Interventions to Support Long-Term Adherence aNd Decrease Cardiovascular Events Post-Myocardial Infarction (ISLAND)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Background: In patients who have had a myocardial infarction (MI) and coronary disease, guidelines recommend cardiac rehabilitation services and the long-term use of cardiac medications to reduce the risk of recurrent cardiovascular events. Adherence to these recommendations substantially reduces morbidity and mortality post-MI. However, for a variety of patient, provider, and system-level reasons, adherence to cardiac medications declines to approximately 50% by 12 months. Likewise, only 30-40% of patients participate in cardiac rehabilitation. Thus, interventions to increase secondary prevention treatment adherence are urgently needed.

The Cardiac Care Network of Ontario (CCN) holds a registry of all patients in the province who have a coronary angiography. The registry has been used to identify gaps in care and to plan health system strategies for high-risk patients. More recently, a pilot trial was conducted in Hamilton by the trial team using data in the registry to send recurrent postal reminders regarding the importance of treatment adherence to patients, their pharmacists, and family physicians. A similar program is underway in Ottawa using automated phone calls with interactive voice response and nurse follow up. These interventions both have the potential to address known determinants of adherence. The CCN, Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, Health Quality Ontario, and other stakeholders across Ontario are interested in evaluating the comparative effectiveness and costs of these interventions.

Research Questions: The research objectives were formed by the decision makers' need to evaluate whether and in what format to sustain and/or scale-up post-MI educational reminder interventions:

i. Can educational reminders delivered via post and/or using interactive voice response with personalized telephone follow up improve secondary prevention treatment adherence post-MI?

ii. How do different approaches to improve adherence to these recommendations compare in terms of clinical effectiveness and costs?

iii. Which subgroups are more/less likely to respond to reminders?

Research Approach: This is a pragmatic, randomized controlled trial with blinded outcome assessment. Patients in cardiac centres throughout Ontario who undergo a coronary angiography will be provided a letter of information explaining the study appended to the standard CCN letter of information. CCN will identify eligible patients (those with substantial coronary artery disease who survive their initial hospitalization post-MI) and provide the patient list back to the cardiac centre. A representative at the centre will securely send this list to the Population Health Research Institute in Hamilton. Patients will be randomized by the Population Health Research Institute team to one of three arms:

1. - Usual care, with no standardized educational materials or reminders
2. - Postal letters sent from Population Health Research Institute on behalf of each hospital's interventional cardiology team to the patient approximately 4, 8, 20, 32, and 44 weeks post-MI, with an insert for the family physician and pharmacist at approximately 4 and 8 weeks post-MI.
3. - Postal letters as above plus interactive voice response phone calls to the patient delivered approximately 2 weeks after the letters, as well as personalized telephone follow up by trained lay health workers for patients identified by the interactive voice response system as non-adherent.

Patient self-report and administrative data will be used to assess outcomes 12 months post-MI. Analyses will be by intention to treat. The primary outcome is adherence to guideline-recommended treatments. Secondary outcomes include health services utilization (including outpatient visits to interventional cardiology), recurrent cardiovascular events, and mortality. During the trial, a theory-informed process questionnaire will be administered to a random sub-sample. An economic evaluation will be conducted from the perspective of the public health care payer.

Implications: This project has the potential to lead to improvements in care for patients at high cardiovascular risk as well as provide generalizable insights regarding how to optimize interventions to improve adherence. Further, it has the potential to inform how other health databases could be used to improve health system performance.