Adapted Hospital Discharge Intervention: the CONNECT Pilot

Not Applicable

Not yet recruiting

• Conditions: Communication Research

• Registration Number: NCT07032818
• Lead Sponsor: Boston Medical Center

Brief Summary

Hospital discharge is a dangerous time for patients: one in five will suffer an adverse event, such as a medication error, and nearly 25% will be readmitted within 30 days. This time is even more dangerous for patients with who face communication barriers, including those with non-English language preference (NELP), low health literacy, and the elderly.

The investigators will pilot a post-discharge educational intervention to reinforce written discharge instructions (known as the After Visit Summary or AVS) using a randomized controlled trial design (2:1 intervention: control). The control group will receive current standard of care discharge education which includes a nurse reviewing their AVS and an automated call in English that allows patients to numerically select types of problems/questions that are then escalated to a nurse who should return their call within a few days. The intervention group will receive the standard of care discharge education with the AVS and an additional post-discharge educational call delivered by a registered nurse or other qualified health professional with the option to have written instructions professionally translated and sent via MyChart message--if available in their preferred language.

Detailed Description

Not available

Study Timeline

• Study First Submitted: 2025-06-13
• Study First Submitted QC: 2025-06-13
• Study First Posted: 2025-06-24
• Status Verified: 2025-08
• Last Update Submitted: 2025-08-14
• Last Update Posted: 2025-08-19
• Study Start: 2026-04-01
• Primary Completion: 2027-03
• Study Completion: 2027-03-01

Recruitment & Eligibility

• Status: NOT_YET_RECRUITING
• Sex: All
• Target Recruitment: 60

Inclusion Criteria

• Registered language in Epic (written or spoken) is Spanish, Haitian Creole, Portuguese, Cape Verdean, or Vietnamese
• Admitted to medicine team at Boston Medical Center (BMC)
• Being discharged home (to the community)

Exclusion Criteria

• On airborne infections precautions at time of recruitment
• On C diff precautions at time of recruitment
• On suicide precautions at time of recruitment
• Nurse report of participant displaying cognitive impairment, ongoing delirium, or aggression
• Discharge observed during a prior admission

Study & Design

• Study Type: INTERVENTIONAL
• Study Design: PARALLEL

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Retention success by linguistic group	12 months	Number of enrolled participants who completed all study assessments stratified by linguistic group.
Fidelity to the intervention	12 months	The number of scheduled educations calls that were completed for participants in the intervention arm based on nursing documentation in Epic.

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Acceptability of the intervention	12 months	The Acceptability of Intervention Measure (AIM) will be completed by participants in the intervention arm to assess acceptability. It has four questions with 5 Likert responses where 1 = Completely disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neither agree nor disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Completely agree, The range of scores from 4 to 20 with higher scores indicating greater acceptability.
Feasibility of the intervention	12 months	Feasibility will be assessed by the number of participants in the intervention arm whose educational call was language concordant based on nursing documentation in Epic.
Patient Understanding of Discharge Instruction (UDI) Scale	12 months	Assessed by a composite score of six key domains of discharge instructions (primary diagnosis, self-care instructions, return precautions, medication changes, medication indications, follow-up) as determined by physician adjudicators (1=poor, 4 = near perfect). Higher scores demonstrate better understanding.

Trial Locations

Locations (1)

Boston Medical Center; 🇺🇸 Boston, Massachusetts, United States