Feasibility of a care team-focused action plan to improve quality of care for children and adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease

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Project Summary Quality of care for youth with chronic disease suffers because of gaps in care coordination and communication among multiple health care providers. As patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have preventive and acute care needs beyond those of peers, IBD provides an excellent use case to evaluate interventions to enhance coordination and improve quality. Electronic health records (EHRs) have largely unfulfilled potential to facilitate coordination among teams of providers and families. This project leverages web-based and mobile phone app access points to share patient-specific information from the IBD center’s EHR. The intervention, myIBDplan, has been developed with systematic input from patients, families, and providers. Our objective is to assess the feasibility of delivering tailored guidance on IBD-related health needs to families and care team members using a low-cost, low-risk health communication innovation that enhances existing health information technology. The rationale is that brief, actionable, individually tailored guidance from IBD specialists to families and other providers will support decisions about seeking and providing timely preventive and acute care. Though the intervention builds on prior work and evidence and has been pilot tested, it requires feasibility testing in practice prior to large-scale evaluation. We will assess feasibility of myIBDplan through a pilot randomized, controlled trial at one site (n=60). The study has three research aims: (1) assess the feasibility of a rollout effectiveness trial design; (2) assess the feasibility and acceptability of implementing myIBDplan in a pediatric IBD clinic; (3) explore the feasibility of myIBDplan to improve (a) care quality measures collected from participants and the EHR and (b) patient self-management. In Aim 1, we will assess subject recruitment, randomization, retention, intervention completion, and contamination of control subjects using a study log. For Aim 2, we will use interviews and surveys to learn about barriers and facilitators of adoption by IBD clinics and acceptability and appropriateness from the perspectives of patients/families and care providers. For Aim 3, we will use surveys and medical record data to explore change over time in family-reported care quality, patient self-management, and completion of guideline-supported quality indicators for pediatric IBD for intervention and control groups, which could be endpoints in a subsequent randomized trial. This project is innovative in seeking to change the default ways that providers caring for the same child share information and address shared responsibilities. MyIBDplan targets well-described barriers to effective coordination and incorporates behavioral strategies of individual tailoring, family participation, expert modeling, and facilitation to streamline information delivery and enhance its relevance, accessibility, and actionability. The proposed study is significant because of its potential to improve health through a low-cost intervention to enhance use of existing health information technology. The study’s findings could provide a framework for EHR-supported quality improvements through learning health system research across a range of childhood-onset chronic diseases.