Implementation of the Hospital to Home (H2H) Heart Failure Initiative

VA Palo Alto Health Care System

Status: Completed

Conditions: Heart Failure

Treatments: Other: Usual Care; Other: Community of Practice Facilitation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other U.S. Federal agency

Identifiers

NCT02148341

SDP-09-160

Details and patient eligibility

About

This study determines if a community of practice of clinicians and quality improvement specialists can be used to implement a national quality initiative known as Hospital to Home (H2H). This quality initative is designed to reduced readmission rates for patients with heart failure or heart attack by improving the transition of care upon discharge.

Enrollment: 122 estimated patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

Inclusion Criteria:

• VA medical centers are the unit of randomization. A medical center will be included if had at least 20 patients discharged with a principal diagnosis of heart failure in 2008

Trial design

Primary purpose: Health Services Research

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Single Blind

---

122 participants in 2 patient groups

Community of Practice Facilitation

Experimental group

Description:

Medical Centers assigned to this arm will recieive the communtiy of practice facilitation. In this process we will contact existing members of the community of practice (called the Heart Failure Network) at the facility as well as attempt to identify new providers and other staff at the facility with an interest in improving heart failure care. The facilitation includes: describing the national H2H program, providing talking points and strategies for local providers to obtain support from their local facility to initiate local projects related to H2H, providing a forum for successful sites to describe how they initiated projects to sites yet to initiate projects.

Treatment:

Other: Community of Practice Facilitation

Usual Care

Experimental group

Description:

Medical centers in this arm will hear of H2H through usual routs (calls with facilty Directors and Chiefs of staff).

Treatment:

Other: Usual Care