Clinical trial NCT06904469: Ostrobothnia Digital Clinic Experiment
Official title: Ostrobothnia Digital Clinic Experiment
Study type: INTERVENTIONAL
Overall status: NOT_YET_RECRUITING
Phase: NA
Conditions: Primary Care Provider
Keywords: digital healthcare
telemedicine
digital clinic
primary care
healthcare utilization
randomized controlled trial
Lead sponsor: Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare
Sponsor class: OTHER_GOV
Collaborators: name: Aalto University
name: University of Turku
First posted: 2025-04-01
Enrollment: 170306
Sex: ALL
Standard ages: CHILD
ADULT
OLDER_ADULT
Accepts healthy volunteers: yes
Allocation: RANDOMIZED
Intervention model: PARALLEL
Intervention model description: Cluster-randomized controlled trials, households as clusters
Primary purpose: HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Brief summary: This randomized controlled trial (RCT) examines the impacts of a publicly provided digital clinic that offers digital primary care services to consumers. This intervention grants access to a public digital clinic that provides chat-based primary care consultations via a mobile phone application and website, including care needs assessment, diagnoses, follow-up care recommendations, and prescriptions. The digital clinic supplements traditional public primary care services, including in-person visits and phone consultations. The trial takes place in Ostrobothnia, Finland, a healthcare district serving a population of 178,000 residents. The investigators will randomize access to the digital clinic at the household level, providing access to 50% of the households. By doing so, the investigators aim to evaluate whether digital services can substitute for, complement, or increase the utilization of traditional primary care, particularly in-person visits or calls to traditional clinics. At the end of the nine-month trial, access to the digital clinic will be expanded to the entire population.


Eligibility criteria: Inclusion Criteria for the intervention:

* All residents alive and residing in the region of Ostrobothnia (Finland) on March 14, 2015, AND permanent address observed in the Finnish Population Information System

Exclusion Criteria for the intervention:

* Resides in the city of Kristiinankaupunki OR resides in a household defined as institutionalized care

Exclusion Criteria for the analysis sample:

* The inclusion and exclusion criteria mentioned above AND:
* If an individual from the target population, extracted from the Population Information System, is not observed in Statistics Finland datasets, which is defined as not having a municipality of residence (missing data) at the end of 2024, the investigators will not use that individual in the study population in the analyses because the data do not include have covariates for the individual.
* Age 71 and above

Primary outcomes:
measure: The number of in-person visits in public primary care (Y1.1)
timeFrame: From the digital clinic launch to the end of treatment at 9 months
Secondary outcomes:
measure: The number of other contacts with traditional public primary care (Y1.2)
timeFrame: From the digital clinic launch to the end of treatment at 9 months
measure: The number of public digital clinic contacts (D.1).
timeFrame: From the digital clinic launch to the end of treatment at 9 months
Other outcomes:
measure: The total number of public primary care contacts (Y1.3)
timeFrame: From the digital clinic launch to the end of treatment at 9 months
measure: Presence or absence of public digital clinic contacts during the follow-up (yes/no) (D.2).
timeFrame: From the digital clinic launch to the end of treatment at 9 months
Locations:
city: Vaasa
country: Finland
facility: Wellbeing Services County of Ostrobothnia
Study officials:
affiliation: University of Turku and Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare
name: Mika T Kortelainen, PhD
role: STUDY_DIRECTOR
References: