GrandAides; a Workforce Innovation to Address Post Acute Care

Temple University

Status: Completed

Conditions: Heart Failure

Treatments: Behavioral: GrandAides

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04966442

Temple University

Details and patient eligibility

About

Randomized controlled trial with two groups looking at post hospital care for patients who were admitted with congestive heart failure. The control group includes standard of care provided to the patients after discharge including a hospital employed community health worker. The intervention group receives a specially trained GrandAide following the GrandAide model for post acute care. Difference in ER visits and readmissions was measured.

Full description

GrandAides program is a credible messenger community health worker based program that assumes a community health worker from the community who has specialized education around a certain chronic condition will be able to support patients in the outpatient setting more effectively than current standard of care. In this study a GrandAide visited a patient discharged from the hospital in their home for 4 weeks providing education, checking vital signs, and assisting with communication with the cardiologist. The study measured the difference in hospital admissions and ER visits between the group that was assigned a GrandAid and the group that took part in standard care. The groups were assigned randomly. The difference was calculated using one and two tailed t-test results.

Enrollment: 98 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 99 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

Clinical diagnosis of heart failure Lives in 6 zipcode catchment area of Temple University Hospital Is followed by Temple Cardiology

Exclusion criteria

End Stage Renal Disease Housed in a Skilled Nursing Facility Substance Use Disorder Unable to give consent Doesn't speak English Under age 18

Trial design

Primary purpose: Prevention

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Quadruple Blind

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98 participants in 2 patient groups

GrandAides

Experimental group

Description:

Patients randomized to this arm of the trial received access to a specially trained GrandAide to work as a credible messenger community health worker. This GrandAide received 6 weeks of education around congestive heart failure to support the patient in the outpatient setting.

Treatment:

Behavioral: GrandAides

Standard of Care

No Intervention group

Description:

This arm served as the control and included standard of care outpatient support for patients with heart failure.This support was done telephonically.