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Background: Post-stroke disability is common, costly, and projected to increase. Acute stroke treatments can substantially reduce post-stroke disability, but few patients take advantage of these cost-effective treatments. Practical, cost-efficient, and sustainable interventions to address underutilized acute stroke treatments are currently lacking. In this context, we present the Stroke Ready project, a stepped wedge design, multi-level intervention that combines implementation science and community-based participatory research approaches to increase acute stroke treatments in the predominately African American community of Flint, Michigan, USA.Methods: Guided by the Tailored Implementation of Chronic Disease (TICD) framework, we begin with optimization of acute stroke care in emergency departments, with particular attention given to our safety-net hospital partners. Then, we move to a community-wide, multi-faceted, stroke preparedness intervention, with workshops led by peer educators, over 2 years. Measures of engagement of the safety-net hospital and the feasibility and sustainability of the implementation strategy as well as community intervention reach, dose delivered, and satisfaction will be collected. The primary outcome is acute stroke treatment rates, which includes both intravenous tissue plasminogen activator, and endovascular treatment. The co-secondary outcomes are intravenous tissue plasminogen activator treatment rates and the proportion of stroke patients who arrive by ambulance.Discussion: If successful, Stroke Ready will increase acute stroke treatment rates through emergency department and community level interventions. The stepped wedge design and process evaluation will provide insight into how Stroke Ready works and where it might work best. By exploring the relative effectiveness of the emergency department optimization and the community intervention, we will inform hospitals and communities as they determine how best to use their resources to optimize acute stroke care.Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Trial Identifier NCT03645590 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The program "Implementing Goals of Care Conversations with Veterans in VA LTC Settings" is proposed in partnership with the US Veterans Health Administration (VA) National Center for Ethics in Health Care and the Geriatrics and Extended Care Program Offices, together with the VA Office of Nursing Services. The three projects in this program are designed to support a new system-wide mandate requiring providers to conduct and systematically record conversations with veterans about their preferences for care, particularly life-sustaining treatments. These treatments include cardiac resuscitation, mechanical ventilation, and other forms of life support. However, veteran preferences for care go beyond whether or not they receive life-sustaining treatments to include issues such as whether or not they want to be hospitalized if they are acutely ill, and what kinds of comfort care they would like to receive.Methods: Three projects, all focused on improving the provision of veteran-centered care, are proposed. The projects will be conducted in Community Living Centers (VA-owned nursing homes) and VA Home-Based Primary Care programs in five regional networks in the Veterans Health Administration. In all the projects, we will use data from context and barrier and facilitator assessments to design feedback reports for staff to help them understand how well they are meeting the requirement to have conversations with veterans about their preferences and to document them appropriately. We will also use learning collaboratives-meetings in which staff teams come together and problem-solve issues they encounter in how to get veterans' preferences expressed and documented, and acted on-to support action planning to improve performance.Discussion: We will use data over time to track implementation success, measured as the proportions of veterans in Community Living Centers (CLCs) and Home-Based Primary Care (HBPC) who have a documented goals of care conversation soon after admission. We will work with our operational partners to spread approaches that work throughout the Veterans Health Administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of feedback reports and feedback reports + external facilitation on completion of life-sustaining treatment (LST) note the template and durable medical orders. This quality improvement program supported the national roll-out of the Veterans Health Administration (VA) LST Decisions Initiative (LSTDI), which aims to ensure that seriously-ill veterans have care goals and LST decisions elicited and documented., Data Sources: Primary data from national databases for VA nursing homes (called Community Living Centers [CLCs]) from 2018 to 2020., Study Design: In one project, we distributed monthly feedback reports summarizing LST template completion rates to 12 sites as the sole implementation strategy. In the second involving five sites, we distributed similar feedback reports and provided robust external facilitation, which included coaching, education, and learning collaboratives. For each project, principal component analyses matched intervention to comparison sites, and interrupted time series/segmented regression analyses evaluated the differences in LSTDI template completion rates between intervention and comparison sites., Data Collection Methods: Data were extracted from national databases in addition to interviews and surveys in a mixed-methods process evaluation., Principal Findings: LSTDI template completion rose from 0% to about 80% throughout the study period in both projects' intervention and comparison CLCs. There were small but statistically significant differences for feedback reports alone (comparison sites performed better, coefficient estimate 3.48, standard error 0.99 for the difference between groups in change in trend) and feedback reports + external facilitation (intervention sites performed better, coefficient estimate -2.38, standard error 0.72)., Conclusions: Feedback reports + external facilitation was associated with a small but statistically significant improvement in outcomes compared with comparison sites. The large increases in completion rates are likely due to the well-planned national roll-out of the LSTDI. This finding suggests that when dissemination and support for widespread implementation are present and system-mandated, significant enhancements in the adoption of evidence-based practices may require more intensive support., (© 2022 Health Research and Educational Trust.)

Background: User-centered design (UCD) methods are well-established techniques for creating useful artifacts, but few studies illustrate their application to clinical feedback reports. When used as an implementation strategy, the content of feedback reports depends on a foundational audit process involving performance measures and data, but these important relationships have not been adequately described. Better guidance on UCD methods for designing feedback reports is needed. Our objective is to describe the feedback report design method for refining the content of prototype reports., Methods: We propose a three-step feedback report design method (refinement of measures, data, and display). The three steps follow dependencies such that refinement of measures can require changes to data, which in turn may require changes to the display. We believe this method can be used effectively with a broad range of UCD techniques., Results: We illustrate the three-step method as used in implementation of goals of care conversations in long-term care settings in the U.S. Veterans Health Administration. Using iterative usability testing, feedback report content evolved over cycles of the three steps. Following the steps in the proposed method through 12 iterations with 13 participants, we improved the usability of the feedback reports., Conclusions: UCD methods can improve feedback report content through an iterative process. When designing feedback reports, refining measures, data, and display may enable report designers to improve the user centeredness of feedback reports.