Optimizing Patient Adherence to Stroke Rehabilitation Treatment: a Telerehabilitation Trial

Stroke impacts nearly 400,000 Canadians annually. Three quarters of stroke survivors will live with minor to severe impairments or disabilities; which require rehabilitation care representing >$3.6 billion in Canadian healthcare expenditure every year. Strong evidence supports beginning rehabilitation as soon as the patient's medical status has stabilized and continuing following discharge from acute care, ideally in the patient's community. Access to optimal services is hampered, however, by travel distances to access rehabilitation, the lack of opportunities for structured and formal interprofessional communication among service providers, and failures to engage the patient and family members in a structured decision making process. Even when travel is not a barrier, adherence to rehabilitation treatments has been shown to be suboptimal. Many patients refuse their outpatient rehabilitation treatments outright or decrease the duration and/or frequency of their treatments over time.

The aim of this proposed mixed methods pragmatic clinical trial is to evaluate an intervention that provides patients who have experienced stroke the opportunity to return home safely after their acute hospital stay, to encourage patient (and family) engagement in their rehabilitation care, and to overcome challenges of access to patient-centered interprofessional rehabilitation care.

The proposed intervention will entail 220 patients (and family) to receive rehabilitation care through remote, live treatment sessions with an interdisciplinary group of clinicians (called telerehabilitation) versus standard of care (n = 110 patients). Five rehabilitation teams will be trained to develop rehabilitation treatment plans that engage the patient and family, while taking advantage of a telerehabilitation platform to engage the patient/family. Grounded in findings gathered through a CIHR funded pilot study, the primary study objective is to evaluate process, clinical outcomes and costs of telerehabilitation in comparison with usual care. Through qualitative interviews with patients and family as well as clinicians, a second objective of this pragmatic, controlled trial is to explore and describe contextual factors (both personal and environmental) that will help the delivery of care, and improve patient's outcomes while fully using technology to deliver stroke rehabilitation care.

This application has been developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers, local healthcare providers from each region involved, two patient partners who have experienced stroke, provincial network stakeholders, and decision makers, all engaged in the successful implementation of stroke guidelines and jurisdictional strategic plans. A panel of Canadian health system knowledge users rounds out the team, to enhance the proposed intervention, to communicate the relevance and anticipated use of the findings within their province, and to foster adaptation of improved stroke care elsewhere. Finally, the study has been endorsed by several knowledge users from the Quebec Ministry of Health as well as the Quebec Heart and Stroke Foundation. Considering contrasts between rehabilitation practices and the Canadian Stroke recommendations and the lack of relevant, robust data, this study represents a unique, highly relevant opportunity to minimize both knowledge and practice gaps, while producing robust, indepth data on the factors related to the effectiveness of telerehabilitation.