Clinical trial NCT04195880: Reducing Veterans Hospitalizations From Community Living Centers
Official title: Implementing and Evaluating INTERACT in VA CLCs
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: COMPLETED
Phase: NA
Conditions: Quality Improvement
Lead sponsor: VA Office of Research and Development
Sponsor class: FED
Collaborators: name: Providence VA Medical Center
First posted: 2019-12-12
Enrollment: 6543
Sex: ALL
Minimum age (years): 18
Standard ages: ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: no
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Intervention model description: Pair matched cluster randomized trial; randomization at the provider level.
Primary purpose: HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Brief summary: The goal of the project was to implement and evaluate the intervention, Interventions to Reduce Acute Care Transfers (INTERACT) in VHA CLCs, which is designed to improve the care of Veterans using CLCs who experience acute changes in their condition and at the same time reduce their rate of hospitalization.

Detailed description: The project was designed to show that engagement by frontline CLC staff, in using the INTERACT (VA version of INTERACT) program will identify Veterans' clinical problems earlier, help evaluate and safely initiate management of acute changes in conditions in the CLC, communicate more effectively with physicians about Veterans' conditions, thereby avoiding unnecessary hospitalizations, and provide more emergent hospitalizations when necessary.

The project planned to implement the INTERACT quality improvement program as the intervention in up to 15 randomly selected, pair matched CLCs for a 6 month intensive training period and an additional 12-18 month ongoing follow-up monitoring period.

Additionally, a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the implementation of the INTERACT intervention was done to characterize the fidelity with which CLCs in the intervention pairs participated in training, engaged in regular conference calls, undertook root cause analyses identifying why hospitalizations occurred and used the tools in which they were trained.

The program's effect is based on three core strategies: 1) enabling front-line NH staff to identify acute conditions early in their course, thereby helping to prevent them from becoming severe enough to require acute hospitalization; 2) providing communication and decision support tools that assist with the safe and effective management of certain conditions in the Community Living Center (CLC) without transfer to the acute hospital; and 3) educating CLC staff in advance care planning and discussions about end-of-life and comfort care plans, and thus increasing the use of advance directives, comfort care measures, and palliative and hospice care as an alternative to hospitalization when appropriate.

Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria:

* Veterans in experimental and control CLCs during 18 months during which the INTERAC intervention was implemented.

Exclusion Criteria:

* Veterans not in participating CLCs

Primary outcomes:
measure: Hospital Admissions Per Person Year Alive Measured at the Facility Month Level
timeFrame: 36 months
Secondary outcomes:
measure: Potentially Avoidable Hospitalizations
timeFrame: 18 months followup during observation period.
Other outcomes:
Locations:
city: Providence
country: United States
facility: Providence VA Medical Center, Providence, RI
state: Rhode Island
Study officials:
affiliation: Providence VA Medical Center, Providence, RI
name: Vincent Mor, PhD
role: PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATOR
References:
citation: Mochel AL, Henry ND, Saliba D, Phibbs CS, Ouslander JG, Mor V. INTERACT in VA Community Living Centers (CLCs): Training and Implementation Strategies. Geriatr Nurs. 2018 Mar-Apr;39(2):212-218. doi: 10.1016/j.gerinurse.2017.09.002. Epub 2017 Oct 5.
citation: Mochel AL, Holle CL, Rudolph JL, Ouslander JG, Saliba D, Mor V, Mittman BS. Influencing Factors Associated with Implementation of INTERACT (Interventions to Reduce Acute Care Transfers) in VA Community Living Centers (CLCs) Using the Consolidated Framework. J Aging Soc Policy. 2022 Sep 3;34(5):673-689. doi: 10.1080/08959420.2021.1926862. Epub 2021 Jun 4.