Knee Osteoarthritis Care: A Quality Improvement Intervention in Physiotherapists

January 26, 2023 updated by: Universitaire Ziekenhuizen KU Leuven

Physiotherapists' knee OA care is suboptimal. Exercise therapy including a combination of aerobic, muscle strengthening and functional exercises is not always performed and a lot of treatments are used for which there is no evidence. By a continuing education session and a pop-up in the electronic patient file, this study wants to improve knee OA care by focusing on combined exercise therapy.

The study will be performed in collaboration with Pro-Q-Kine, an independent organization implementing quality improvement in Belgian physiotherapists' care. Besides Pro-Q-Kine the study will be performed in collaboration with two or three software producers of physiotherapists' electronic patient files that reached a national homologation for their respective software packages and covering a large part of the Flemish physiotherapists.

Pro-Q-Kine will organize sessions of continuing education with a focus on optimal knee OA care. These sessions will be performed in LOK-groups (local peer-groups of physiotherapists who meet each other for continuing education). At these sessions the physiotherapists will be asked to take part to the study. A pop-up will be installed in the electronic patient file of the participating physiotherapists, lightening up when physiotherapists register a patient with knee OA. The pop-up includes a short message about optimal knee OA care. The physiotherapists will also receive a script for a query in their electronic patient files in order to extract those patients that initiated a treatment for knee OA between 1 year and 3 months before the therapists received education. These patients will receive a letter of their respective physiotherapists in which they are addressed to take part to the study. An informed consent, patient questionnaire and retour-envelope will be included. There will also be the opportunity to complete the questionnaire electronically with an electronic informed consent. The patient questionnaire will include some background details (such as age and gender) and details about the physiotherapeutic treatments they received for knee OA. The patient questionnaire will be coded with a number, referring to the physiotherapist and to the individual patient (the first patient of the first physiotherapist will be coded as 1.01, the 10th patient of the 14th physiotherapist will be coded as 14.10). Patients' names will not be revealed to the investigators and physiotherapists will not have any access to the completed patients' questionnaires. The general practitioners in the environment of the physiotherapist will (probably) receive a letter from the researchers. This letter will contain information about the importance of referral to a physiotherapist in knee OA care and about knee OA care in general. This letter will also refer to the study that is going on in physiotherapists' care, without details.

Six months after the installation of the pop-up, the physiotherapists will be asked again to perform the query to extract patients out of the electronic patient file that have been treated for knee OA and whose treatment sessions had been started in the period of three months from the installation of the pop-up.

Study Overview

Status

Terminated

Conditions

Intervention / Treatment

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

12

Phase

  • Not Applicable

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:

  • patients with knee osteoarthritis, treated by a participating physiotherapist within a predefined period

Exclusion Criteria:

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

  • Primary Purpose: Health Services Research
  • Allocation: N/A
  • Interventional Model: Single Group Assignment
  • Masking: None (Open Label)

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Other: Intervention= education peer review group
For this controlled trial a group of physiotherapists will recieve specific education about optimal exercise therapy for patioents with knee OA in early stage
Other: Education to physiotherapists

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Time Frame
Quality of knee osteoarthritis care
Time Frame: 0-6 months
0-6 months

Collaborators and Investigators

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

Sponsor

Universitaire Ziekenhuizen KU Leuven

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

September 1, 2014

Primary Completion (Actual)

August 1, 2017

Study Completion (Actual)

August 1, 2017

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

June 26, 2014

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

June 26, 2014

First Posted (Estimate)

June 27, 2014

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Estimate)

January 30, 2023

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

January 26, 2023

Last Verified

October 1, 2016

More Information

Terms related to this study

Additional Relevant MeSH Terms

Other Study ID Numbers

  • S56904

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.

Clinical Trials on Quality of Knee Osteoarthritis Care

Clinical Trials on Education to physiotherapists

Search Similar Trials

Sponsors and Collaborators

Medical Conditions

Drug Interventions

CROs by country

CROs in Myanmar

Conditions

Rare Diseases

Drug Interventions

Dietary Supplements

Sponsor/Collaborators

Locations

Subscribe