When standard of care neurology visits are 6 months apart, there can often be gaps in care and missed opportunities to improve patient function; the result is poor follow-up for care management or low medication adherence. MS care can be comprehensively approached with a human-tech platform that supports symptom and medication tracking, nursing interventions, laboratory monitoring for subclinical disease activity and curated MRI reports to ensure accurate data at return visits.
To test the Octave integrated MS care platform for efficacy in reducing unplanned healthcare utilization (UHU) and improving patient and physician satisfaction.
This prospective, randomized study with a within-subjects, waitlist-control trial design aims to reduce UHU costs and increase patient and physician satisfaction with their MS care. Secondary endpoints include determining the feasibility of the human-tech service, blood-based disease activity tests and enhanced MRI reports. Approximately 80 participants will be randomized to a case or waitlist group. Case subjects will have access to the platform for all 12 months of enrollment; waitlist subjects will have access for the second 6 months of enrollment. The platform includes medication and symptom tracking, check-ins every 2 weeks with an MS-certified nurse and curated physician/MRI reports. UHU will be qualified by events captured in the EHR and monetary value assigned to these events. Satisfaction will be measured through participant and physician questionnaires. Subject’s blood tests will be correlated to symptomology and MRI findings to assess subclinical disease activity.
UHU was created by Octave and is a composite metric of unplanned office visits and communication by phone or e-message, weighted by expense per interaction as collected in the EHR. Our analysis aims to quantify the UHU difference between 1) case vs. control samples over the first 6 months of the study, and 2) waitlist control patients for the first vs. second 6 months of the study. Satisfaction will be measured between case and control groups using a Likert scale and quantified with a 2-sample t-test.
This trial aims to improve MS disease management, reduce UHU and increase patient/physician satisfaction through a mobile platform intervention, using a waitlist design.