Harnessing Health IT for Self-Management Support and Medication Activation in a Medicaid Health Plan (SMARTSteps)

We will be conducting an evaluation of a quality improvement initiative that the San Francisco Health Plan (SFHP), a large Medicaid managed care plan in SF, is conducting for approximately 500 SFHP enrollees with diabetes who are attending 4 Community Health Network Clinics in San Francisco (CHNSF) over a two year period. The intervention that SFHP is implementing is Automated Telephone Support Management (ATSM), a health IT innovation used as adjunct to care management. The partnership with University of California, San Francisco-San Francisco General Hospital (UCSF-SFGH) researchers is based on previous work we have done in the CHNSF regarding using ATSM among diabetes patients to improve self-management activities and other health outcomes,but in the current demonstration project and evaluation, the recruitment of participants and implementation of the intervention will be done by the SFHP; UCSF will only conduct an evaluation. The Governing Board at the SFHP decided to adopt the ATSM model for its growing number of diabetes patients, to dedicate nursing staff to respond to ATSM data and engage with enrollees and their providers, to underwrite the costs of ATSM implementation, to randomly assign their patients to one of two types of ATSM (one that involves medication review/intensification vs. one that only delivers behavioral support), and to contact eligible SFHP members for ATSM and also to briefly describe the evaluation study to be carried out by UCSF. We, as UCSF researchers, will evaluate the impact of the interventions on patient outcomes. There will be limited contact with patients by the UCSF research team. UCSF research staff will only contact patients after SFHP has determined that their patients are interested in being contacted about the evaluation; and there will be no collection of personal health information by UCSF evaluators. UCSF research staff will conduct a telephone survey after verbal consent procedures, at baseline and 6 months (and for patients wait-listed, again at 12 months), for patients participating in the ATSM intervention. The SFHP will maintain an identification (ID) link between patients who are in the intervention and who are conducted about the evaluation, but they will not have patient-linked survey data, nor will UCSF have linked health-related data from the SFHP regarding patient outcomes, although de-identified data will be included in the UCSF evaluation. UCSF will conduct the quantitative data analyses of de-identified data provided to us by the SFHP at set times over the study period to examine the impact of the interventions on clinical outcomes. The evaluation will focus on the effects of ATSM on both patient-centered outcomes and on clinical outcomes through this "real-world" effectiveness study. The fact that recruitment and implementation will be carried out by SFHP, that SFHP will maintain the link to patients in the evaluation but will not have the survey data linked to individuals, and that only SFHP will have control over the personal health information of patients, has important implications for generalizability.