Improving Inflammatory Arthritis health services by identifying avoidable hospital visits
Scientific study title:
Avoidable Acute Care Use for Inflammatory Arthritis Conditions: Groundwork to Improve Inflammatory Arthritis Health Service and System Quality
Principal Investigators:
Cheryl Barnabe – MD, MSc, FRCPC, Senior Scientist, Arthritis Research Canada
Professor, Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine and Department of Community Health Sciences, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary
Arthur J.E. Child Chair in Rheumatology Research
Co-Investigators:
Claire Barber, MD, PhD, FRCPC, Associate Professor, Division of Rheumatology, Department of Medicine and Department of Community Health Sciences, Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, Research Scientist, Arthritis Research Canada
Research Scientist, Arthritis Research Canada
Caley Shukalek, MD, MSc, MPH, Clinical Assistant Professor in the Departments of Medicine & Community Health Sciences at the University of Calgary and Alberta Health Services.
Study Start Date:
April 2023
Study End Date:
March 2026
Why do this research?
Hospitalization and emergency room visits for rheumatoid arthritis, spondyloarthritis, and psoriatic arthritis are less common now as a result of better treatment approaches and medications. However, gaps in care are still present for conditions like gout, evident as hospital and emergency room visits by patients with that condition are rising. There is still room to improve on how outpatient rheumatology care is delivered to all patients so that inconvenient and costly emergency department visits and hospitalizations can be avoided This project will undertake several activities to support this mission.
What will be done?
We will convene experts and patients from diverse communities to decide which conditions specific to inflammatory arthritis that result in an emergency department visit or hospitalization are avoidable.
We will calculate how frequent and how expensive these types of visits are from existing healthcare data, and analyze results for different population groups.
We will interview patients visiting an emergency department or hospitalized for these conditions to understand what circumstances led to that visit or admission, specifically focusing on their access to health care, and their individual social and economic circumstances.
A quality and safety committee will review the information and determine how we can improve arthritis care to reduce avoidable health care use.
Who is involved?
This project will include a variety of participants at different stages of the project. We will be recruiting patients with lived experience of inflammatory arthritis as well as rheumatologists, primary care physicians and health system leaders to be experts in the consensus panel. Patients living with inflammatory arthritis admitted to a hospital or visiting an emergency department in Alberta will be recruited to interviews. The members of the quality and safety committee will be patients, physicians and health system leaders in southern Alberta.
How are Equity, Diversity and Inclusion addressed or taken into consideration?
Members of the consensus panel and the quality and safety committee will be specifically chosen to reflect the diversity of the population, including representation by sex and gender, race, socioeconomic status, and location of residence. We will also analyze healthcare data for these population categories.
Funding Agency
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
How can people get involved?
Contact arthritis@ucalgary.ca
