The Potential of Technology to Improve Chronic Disease Management and Quality of Care

To date, limited research has been conducted to determine if health information technology (HIT) is effective in improving the outcomes for patients with chronic diseases. Research is required to determine if interventions facilitated by an institutional EMR platform can be implemented such that they support patients with chronic diseases to achieve improved outcomes in a cost effective fashion.

At the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) an ambulatory EMR has been implemented to foster patient safety and institutional best practice guidelines, to facilitate research, and to achieve efficiencies in practice management. Our EMR is the foundation of the CCF patient portal. One of the functions of the portal is to allow patients to enter specific data elements that become part of their permanent medical record. Diabetics can enter and review their home glucometer readings, and view alert messages based on their entries. The entries are transferred to the patient's primary care physician's EMR In-Basket for review.

We recognize that some patients will be more predisposed to technology adoption and some will be more health behavior compliant than others. Therefore, in addition to studying our portal's efficacy in positive diabetic behavior change, we will test if interventions can assist less predisposed and less compliant patients to become more compliant and more inclined to adopt the technology.

The goals of the proposed study are:

1) to assess whether a web portal will improve care outcomes in diabetic patients; 2a) to describe the characteristics of patients whose health behavior improves over the study period; 2b) to describe the characteristics of patients who adopt the web portal-based disease management technology; 3) to develop and test targeted interventions to increase the adoption of the web portal and improve patient health behavior; 4) to monitor the ongoing costs associated with the web portal and patient healthcare resource utilization, and to monitor the incremental costs of the interventions designed to improve utilization of the technology and patient compliance with their diabetic regimens.