Adapted Hospital Discharge Intervention: the CONNECT Pilot
ConditionCommunication Research
Trial statusRecruiting
Trial phaseNot applicable
Trial typeInterventional
Biological sexAll
Age18+
SponsorBoston Medical Center
About this trial
Hospital discharge is a dangerous time for patients: one in five will suffer an adverse event, such as a medication error, and nearly 25% will be readmitted within 30 days. This time is even more dangerous for patients with who face communication barriers, including those with non-English language preference (NELP), low health literacy, and the elderly.
The investigators will pilot a post-discharge educational intervention to reinforce written discharge instructions (known as the After Visit Summary or AVS) using a randomized controlled trial design (2:1 intervention: control). The control group will receive current standard of care discharge education which includes a nurse reviewing their AVS and an automated call in English that allows patients to numerically select types of problems/questions that are then escalated to a nurse who should return their call within a few days. The intervention group will receive the standard of care discharge education with the AVS and an additional post-discharge educational call delivered by a registered nurse or other qualified health professional with the option to have written instructions professionally translated and sent via MyChart message--if available in their preferred language.
Eligibility criteria
This trial does not accept healthy volunteersQualifiers
Registered language in Epic (written or spoken) is Spanish, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Cape Verdean, or Vietnamese
Admitted to medicine team at Boston Medical Center (BMC)
Being discharged home (to the community)
Disqualifiers
On airborne infections precautions at time of recruitment
On C diff precautions at time of recruitment
On suicide precautions at time of recruitment
Nurse report of participant displaying cognitive impairment, ongoing delirium, or aggression
Trial design
Design model
Parallel
Treatments tested in this trial
Additional post discharge phone call
Other intervention24-72 hours after hospital discharge, a nurse will call participants to review the written After Visit Summary (AVS) given at discharge, including primary diagnosis, self-care instructions, emergency plan, medication changes, how and why to take medication, and scheduled follow up. These phone calls will take on average 10-15 minutes.
Treatment groups
60 Participants
are divided into 2 treatment groupsGroup A: Educational interventionOther 1 intervention
Group B: Standard of careNo intervention 0 interventions
Trial outcomes
Primary outcomes
1
Retention success by linguistic group
Number of enrolled participants who completed all study assessments stratified by linguistic group.
Time frame
12 months2
Fidelity to the intervention
The number of scheduled educations calls that were completed for participants in the intervention arm based on nursing documentation in Epic.
Time frame
12 monthsSecondary outcomes
1
Acceptability of the intervention
The Acceptability of Intervention Measure (AIM) will be completed by participants in the intervention arm to assess acceptability. It has four questions with 5 Likert responses where 1 = Completely disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neither agree nor disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Completely agree, The range of scores from 4 to 20 with higher scores indicating greater acceptability.
Time frame
12 months2
Feasibility of the intervention
Feasibility will be assessed by the number of participants in the intervention arm whose educational call was language concordant based on nursing documentation in Epic.
Time frame
12 months3
Patient Understanding of Discharge Instruction (UDI) Scale
Assessed by a composite score of six key domains of discharge instructions (primary diagnosis, self-care instructions, return precautions, medication changes, medication indications, follow-up) as determined by physician adjudicators (1=poor, 4 = near perfect). Higher scores demonstrate better understanding.
Time frame
12 monthsSponsors and contacts
Click on the lead sponsor to view all of their trials.
Boston Medical Center
Lead sponsor
National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD)
Collaborator
Source ClinicalTrials.gov