A Personalized Dashboard to Educate Veterans at Risk of Stroke

Background: Personalized risk communication methods have been used to educate patients who are at high risk of developing a cardiovascular event. These methods include personalized counseling, printed brochures and individualized graphs describing the status of the risk factors. Very few studies have provided an interactive tool for patients to use to compare the relative change in risk that might result from modifying their risk factors. Objectives: The goals of this pilot study were to: (a) develop a prototype of a personalized dynamic dashboard to educate veterans and help them make informed decisions about modifying their vascular risk factors (hypertension, diabetes mellitus, hyperlipidemia, and tobacco use) to reduce the probability of a vascular event; (b) test the usability of this tool from the patient's perspective; and (c) provide preliminary data regarding the effectiveness of this tool in terms of changes in lifestyle or risk factor control compared with nurse-education. Methods: This was a three-arm randomized controlled study. Veterans from the panel of one experienced general internist were randomly assigned to one of three groups: (1) dashboard with nurse-education, (2) nurse-education alone, (3) usual care. To be eligible, patients must have had at least two of the following: body mass index \>30 kg/m2; current tobacco use; systolic blood pressure \>140 mm Hg or diastolic \>90 mm Hg; LDL-cholesterol \>130 mg/dL, or hemoglobin Hb1Ac \>8%. We developed the dashboard in our Human Computer Interface/Information Technology laboratory. Patients in the dashboard group received two in-person counseling sessions regarding methods for controlling risk factors, and were asked to use the dashboard tool to enter values for their own risk factors and to observe the relative effects of varying their risk factor control on their overall vascular risk. The nurse-education consisted of two in-person counseling sessions regarding methods for controlling risk factors. Both intervention sessions lasted approximately 30 minutes; therefore, the majority of the time was used to interact with the tool in the dashboard group whereas the entire time was used for personalized risk factor discussion in the nurse-education group. For the usual care group, data were retrospectively collected about the primary care visits and laboratory tests which took place during the same period as the visits for intervention patients. Status: Completed.