Integrated Care clinical trials

Implementation of Community-based Collaborative Management of Complex Chronic Patients

Background/Aims: Large scale adoption of integrated care for chronic patients constitutes a key milestone to accelerate adaptation of current healthcare systems to the evolving needs triggered by population ageing and high prevalence of chronic conditions. Lessons learnt from deployment experiences are being disseminated as "good practices". But, there is need for further assessment of implementation strategies in real world scenarios. Moreover, progresses achieved in disease-oriented integrated care cannot be automatically transferred to management of complex chronic patients (CCP). The protocol addresses five aims: 1) implementation of two integrated care interventions using a collaborative and adaptive case management (ACM) approach (i) Community-based management of CCP; and, ii) Integrated care for patients under long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT)); 2) adoption of information and communication technologies (ICT) required to support collaborative ACM; 3) to evaluate the impact of enhanced clinical health risk assessment and stratification; 5) to generate a roadmap for regional adoption of the CCP program. Methods/Design: the CCP program will be deployed in three healthcare sector of Barcelona-Esquerra (AISBE) (520 k citizens) and in two other areas of Catalonia: Badalona Serveis Assistencials (BSA) (420 k citizens) and Lleida (366 k citizens) following Plan-Do-Study-Act iterative cycles, using the Model for Assessment of Telemedicine for evaluation purposes. The study also addresses the steps for scale-up of integrated care in the entire Catalan region (7.5 M citizens). Observational studies with matched controls have been planned for both Community-based management of CCP (n=3.000) and for Integrated care for patients under LTOT (n=500). Moreover, clustered randomized controlled trials (RCT) are planned on top of the observational studies to test specific questions (i.e. performance of the ICT platform providing ACM functionalities). Main components of CCP program are: a) patient stratification; b) comprehensive assessment strategies; c) ICT supported adaptive Case management; d) Roadmap for regional adoption. Hypothesis: the CCP program will generate guidelines for large scale deployment of the CCP program, including transferability analysis, facilitating adoption of integrated care services for management of multi-morbidity.