View clinical trials related to Multimorbidity.
Filter by:Rationale A recent study into the patient perspective of patients with multiple chronic conditions in the Netherlands underlines the strain multimorbidity can put on people. Most patients would appreciate more coordination from and communication with their care providers. This call for better coordination of needs and preferences ties into the concept of Advance Care Planning (ACP). ACP is a structured process of communication in which patients and physicians discuss and, if applicable, document health preferences and goals of patients regarding their last phase in life. Most ACP studies have been performed amongst older, terminally ill patients with the main aim of establishing patients' preferences before they lose capacity. We want to investigate the potential of ACP to increase patient empowerment in a population of competent patients with multimorbidity, who are not necessarily in their last phase of life. The distribution of healthcare expenditure among the population requiring care is skewed. In the Netherlands the top-10% most cost incurring patients account for 68% of expenditure. Many of these patients receive unnecessary or ineffective care, with a recent study estimating preventable spending at 10%. High-Need High-Cost patients comprise a very heterogeneous group, yet one common denominator explaining high cost is the high prevalence of multiple chronic conditions. Both overtreatment and conflicting treatment are legitimate concerns within this population. As multimorbidity and frailty increase with age, the older patient with multimorbidity is especially at risk. Targeted care programmes have been developed under the assumption that better coordination will lead to a reduction in healthcare utilization. However, although care might be identified as preventable or inefficient from a medical point of view, this is not necessarily the case from a patient perspective. We are interested how patients experience such care and thereby if better coordination would indeed lead to a reduction in utilization. Because ACP supports patients in timely recognition and better expression of their needs and preferences, we hypothesize that care will address those needs and preferences more adequately, which will result in improved patient assessment of care. We further hypothesize that patient empowerment will enable better planning of care and decision making, which can result in less unwanted or preventable interventions. As a consequence healthcare utilization might decrease. However, another possibility is that rather than leading to a decrease, improved empowerment may lead to an increase in utilization because care which is deemed superfluous from a medical perspective might not be perceived as such by patients. Objective The primary objective of our pilot study is to assess the feasibility of a formal Randomized Controlled Trial. Our secondary pilot objectives are to collect data on patient experience of healthcare, patient engagement, cost-effectiveness, and other data that might inform the design of a full-scale RCT. Study design Randomized pilot study Study population Patients over 65 years of age with polypharmacy, multimorbidity and multiple hospitalizations and/or ER admissions in the past year Intervention One of the most well-researched ACP programmes is the Respecting Choices Programme. In this programme, a trained facilitator encourages patients to reflect on their goals, values and beliefs, to discuss and document their future choices, and to appoint a surrogate decision maker. The programme was translated to the Dutch context in previous studies in the nursing home setting and oncology care. Patients randomized to receive ACP will have two meetings with a trained facilitator within two months. Main study parameters/endpoints Primary: trial-feasibility is defined as the successful inclusion of 50 patients in total, timely administration of the intervention in 25 patients, adherence to follow-up procedures and identification of problems or barriers during recruitment, inclusion, intervention administration and follow-up. Secondary: main outcome for cost-effectiveness is total duration and number of hospital admissions, as a proxy for both costs and effects (iMCQ). In order to inform a future cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), data on health-related quality of life (EQ5D-5L) will also be collected. Our outcomes for patient assessment of care and patient empowerment are the PACIC questionnaire, the ACP Engagement Survey and the appointment of a surrogate decision maker and/or the documentation of advance directives.
The progressive rising of multimorbidity, which has been always considered the hallmark of clinical complexity (CC), has made management of the "complex" patient one of the most topical and challenging issues in medicine. However, patient-related factors (multimorbidity, age, frailty, disease severity) pertain only to the biological complexity, while CC is the result of the dynamic interaction between biological complexity and a number of other coexisting factors (socio-economic, cultural, behavioural, environmental). Starting from these premises, the investigators designed a five-year observational prospective longitudinal study that aims to validate and compare a CC score system on a large cohort of patients (n=1000) admitted in internal medicine wards. Clinicians, biostatisticians and epidemiologists will cooperate into the project. A questionnaire that encompasses the main biological and extra-biological factors was designed (Clinical Complexity Index, CCI) by a multiprofessional consensus. This questionnaire will be administered by the investigators to the patients and validated. Consecutive patients will be enrolled every other week for two years and followed-up for 5 years. The primary endpoint will be the validation of the CCI. Thereafter, the investigators will evaluate the correlation between the CCI and the length of stay of the index hospitalization, assuming that a higher CCI score is associated with longer length of stay. The secondary endpoints will be the demonstration of the association between higher CCI score and more health resources utilization (i.e., evaluating occurrence of hospital readmissions, number of accesses to the emergency room, visits at the outpatient clinic, different drugs prescribed and hospital reimbursement according to the local diagnosis-related group [DRG] system) along with worse prognosis (mortality at 1 and 5 years).