Grand Rounds October 7, 2022: Impact Of Handovers Of Anesthesia Care On Morbidity And Mortality (Melanie Meersch-Dini, MD)

Speakers

Melanie Meersch-Dini, MD
Professor
Department of Anesthesiology, Intensive Care and Pain Medicine
University Hospital Münster, Germany

 

 

Keywords

HandiCAP Trial, Pragmatic Clinical Trial

 

Key Points

  • There is an increasing frequency of surgical procedures and the need for anesthesia care, and the number of care transitions is increasing. The HandiCAP trial asked the question do intraoperative handovers of anesthesia care have an impact on patient outcomes?
  • The trial included adults 18 and older, ASA physical status III or IV, who had a major inpatient surgery with an anticipated duration of 2 hours or longer. Patients were registered and randomized centrally in a 1:1 ratio to receive either a handover of anesthesia care or no handover.
  • In Germany, there are two levels of anesthesia, in-room anesthesiologists who are either trainees or a medical specialist (non-management). Then there is an attending anesthesiologist who is a supervisor responsible for 3-4 ORs.
  • The primary endpoint was a composite of all-cause of death, readmission to hospital or major postoperative complications within 30 days. The secondary endpoints were individual criteria of the primary endpoint, hospital length of stay and ICU length of stay. The trial randomized 1,817 patients, with 908 randomized to the handover group and 909 to the no handover group.
  • There was no significant different in the primary endpoint between the handover and no handover groups, and none of the composites were a significant difference. We performed a multivariable regression analysis for the primary endpoint and none of the factors were significantly different between the two groups. Short-term outcomes, surgery length of time, and level of training of the anesthesiologist were also not different between the two groups.
  • There are some limitations and remaining questions from the trial: The trial did not include weekend and nighttime surgeries, so one remaining question is are handovers harmful during off-hours when fatigue and stress may play a bigger role? What affect does the experience of the surgeons and anesthesia and surgical nurses have on outcomes? Are the results generalizable to all patient cohorts and to other health care systems?

Learn more about the HandiCAP Trial.

Discussion Themes

-What instructions or guidance did you provide for the handover? We left them to their daily routine that they perform. We told them what they needed to tell the new anesthesiologist but not how to do the handoff.

What didn’t go as you expected and what were some of the lessons that you learned that would inform a follow-on trial to this trial? We planned this trial with three centers and then the third center did not get the approval by the ethics committee, so we had to include 12 centers. The COVID situation was another aspect we could not control. We had to the change the protocol once to correct a wording mistake. What I learned from designing this trial is that you can never plan that centers will recruit the same amount of patients as we would do in the initiating center. You have to include more centers to reach your goal during the course of the study.

Tags

#pctGR, @Collaboratory1

November 1, 2019: Collaboratory PIs Give Advice to New Pragmatic Trials

The NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory program is welcoming new embedded pragmatic clinical trials (ePCTs) on pain management and reducing opioid prescribing as part of the NIH’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative (NIH HEAL Initiative). At the same time, many of the Collaboratory’s early NIH Collaboratory Trials are completed and now publishing results. At a recent Collaboratory Steering Committee meeting, we spoke with four of the principal investigators (PIs) of completed trials to glean advice for new trials.

What words of advice do you have for investigators conducting their first embedded PCT?

Dr. Laura Dember, PI of the Time to Reduce Mortality in End-Stage Renal Disease (TiME) trial (NCT02019225).

Dr. Dember: “An important message is that progress in making big changes to how trials are conducted is going to be incremental. We need to be aspirational, but we also need to recognize that we’re not going to solve all of the problems with one try. We should not be discouraged by the things that don’t work, but rather keep moving forward by building on what we’ve learned.”

Dr. Lynn Debar, PI of the Collaborative Care for Chronic Pain in Primary Care (PPACT) trial (NCT02113592).

Dr. DeBar: “Regarding stakeholder engagement, recognize that these are really complex adaptive systems, and sometimes, more resources and harder pushing is not the way to accomplish your goal. You have to really think through how to communicate: where and how you push requires thinking about all the stakeholders involved.”

Dr. Beverly Green, Co-PI of the Strategies and Opportunities to Stop Colorectal Cancer (STOP CRC) trial (NCT01742065).

Dr. Green: “The collaboration part of bringing the investigators together to figure out the pieces of the puzzle has really been valuable to me. Really try to understand stakeholder engagement, the values of the people involved, and work to align them. This way, when you get it right, embedded pragmatic research can save money, improve health, and be a better experience for staff and patients. It’s a win-win.”

Dr. Susan Huang, PI of the Active Bathing to Eliminate (ABATE) Infection trial (NCT02063867).

Dr. Huang: “Communication is so important because if you have stakeholders at the table, not all of them will have the exact vantage point as you, and you will learn by communicating. And, if you’re learning different things and reaching different forks in the road that require decision-making and troubleshooting, it’s only by talking about them that you get everybody to really understand what the goal is. And in this way, you come up with better solutions than you could come up with yourself.”

What was the biggest lesson learned in conducting your trial?

Dr. Dember:  “It’s important to effectively engage with people on the ground. The extent to which this is possible depends on the setting, but, at least for some interventions, being able to engage with the people who are actually implementing the trial procedures is critical.”

Dr. Huang: “The biggest lesson is the critical nature of the partnership and the investment involved in maintaining it. The strength of our trial, and our ability to conduct it, was dependent on a strong partnership.”

Dr. Debar: “Vertical integration is important: you need high level buy-in, but you also need buy-in from people on the ground who are providing care.”

Dr. Green: “Someone in NIH did the math regarding how much an implementation study costs per participant, and he said, ‘That has to be cheaper.’ This prompted me to think about what things could be answered with embedded research. As a clinician, day to day, I am always making decisions that I don’t really know the answer because there isn’t enough evidence. There are so many questions that need to be answered, and embedded pragmatic research is a great starting point for getting more answers. We’ll never get there by doing this one trial at a time with traditional research.”

Congratulations to all four investigators for their groundbreaking work on their NIH Collaboratory Trials!

December 5, 2017: Dr. Greg Simon Answers the Question: What is a Pragmatic Trial?

In a new video for the Living Textbook, Dr. Greg Simon uses props—including Play-Doh and toys—to define pragmatic trials and their importance in clinical research.

“Pragmatic clinical trials are about helping doctors make better decisions to take care of their patients.” —Greg Simon, MD

In the News: Increase in Use of Personal Health Data


An explosion in the collection of personal data is fostering concerns about the extent to which health information is accessed—and about the privacy and confidentiality of this information. Two recent National Public Radio stories highlight a few of the burgeoning uses of these abundant data.

In the first, an insurer uses personal data to predict who will get sick so it can identify patients at highest risk for hospital admission, or readmission, and then provide them with personal health coaches. The coordinated care given to patients by the coaches (for example, arranging a visiting nurse or streamlining appointments) has been shown to improve hospitalization rates. The insurer says it follows federal health privacy guidelines for anonymity and uses the information to better serve its members.

The second story explains that results of online health searches aren’t always confidential, and data brokers are tracking information and selling it to interested parties. The author notes that data gathered on the Web are, for the most part, unregulated. Both stories raise questions about privacy and confidentiality of health information and how to best protect it.

Pragmatic clinical trials also seek to use personal health data to answer important questions on the risks, benefits, and burdens of therapeutic interventions. In a blog post in Health Affairs, Joe Selby, executive director of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), underscores the need for trust, support, and active engagement of patients when involving them in health data research, even with privacy protections in place. PCORI has launched the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) as a means of harnessing large clinical data sets to study the comparative effectiveness of treatments, and a central tenet of the network is that patients, clinicians, and healthcare systems should be actively involved in the governance of the use of health information.


Read the full articles

From NPR: Insurer Uses Personal Data To Predict Who Will Get Sick
From NPR: Online Health Searches Aren't Always Confidential
From Health Affairs: Advancing the Use of Health Data in Research With PCORnet

 

PCORI Announces First PCORnet NIH Collaboratory Trial: The ADAPTABLE Aspirin Study


PCORnetThe Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has approved the first pragmatic clinical trial to be performed through the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet)—the ADAPTABLE study (Aspirin Dosing: A Patient-centric Trial Assessing Benefits and Long-term Effectiveness).

Over the course of the trial, 20,000 study participants with cardiovascular disease will be randomly assigned to receive one of two commonly used doses of aspirin—a low dose of 81 mg per day versus a higher dose of 325 mg per day—in order to determine which provides the optimal balance between protecting patients with cardiovascular disease from heart attack and stroke, and minimizing bleeding events associated with aspirin therapy. The trial will also employ a number of innovative methods, including electronic health record (EHR)-based data collection and a patient-centered, web-based enrollment model in partnership with the Health eHeart Alliance Patient-Powered Research Network (PPRN).

The ADAPTABLE trial, which includes six of PCORnet’s Clinical Data Research Networks (CDRNs), will be led and coordinated through the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI).


Read more about the ADAPTABLE Aspirin Trial here:
Fact Sheet (PDF)
Infographic (PDF)
DCRI Coordinating Center Announcement

Report from NIH Collaboratory Workshop Examines Ethical and Regulatory Challenges for Pragmatic Cluster Randomized Trials

A new article by researchers from the NIH Collaboratory, published online this week in the journal Clinical Trials, explores some of the challenges facing physicians, scientists, and patient groups who are working to develop innovative methods for performing clinical trials. In the article, authors Monique Anderson, MD, Robert Califf, MD, and Jeremy Sugarman, MD, MPH, MA, describe and summarize discussions from a Collaboratory workshop on ethical and regulatory issues relating to pragmatic cluster-randomized trials.


Pragmatic Cluster-Randomized Trials

Many of the clinical trials that evaluate the safety and effectiveness of new therapies do so by assigning individual volunteers to receive either an experimental treatment or a comparator, such as an existing alternative treatment, or a placebo. However, this process can be complex, expensive, and slow to yield results. Further, because these studies often take place in specialized research settings and involve patients who have been carefully screened, there are  concerns that the results gathered from such trials may not be fully applicable to “real-world” patient populations.

For these reasons, some researchers, patients, and patient advocacy groups are interested in exploring different methods for conducting clinical trials, including designs known as pragmatic cluster-randomized trials, or CRTs. In a pragmatic CRT, groups of individuals (such as a clinic, hospital, or even an entire health system) are randomly assigned to receive one of two or more interventions being compared, with a focus on answering questions about therapies in the setting of actual clinical practice—the “pragmatic” part of “pragmatic CRT.”

Pragmatic CRTs have the potential to answer important questions quickly and less expensively, especially in an era in which patient data can be accessed directly from electronic health records. Just as importantly, that knowledge can then be fed back to support a “learning healthcare system” that is constantly improving in its approach to patient care.  However, while cluster-randomized trials are not themselves new, their widespread use in patient-care settings raises a number of potential challenges.

For example: in a typical individually randomized clinical trial, patients are enrolled in a study only after first providing written informed consent. However, in a CRT, the entire hospital may be assigned to provide a given therapy. In such a situation, how should informed consent be handled? How should patients be notified that research is taking place, and that they may be part of it? Will they be able to “opt out” of the research? What will happen to the data collected during their treatment? And what do federal regulations governing clinical trials have to say about this? These are just a few of the questions raised by the use of pragmatic CRTs in patient-care settings.


The NIH Collaboratory Workshop on Pragmatic Cluster-Randomized Trials

The NIH Collaboratory Workshop of Pragmatic CRTs, held in Bethesda, Maryland in July of 2103, convened a panel of experts in clinical trials, research ethics, and regulatory issues to outline the challenges associated with conducting  pragmatic CRTs and to explore ways for better understanding and overcoming them. Over the course of the intensive 1-day workshop, conference participants identified key areas for focused attention. These included issues relating to informed consent, patient privacy, oversight of research activities, insuring the integrity of data gathered during pragmatic CRTs, and special protections for vulnerable patient populations. The article by Anderson and colleagues provides a distillation of discussions that took place at the workshop, as well as noting possible directions for further work.

In the coming months and years, the NIH Collaboratory and its partners, including the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet), plan to build on this workshop experience. Together, they hope to explore these issues in greater detail and propose practical steps for moving forward with innovative clinical research methods, while at the same time maintaining robust protections for patients’ rights and well-being.


Jonathan McCall, MS, and Karen Staman, MS, contributed to this post.


Read the full text of the article here:

Anderson ML, Califf RM, Sugarman J. Ethical and regulatory issues of pragmatic cluster randomized trials in contemporary health systems. Clin Trials 2015 [e-Pub ahead of press].
doi:10.1177/1740774515571140 
For further reading:

Tunis SR, Stryer DB, Clancy CM. Practical clinical trials: Increasing the value of clinical research decision making in clinical and health policy. JAMA 2003;290(12):1624-32. PMID:14506122; doi:10.1001/jama.290.12.1624.

The Ottawa Hospital Research Institute Ethical Issues in Cluster Randomized Trials Wiki.

Special Report: Ethical Oversight of Learning Health Systems. Hastings Center Report 2013;43(s1):S2–S44, Si–Sii.

Sugarman J, Califf RM. Ethics and regulatory complexities for pragmatic clinical trials. JAMA 2014;311(23):2381-2. PMID: 24810723; doi: 10.1001/jama.2014.4164.