ICOLLAB FOR Children With Medical Complexity — ICOLLAB  

Children With Medical Complexity Clinical Trial

Official title: Interagency Collaboration To Improve Home Care of Children With Medical Complexity.

Status Completed

Clinical Trial Summary

Background: Children with medical complexity (CMC) have higher hospitalizations and readmissions compared to children without medical complexity. While CMC were institutionalized in the past, increasingly CMCs are now cared for at home. Caring for individuals with disabilities at home, and not congregate care settings is a Healthy People 2020 Objective. Home health nursing, especially good-quality care, is important for CMC. The purpose of this research is to test whether collaboration between home health nurses, primary-care doctors, and the complex care team (a special team at Brenner Children's Hospital that provides care for children with complex chronic medical conditions (CCMC)) can improve the health of these children.

Clinical Trial Description

The specific aims of this study are to: develop and implement a model of care, Interagency Collaboration (ICollab) in which communication with Home Health Nurse (HHN) and Primary Care Provider (PCP) is maintained and clinical support is provided to HHN; evaluate whether ICollab is effective in reducing healthcare utilization of Children with medical complexity (CMC) and caregiver burden; and assess caregiver satisfaction in home health care, HHN retention, and collaboration with other healthcare providers.

Methods: Investigators will develop and implement an intervention model (ICollab) that includes: (1) maintaining communication with HHN and PCP about clinical information about CMC, and (2) providing clinical support to HHN. Investigators will create an interdisciplinary intervention team in our children s hospital consisting of a pediatrician and a nurse. The intervention team will ensure communication with HHN and PCP by communicating clinical information (recommendations from clinic visits and emergency room (ER) visits, and discharge summary). The team will provide clinical support to HHN via collaborative meetings and availability as a resource for clinical problem-solving with HHN. Investigators will recruit 110 CMC discharged home on private-duty nursing services into this randomized trial. The intervention group (n=55) will receive the ICollab intervention for 6 months post-discharge from the hospital, in addition to usual care. Children in the control group (n=55) will receive only usual care. Outcome measures will include healthcare utilization metrics (hospitalization rates, ER visit rates, and days to readmission), caregiver burden and caregiver satisfaction with home health care, HHN retention, and HHN collaboration with other healthcare providers. Investigators hypothesize that ICollab will reduce healthcare utilization and caregiver burden, and improve caregiver satisfaction with home health care, increase HHN retention, and increase HHN collaboration with other healthcare providers. Investigators will perform a systematic process evaluation of the implementation of the intervention and standardize the ICollab model.

Implications: How healthcare delivery of CMC can be structured to avoid fragmentation especially surrounding transition across clinical settings is an understudied area. Our results will address this gap by providing a critically needed evidence-base for interventions to improve the quality of healthcare delivery for CMC ;

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Children With Medical Complexity

• NCT number: NCT03978468
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: Wake Forest University Health Sciences
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: November 8, 2019
• Completion date: March 15, 2023