Improving Decision Making for Patients With Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation

Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation Clinical Trial

Official title: Improving Decision Making for Patients With Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation

Status Completed

Clinical Trial 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).

Clinical Trial 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. ;

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Prolonged Mechanical Ventilation
• Surrogate Decision Makers

• NCT number: NCT01751061
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: Duke University
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: January 2013
• Completion date: January 6, 2017