Capturing Outcomes of Clinical Activities Performed by a Rounding Pharmacist Practising in a Team Environment

December 7, 2007 updated by: University of Alberta

Capturing Outcomes of Clinical Activities Performed by a Rounding Pharmacist Practising in a Team Environment (COLLABORATE)

We, the researchers, propose to link a clinical pharmacist with an internal medicine or family medicine team to provide pharmaceutical care to all patients assigned to the team. The hypothesis is that through this team based approach, pharmacists will act as a resource for providing pharmacotherapeutic advice during the drug therapy decision making process and promote optimal drug use by identifying and resolving actual and potential drug related problems. This study is designed to test this hypothesis, by assessing the impact of this intervention on evidence based, quality of drug therapy indicators, for patients admitted with heart failure (HF), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), community acquired pneumonia (CAP), type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), and stable coronary artery disease (CAD).

Study Overview

Detailed Description

The overall goal of the COLLABORATE study is to improve processes of care and patient outcomes by optimizing drug therapy via a hospital pharmacy practice model that integrates clinical pharmacists into the patient care team.

The intervention consists of a clinical pharmacist assigned to the patient care team for the purpose of providing proactive clinical pharmacy services. The study pharmacist will be available during normal office hours 5 days per week to provide clarification of the patient's medication history, identify and resolve actual and potential patient specific drug related problems/issues, participate in patient care rounds, provide drug information to the patient care team, provide patient education and discharge medication counselling, and provide physician and/or nursing staff education. The anticipated pharmacist to patient ratio is approximately 1:20.

Control patients will receive usual care. Usual care consists of reactive clinical pharmacy services (i.e. drug related issues identified as orders are received, or by patient profile review) provided by a ward based, not team based, clinical pharmacist.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

452

Phase

  • Phase 4

Contacts and Locations

This section provides the contact details for those conducting the study, and information on where this study is being conducted.

Study Locations

    • Alberta
      • Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6G 2B7
        • University of Alberta Hospital
      • Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T5H 3V9
        • Royal Alexandra Hospital
      • Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T6L 5X8
        • Grey Nuns Community Hospital

Participation Criteria

Researchers look for people who fit a certain description, called eligibility criteria. Some examples of these criteria are a person's general health condition or prior treatments.

Eligibility Criteria

Ages Eligible for Study

18 years and older (Adult, Older Adult)

Accepts Healthy Volunteers

No

Genders Eligible for Study

All

Description

Inclusion Criteria:

  • Consecutive patients > 18 years of age admitted to participating internal and family medicine teams during the 1 year study period will be eligible to receive the pharmacist intervention. For the purposes of data analysis, patients with a most responsible or primary diagnosis of HF, COPD, CAP, T2DM, and CAD will be included.

Exclusion Criteria:

  • Residence outside the Capital Health catchment
  • Admitted for ≤ 2 days
  • Palliative care
  • Transferred to another team

Study Plan

This section provides details of the study plan, including how the study is designed and what the study is measuring.

How is the study designed?

Design Details

  • Allocation: Non-Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Time Frame
Improvement in proportion of quality indicators achieved, for target diseases as a most responsible or primary diagnosis, between groups.
Time Frame: in hospital
in hospital

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Time Frame
Differences in condition-specific achievement of drug therapy quality indicators;
Time Frame: in hospital
in hospital
Differences in 6 month hospital readmission rate;
Time Frame: 6 months
6 months
Differences in number, type, acceptance rate, and expected impact of all pharmacist interventions;
Time Frame: in hospital
in hospital
Qualitative evaluation of the impact of the intervention via interviews with the participating pharmacists and physicians.
Time Frame: in hospital
in hospital

Collaborators and Investigators

This is where you will find people and organizations involved with this study.

Collaborators

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Ross T. Tsuyuki, PharmD, MSc, University of Alberta

Publications and helpful links

The person responsible for entering information about the study voluntarily provides these publications. These may be about anything related to the study.

Helpful Links

Study record dates

These dates track the progress of study record and summary results submissions to ClinicalTrials.gov. Study records and reported results are reviewed by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to make sure they meet specific quality control standards before being posted on the public website.

Study Major Dates

Study Start

February 1, 2006

Study Completion (Actual)

July 1, 2007

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

July 12, 2006

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

July 12, 2006

First Posted (Estimate)

July 13, 2006

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Estimate)

December 11, 2007

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

December 7, 2007

Last Verified

February 1, 2006

More Information

This information was retrieved directly from the website clinicaltrials.gov without any changes. If you have any requests to change, remove or update your study details, please contact register@clinicaltrials.gov. As soon as a change is implemented on clinicaltrials.gov, this will be updated automatically on our website as well.

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