Comparing Types of Implementation of a Shared Decision Making Intervention

Changing the behavior of health providers can be challenging, and significant gaps exist in our knowledge of how to best disseminate new medical evidence into everyday practice. This is true when the evidence involves a new paradigm of patient-centered care delivery such as shared decision making (SDM). The most common dissemination used is passive diffusion, which includes journal publications, didactic presentations, and educational material and often fails to produce timely or sustainable practice level changes. A unique partnership between a Medicaid network and a well established consortium of practice-based research networks provides an ideal venue to examine the effectiveness of new effective methods of dissemination. We previously developed an asthma toolkit that was funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and tested across a regional network of Pediatric, Family Medicine, and Internal Medicine ambulatory practices in Mecklenburg County North Carolina. During this study, key principles of community based participatory research were used engaging providers and patients to develop a Facilitator-Led participant OWned (FLOW) Approach to dissemination. The FLOW approach uses Practice Facilitators to guide practices through the process of adapting the Toolkit into the existing culture and workflow. This approach led to rapid dissemination and sustainability of the Toolkit across six practices. The initial results have showed marked improvement in patient outcomes (improved medication adherence and decreased asthma exacerbations) with increased patient involvement in the creation of the care plans. The objective is to determine what dissemination strategy most effectively increases practice level adoption of shared decision making, improves patient outcomes, and increases patient involvement in care decisions. We will leverage a partnership between the statewide Medicaid network and NCNC, a state-wide consortium of research networks, to identify best practices for dissemination of the shared decision making toolkit. We will test the FLOW method for dissemination on a larger scale by randomizing 30 primary care practices from 4 practice based research networks to one of three dissemination arms: (1) Facilitator-Led participant OWned (FLOW) Approach to Dissemination; (2) Traditional dissemination (Active Diffusion) with facilitator exposure; and (3) Passive dissemination.