Abstract
BackgroundThe gap between the level of care recommended by evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and the actual care delivered to patients in practice has been well established. The Canadian Diabetes Association (CDA) created an implementation strategy to improve the implementation of its 2008 guidelines. This study will evaluate the impact of the strategy to improve cardiovascular disease (CVD) screening, prevention and treatment for people with diabetes.DesignA pragmatic cluster-randomized trial will be conducted to evaluate the CDA's CVD Toolkit. All family physicians in Ontario, Canada were randomly allocated to receive the Toolkit, which includes several printed educational materials targeting CVD screening, prevention and treatment, either in spring 2009 (intervention arm) or in spring 2010 (control arm). Randomization occurred at the level of the practice. Forty family physicians from each arm will be recruited to participate, and the medical records for 20 of their diabetic patients at high risk for CVD will be retrospectively reviewed. Outcome measures will be assessed for each patient between July 2009 and March 2010. The primary outcome will be that the patient is receiving a statin. Secondary outcomes will include 1) the receipt of an angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor or angiotensin receptor blocker, 2) various intermediate measures (A1c, blood pressure, LDL-cholesterol, total-/HDL-cholesterol ratio, body mass index and waist circumference), and 3) clinical inertia (the failure to change therapy in response to an abnormal A1c, blood pressure or cholesterol reading). The analysis will be carried out using multilevel hierarchical logistic regression models to account for the clustered nature of the data. The group assignment will be a physician-level variable. In addition, a process evaluation study with six focus groups of family physicians will assess the acceptability of the CDA's Toolkit and will explore factors contributing to any change or lack of change in behaviour, from the perspectives of family physicians.DiscussionPrinted educational materials for physicians have been shown to exert small-to-moderate changes in patient care. The CDA's CVD Toolkit is an example of a practice guideline implementation strategy that can be disseminated to a wide audience relatively inexpensively, and so demonstrating its effectiveness at improving diabetes care could have important consequences for guideline developers, policy makers and clinicians.Trial RegistrationThe trial is registered with http://www.clinicaltrials.gov, ID # NCT01026688
Highlights
The gap between the level of care recommended by evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and the actual care delivered to patients in practice has been well established
The Canadian Diabetes Association (CDA)'s cardiovascular disease (CVD) Toolkit is an example of a practice guideline implementation strategy that can be disseminated to a wide audience relatively inexpensively, and so demonstrating its effectiveness at improving diabetes care could have important consequences for guideline developers, policy makers and clinicians
The objective of this study is to evaluate the impact of the CDA's strategy to improve cardiovascular disease screening, prevention and treatment for people with diabetes
Summary
The gap between the level of care recommended by evidence-based clinical practice guidelines and the actual care delivered to patients in practice has been well established. Multi-faceted interventions that target behaviour modification, glycemia and cardiovascular risk factors substantially reduce cardiovascular events and mortality[9,10]. These approaches are complex, as they require management of the multiple risk factors that lead to complications. Clinical practice guidelines (such as those produced by the Canadian Diabetes Association [CDA]) can help health care providers and patients by synthesizing the enormous literature on diabetes management into specific recommendations for care. The implementation of evidence-based guideline recommendations in actual clinical practice needs to be improved
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