Clinical Trial Summary
Physiotherapists' knee OA care is suboptimal. Exercise therapy including a combination of
aerobic, muscle strengthening and functional exercises is not always performed and a lot of
treatments are used for which there is no evidence. By a continuing education session and a
pop-up in the electronic patient file, this study wants to improve knee OA care by focusing
on combined exercise therapy.
The study will be performed in collaboration with Pro-Q-Kine, an independent organization
implementing quality improvement in Belgian physiotherapists' care. Besides Pro-Q-Kine the
study will be performed in collaboration with two or three software producers of
physiotherapists' electronic patient files that reached a national homologation for their
respective software packages and covering a large part of the Flemish physiotherapists.
Pro-Q-Kine will organize sessions of continuing education with a focus on optimal knee OA
care. These sessions will be performed in LOK-groups (local peer-groups of physiotherapists
who meet each other for continuing education). At these sessions the physiotherapists will be
asked to take part to the study. A pop-up will be installed in the electronic patient file of
the participating physiotherapists, lightening up when physiotherapists register a patient
with knee OA. The pop-up includes a short message about optimal knee OA care. The
physiotherapists will also receive a script for a query in their electronic patient files in
order to extract those patients that initiated a treatment for knee OA between 1 year and 3
months before the therapists received education. These patients will receive a letter of
their respective physiotherapists in which they are addressed to take part to the study. An
informed consent, patient questionnaire and retour-envelope will be included. There will also
be the opportunity to complete the questionnaire electronically with an electronic informed
consent. The patient questionnaire will include some background details (such as age and
gender) and details about the physiotherapeutic treatments they received for knee OA. The
patient questionnaire will be coded with a number, referring to the physiotherapist and to
the individual patient (the first patient of the first physiotherapist will be coded as 1.01,
the 10th patient of the 14th physiotherapist will be coded as 14.10). Patients' names will
not be revealed to the investigators and physiotherapists will not have any access to the
completed patients' questionnaires. The general practitioners in the environment of the
physiotherapist will (probably) receive a letter from the researchers. This letter will
contain information about the importance of referral to a physiotherapist in knee OA care and
about knee OA care in general. This letter will also refer to the study that is going on in
physiotherapists' care, without details.
Six months after the installation of the pop-up, the physiotherapists will be asked again to
perform the query to extract patients out of the electronic patient file that have been
treated for knee OA and whose treatment sessions had been started in the period of three
months from the installation of the pop-up.
