2 Clinical Trials for Various Conditions
It has been shown that patients can improve their safety through informed choice, safe medication use, and complication reporting. This includes not only the potential problems that occur from prescription medication use but also issues that may arise through the improper use of over-the-counter medications. The willingness of a patient to take on safety action is known to be complicated by an unwillingness to behave in a manner that might challenge a physician's judgment or actions. Community pharmacists are in the unique position to provide perspective on the physician's recommendation and act as an advocate to facilitate necessary change. Through supportive and repeated interaction with their community pharmacist patients will develop assertiveness toward their own health care, an increased frequency and quality of interaction with their physician, and thus a minimized risk of harm and maximized opportunity to optimize clinical outcomes.
Through NINR project 1R44NR017842-01 which preceded the present study, the investigators enhanced the care.coach avatar platform to incorporate a robust suite of evidence-based protocols based on the Hospital Elder Life Program (HELP), and to leverage an integration with hospital-based electronic medical record (EMR) systems. In the present study, the investigators seek to validate the efficacy of the new avatar platform, as measured by reduction in falls, delirium, and patient sitter utilization. Also, the investigators seek to gather patient and outcomes data at a scale sufficient to begin developing machine learning algorithms for intelligent, automatic assignment of protocols to maximize patient engagement and clinical efficacy, and for intelligent, automatic screening of delirium to assist care teams in positive identification of delirium. Therefore, the present study comprises a two-year randomized between-groups comparison across multiple hospitals to compare outcomes with the new generation of care.coach avatars as the intervention versus usual care only as the control. Each study group will be geographically distributed across participating research sites: initially MediSys Health Network's Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in New York, with additional hospitals to join the study over the course of two years.