Using an Online Patient Monitoring System to Improve Care for Children With Chronic Conditions

Overview

TriVox Health is an online system designed to make it easy for healthcare providers to monitor patients' disease symptoms and functioning over time and in between in-person visits (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR1vcbx0Ef4). Using combined quality improvement and randomized clinical trial methods, we will evaluate the impact of TriVox on the health outcomes, patient/family experience of care, and healthcare utilization for children and adolescents with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), asthma, autism, depression, and epilepsy.

TriVox Health is a web-based patient management and monitoring system designed to track patients' disease symptoms and response to therapy over time. TriVox Health enables clinics to use electronic surveys to gather data remotely from multiple responders, including patients, parents/guardians, school personnel and ancillary providers, and view the responses in a timely manner via graphical, tabular, and narrative summary formats. This quality improvement (QI) initiative will implement TriVox as the standard of care for all patients who receive care for ADHD, asthma, autism, depression, and epilepsy within seven ambulatory specialties at Boston Children's Hospital. Patients and families will use TriVox to report on patient health status and will complete clinically-reTriVoxlevant questionnaires at routine intervals. Providers will use the information collected through TriVox to inform their clinical care of the patient/family. To evaluate the effectiveness of TriVox, we will conduct a 24-month phased, cluster randomized controlled trial (RCT) where we randomize providers to "active" vs. "delayed-start" to TriVox use, with patients clustered by provider (within specialties) for analytic purposes. Delayed-start providers will crossover to active TriVox use after 12 months. Patients/families will complete additional surveys in order to assess the system's actual or potential effects on patient/family-provider interactions, healthcare utilization and costs.