Impact of an Interprofessional Shared Decision-making and Goal-setting Decision Aid for Patients With Diabetes

November 16, 2020 updated by: Unity Health Toronto

Impact of an Interprofessional Shared Decision-making and Goal-setting Decision Aid for Patients With Diabetes - A Pilot Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

Diabetes care is complicated for people with diabetes as well as for health care providers: they have to watch their diet, exercise, take medications, checking blood sugars and blood pressure, get tests and see multiple doctors. On top of that, many with diabetes have other health problems, such as high blood pressure or arthritis, that make care even more complicated. Guidelines for improving the care of people with diabetes try to help by summarizing the best practices for care, but because diabetes care is so complicated, it is hard for them to be put into practice. One solution to this is a tool that can help people with diabetes set health care goals that are important to them, and participate actively in decisions about their own health care, together with health care providers. This tool would have an information booklet for patients with facts that can help them make a decision, a worksheet to help spell out what their goals are and how they want to get there, and a cheat-sheet for health care providers that gives them tips on how to do this. The purpose of this project is to find out if a tool like this would be helpful, how to make it more helpful and usable, and what the best way would be to make sure that people use it.

An interprofessional (IP) shared decision-making (SDM) and goal-setting tool kit, including a 1-page provider enabler, a point-of-care worksheet and a patient workbook, can be implemented successfully in clinical practice and will reduce decisional conflict and diabetes distress and improve chronic care delivery and quality of life in patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes and 2 other comorbid chronic diseases. The investigators hypothesize that patients in the intervention arm of the study will have reduced decisional conflict and diabetes distress, and improved decision-making satisfaction, chronic care delivery and quality of life.

Study Overview

Detailed Description

Significance:

Diabetes is prevalent and results in major morbidity. Care of the patient with diabetes is complex and often occurs in the context of other chronic illness; this multimorbidity negatively impacts morbidity and mortality. The Canadian Diabetes Association (CDA) Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPG) are a rigorously developed knowledge tool that comprehensively address all aspects of diabetes care, conforming to AGREE II standards for guideline development. However, guideline adherence in the patient with multimorbidity is challenging both for the provider and the patient, who are overwhelmed by numerous, often conflicting recommendations. An individualized approach to the multimorbid diabetic patient using shared decision-making (SDM) and goal setting may overcome challenges to guideline adherence; however these strategies have not been taken up extensively in clinical practice. Barriers to uptake can be overcome by incorporating SDM into the context of interprofessional care: in diabetes care, role expansion, active participation by more than one discipline and adding additional team members have been demonstrated to improve clinical outcomes. While SDM and decision aids have typically focused on one issue, the precedent and potential exists for their use in the translation of the CDA CPG into practice through the prioritization of complex guideline recommendations. Given the growing prevalence of diabetes and multimorbidity in Canada, effectively bridging the knowledge to practice gap in this area has the potential to significantly improve patient-important outcomes, health care delivery and system sustainability.

Objectives:

  1. To enhance the implementation of a complex guidelines document (CDA 2013 CPG) by assisting in prioritizing care for patients with diabetes and multiple other comorbidities through the use of a diabetes-focused SDM intervention;
  2. To systematically develop, test and pilot a SDM and goal-setting intervention following the United Kingdom Medical Research Council and Knowledge to Action Frameworks;
  3. To build a team consisting of members of the research community, patients, health care providers, CDA, and Local Health Integration Networks of the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, in order to increase the relevance of research conducted and enable dissemination of these research results into practice.

Hypothesis An interprofessional SDM and goal-setting tool kit, including a 1-page provider enabler, a point-of-care worksheet and a patient workbook, can be implemented successfully in clinical practice and will reduce decisional conflict and diabetes distress and improve chronic care delivery and quality of life in patients with type 1 or type 2 diabetes and 2 other comorbid chronic diseases.

Research Plan Development, testing and refinement: An evidence-based multi-component SDM intervention will be developed, framed by the Interprofessional SDM Model and based on user input from individual interviews regarding feasibility, acceptability and mediators of use. Usability testing will be done using cognitive task analysis to assess paths users take to accomplish tasks, errors made, when and where they encountered confusion or frustration, degree of satisfaction and quality of decision support. Based on feedback received, the tool will be refined through several iterative cycles of feedback and redesign.

Pilot trial: The tool kit will be piloted in a two-step parallel clustered randomized controlled trial (RCT) whose primary purpose is to assess intervention fidelity and to test the feasibility of conducting a larger RCT. The first step will be a provider-directed phase; the second step (which will occur 6 months later) will be a provider- and patient-directed phase. A secondary purpose of this study is to estimate the impact of the decision aid on decisional conflict; secondary outcomes include diabetes distress, chronic illness care and quality of life, assessed by patient-completed questionnaires of validated scales at baseline, 6 and 12 months. Analysis will be done by intention to treat. Multilevel hierarchical regression models will be used to account for the clustered nature of the data.

Study Type

Interventional

Enrollment (Actual)

225

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:

  • diagnosis of Type 1 or Type 2 diabetes and
  • have 2 or more other chronic comorbidities

Exclusion Criteria:

  • do not speak English
  • have documented cognitive deficits
  • unable to give informed consent
  • have limited life expectancy (<1 year)
  • not available for follow-up
  • seen primarily by a resident physician
  • are pregnant or considering conception

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: Randomized
  • Interventional Model: Parallel Assignment
  • Masking: Single

Arms and Interventions

Participant Group / Arm
Intervention / Treatment
Experimental: Shared decision-making aid

At study start (step 1: provider-directed intervention phase): Online shared decision-making aid, 1-page provider enabler, provider training video made available to health care providers

At 6 months (step 2: provider- and patient-directed phase): Online shared decision-making aid, 1-page patient enabler, patient training video also made available to patients (in addition to health care providers)

The IP-SDM toolkit consists of an online shared decision-making aid, 1-page provider enabler, a provider training video,1-page patient enabler, and a patient training video.
Placebo Comparator: Generic hard-copy diabetes resources

At study start (step 1: Provider-directed intervention phase): A hard copy of the executive summary of the CDA CPG and postcard outlining online resources made available to health care providers

At 6 months (step 2: provider- and patient-directed phase): A CDA patient education pamphlet regarding diabetes self-management also made available to patients

In addition, provider- and patient-directed guideline dissemination tools (not incorporating SDM) will also be publicly accessible from the CDA website.

A hard copy of the executive summary of the CDA CPG and postcard outlining online resources, CDA patient education pamphlet
Provider- and patient-directed guideline dissemination tools (not incorporating SDM) publicly accessible from the CDA website

What is the study measuring?

Primary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Decisional Conflict in Patients With Diabetes
Time Frame: This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.
Decisional conflict was chosen to allow us to assess the impact of our decision aid on the quality of the decision-making process, an important first measure of the effectiveness of a decision aid and the shared decision making process. This outcome is assessed by the Decisional Conflict Scale (DCS), a well-validated, patient-completed measure. DCS consists of 16 items, with 5 subscales (informed, values clarity, support, uncertainty, and effective decision) and an overall summary score. IT is scored on a 5-item Likert scale ranging from '0- strongly agree' to '4- strongly disagree'. It's minimum total score is 0 and it's maximum total score is 100. The higher the score, the worse the outcome. The lower the score, the better the outcome.
This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Outcome Measure
Measure Description
Time Frame
Patient With Diabetes' Assessment of Their Chronic Illness Care
Time Frame: This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.

This outcome was selected because it is a direct measure of knowledge use by patients that will allow us to better understand mediating variables of knowledge use such as patient activation, goal-setting, problem-solving, and decision support.

This outcome is assessed by the Patient Assessment of Care for Chronic Conditions (PACIC), a well-validated patient-completed questionnaire. PACIC includes 20 items, scored on a 5 point Likert scale ranging from '1 - None of the time' to '5 - Always'. PACIC consists of 5 sub-scales (patient activation, delivery system design, goal setting, problem solving, and follow-up/coordination) and an overall summary score. The minimum total score is 0 and the maximum total score is 50. A higher score indicates a better outcome.

This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.
Diabetes Distress in Patients With Diabetes
Time Frame: This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.

This outcome was selected because it is a direct measure of knowledge use by patients that will allow us to better understand mediating variables of knowledge use such as patient activation, goal-setting, problem-solving, and decision support.

This outcome is assessed by the Diabetes Distress Scale (DDS), a well-validated, patient-completed questionnaire. The DDS is a 17-item scale with 4 subscales (emotional burden, regimen distress, interpersonal distress and physician distress) with an overall summary score. It is scored on a 6-point Likert scale, ranging from '1 - no problem' to '6 - serious problem'. It's minimum total score is 0 and it's maximum total score is 6. The higher the score, the worse the outcome. The lower the score, the better the outcome.

This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.
Health-related Quality of Life in Patients With Diabetes
Time Frame: This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.

Quality of life was selected to inform future sample size calculations, as more holistic and patient-centred measure of knowledge use that uniquely acknowledges patient prioritization of health care goals.

This outcome is assessed by the Short Form 12 (SF-12), a well-validated, patient-completed questionnaire. The SF-12 consists of 12 items (minimum score is 0 and maximum score is 100; the higher the score, the better the quality of life.)

This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.
Intention to Engage in Shared Decision-making in Health Care Providers
Time Frame: This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.
This outcome is assessed by the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Reaction Questionnaire, a theory-based instrument to assess the impact of continuing professional development on clinical behavioral intentions. This outcome was selected to assess provider's intention to engage in shared decision-making, as a potential facilitator or barrier to shared decision-making. The CPD Reaction Questionnaire consists of 12 items with 5 subscales (intention, social influence, beliefs about capabilities, moral norm, and beliefs about consequences) and is scored on a 7-point Likert scale. It's minimum score is 1 and it's maximum score is 7. The higher the score, the better the outcome.
This outcome is measured at 0, 6 and 12 months.

Collaborators and Investigators

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

Investigators

  • Principal Investigator: Catherine H Yu, MD FRCPC, St. Michael's Hospital (Unity Health Toronto)

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.

General Publications

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 (Actual)

March 1, 2016

Primary Completion (Actual)

December 1, 2019

Study Completion (Actual)

December 1, 2019

Study Registration Dates

First Submitted

February 11, 2015

First Submitted That Met QC Criteria

February 26, 2015

First Posted (Estimate)

March 4, 2015

Study Record Updates

Last Update Posted (Actual)

December 10, 2020

Last Update Submitted That Met QC Criteria

November 16, 2020

Last Verified

November 1, 2020

More Information

Terms related to this study

Plan for Individual participant data (IPD)

Plan to Share Individual Participant Data (IPD)?

NO

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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