The Effect of Peer Comparison Emails on Oncologists' Documentation of Cancer Stage

Oncology Clinical Trial

Official title:

The Effect of Peer Comparison Emails on Oncologists' Documentation of Cancer Stage

Clinical Trial Details — Status: Completed

Administrative data

• NCT number: NCT04298762
• Other study ID #: staging_documentation
• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: July 1, 2018
• Est. completion date: September 30, 2019

Study information

• Verified date: March 2020
• Source: Harvard School of Public Health
• Contact: n/a
• Is FDA regulated: No
• Study type: Interventional

Clinical Trial Summary

Documenting cancer stage is the most important determinant of treatment approach and survival for cancer patients. However, oncologists do not routinely document a patient's cancer stage in the structured field in electronic health records. This quality improvement pilot study evaluated the impact of sending an email to physicians at a cancer center of a large academic hospital with individualized data on their rates of cancer stage documentation using a structured field. The investigators assessed patient-level documentation and physician-level rates of staging documentation over 15 months including a three-month pre-period, a six-month pilot phase and a six-month follow-up period. The investigators also estimated staging documentation rates separately for each physician's new versus established patients.

Recruitment information / eligibility

• Status: Completed
• Enrollment: 56
• Est. completion date: September 30, 2019
• Est. primary completion date: September 30, 2019
• Accepts healthy volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers
• Gender: All
• Age group: N/A and older

Eligibility

Inclusion Criteria:

• Attending physicians who had been at one of three sites of hospital between January - August 2018

Exclusion Criteria:

• Physicians treating cancer patients where American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) staging modules were less clinically relevant

• Physicians with low clinical volume (<5 patients over 3 months)

• Physicians without any outpatient visits

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Neoplasms
• Oncology

Intervention

Other:
• No peer comparison email
The comparison group received no email communication on their cancer stage documentation activity.
• Peer comparison email
The intervention group received three separate emails with individualized data on their cancer stage documentation activity in the previous 1-3 months. The email described the number and percent of attributed patients for whom cancer stage was documented, and included a figure showing their staging documentation rate compared to their peers.

Locations

Country	Name	City	State
United States	Massachusetts General Hospital	Boston	Massachusetts

Sponsors (2)

Lead Sponsor	Collaborator
Harvard School of Public Health	Massachusetts General Hospital

Country where clinical trial is conducted

United States, 

Outcome

Type	Measure	Description	Time frame	Safety issue
Primary	Measuring if a patient's cancer stage was documented in a structured field in the Electronic Health Record on the date of the patient's first ambulatory care visit	Indicator of whether the structured field for cancer stage in the patient's electronic health record (EHR) was populated on the date of the first outpatient encounter that a patient had during the study period (1=yes, 0=no)	15 months
Secondary	Staging documentation rate (monthly)	Percentage of patients whose first outpatient encounter occurred in a given month for whom cancer stage was documented	15 months