Person-centred, integrated and pro-active care for multi-morbid elderly with advanced care needs: a propensity score-matched controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Person-centred care (PCC) focusing on personalised goals and care plans derived from "What matters to you?" has an impact on single disease outcomes, but studies on multi-morbid elderly are lacking. Furthermore, the combination of PCC, Integrated Care (IC) and Pro-active care are widely recognised as desirable for multi-morbid elderly, yet previous studies focus on single components only, leaving synergies unexplored. The effect of a synergistic intervention, which implements 1) Person-centred goal-oriented care driven by "What matters to you?" with 2) IC and 3) pro-active care is unknown. METHODS: Inspired by theoretical foundations, complexity science, previous health service research and a patient-driven evaluation of care quality, we designed the Patient-Centred Team (PACT) intervention across primary and secondary care. The PACT team collaborate with the patient to make and deliver a person-centred, integrated and proactive multi-morbidity care-plan. The control group receives conventional care. The study design is a pragmatic six months prospective, controlled clinical trial based on hospital electronic health record data of 439 multi-morbid frail elderly at risk for emergency (re) admissions referred to PACT and 779 propensity score matched controls in Norway, 2014-2016. Outcomes are emergency admissions, the sum of emergency inpatient bed days, 30-day readmissions, planned and emergency outpatient visits and mortality at three and six months follow-up. RESULTS: The Rate Ratios (RR) for emergency admissions was 0,9 (95%CI: 0,82-0,99), for sum of emergency bed days 0,68 (95%CI:0,52-0,79) and for 30-days emergency readmissions 0,72 (95%CI: 0,41-1,24). RRs were 2,3 (95%CI: 2,02-2,55) and 0,9 (95%CI: 0,68-1,20) for planned and emergency outpatient visits respectively. The RR for death at 3 months was 0,39 (95% CI: 0,22-0,70) and 0,57 (95% CI: 0,34-0,94) at 6 months. CONCLUSION: Compared with propensity score matched controls, the care process of frail multi-morbid elderly who received the PACT intervention had a reduced risk of high-level emergency care, increased use of low-level planned care, and substantially reduced mortality risk. Further study of process differences between groups is warranted to understand the genesis of these results better. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov (identifier: NCT02541474 ), registered Sept 2015.

A cost-minimization analysis of a realtime teledermatology service in northern Norway.

Realtime teledermatology has been a routine service provided by the University Hospital of Tromsø to a primary-care centre in Kirkenes since 1989. The cost of the teledermatology service was compared with the costs of three alternative methods of treatment for the patients. The first was a combination of a visiting service and patient travel to hospital. The second was patient travel to the nearest secondary-care centre. The third was a locally employed dermatologist. At the actual 1998 workload of 375 patients, the total cost of teledermatology was NKr470,780, while the three alternatives cost NKr880,530, NKr1,635,075 and NKr958,660, respectively. Analysis of the unit costs showed that the realtime teledermatology service, including local phototherapy, was less costly than the three alternatives for annual workloads above 195 patients per year. A sensitivity analysis showed that the results were robust to changes in the assumptions about the cost structure.