therefore, study investigators propose addressing these issues by implementing a model of care that includes diabetes educator (DE)-led planned visits with a real-time videoconferencing telemedicine program for ongoing patient support to improve DM outcomes.

Detailed description

Health care systems need to seek ways through quality improvement, care coordination, and workforce capacity to support quality care. It has been proposed that new models of care coupled with technology are needed. DM provides an ideal model for testing new approaches as the number of people with DM continues to rise, with an inverse shortage of health providers available to meet their needs. Most patients with Type 2 DM (T2DM) are seen in primary care (PC) where providers report barriers to comprehensive care that include limited time, educational resources, added workload and feeling ill-equipped to counsel patients on behavior change. Efforts to restructure PC are underway, like DE-led planned management visits, reported to improve healthy behaviors and outcomes in patients at high risk. DEs are well suited to support the skills, decision making, self-care behaviors, problem solving and active collaboration with the care team that serve as the foundation for diabetes self-management education and key to an effective planned visit. DEs supporting care and self-management education in PC have been shown to improve access and outcomes. For patients to sustain a lifetime of behavior to effectively self-manage, continued support to sustain the ongoing skills, knowledge, and behaviors required to manage their condition is needed. Given the need for enduring support and scarcity of providers, particularly in underserved rural areas, efforts to understand how best to re-design practice to involve DEs in PC and utilize technology to enable and scale engagement in self-management and ongoing support must be considered. The purpose of this application is to evaluate the deployment of Telemedicine for Reach, Education, Access, Treatment and Ongoing Support (TREAT-ON), a DE-driven, PC-based telemedicine model that relies on PC practice redesign to afford access to real-time ongoing support. Investigators hypothesize that the TREAT-ON model will help individuals identified as being high risk in an underserved rural community to achieve and sustain improvements in clinical, psychosocial and behavioral outcomes, and aim to demonstrate the model's viability in terms of feasibility and acceptability to inform future testing of TREAT-ON.

Conditions

• Diabetes Mellitus

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	TREAT-ON	TREAT-ON is a DE-driven self-management and support program that is delivered primarily through a real-time telemedicine videoconferencing platform. Like the usual care intervention, "high risk" patients with DM receiving care in underserved practices will be identified by a nurse practice-based manager (PCBM) and referred to a DE for self management services. Participants will complete an initial face-to-face visit with the DE to assess needs and develop a self-management treatment plan and goals. Via telemedicine videoconferencing, follow-up visits will be delivered by the DE to participants in their homes. Follow-up visits will be used to evaluate and support progress towards meeting and sustaining self-management goals and outcomes.
BEHAVIORAL	Usual Care	A retrospective control group will be formed from individuals who have previously participated in a program called the "Diabetes High Risk Initiative." In this program, patients receiving care in underserved practices are identified by a nurse PBCM to be at high risk for DM complications and/or unplanned care and referred to a DE for self management services delivered through primary care. Patients typically participate in one face-to-face visit with the DE to assess needs and develop self-management goals and then one to two follow-up encounters (generally conducted by telephone) with the PBCM or DE.

Timeline

• Start date: 2020-02-04
• Primary completion: 2022-08-04
• Completion: 2022-12-09
• First posted: 2019-09-27
• Last updated: 2023-12-18
• Results posted: 2023-11-18

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States