Speakers
Julie Fritz, PT, PhD, FAPTA
Distinguished Professor, Department of Physical Therapy & Athletic Training
Associate Dean for Research, College of Health
University of Utah
Guilherme Del Fiol, MD, PhD
Professor, Biomedical Informatics
University of Utah
Keywords
Community Health Centers; Low Back Pain; Physical Therapy Modalities; Primary Care; Telemedicine
Key Points
- Clinical practice guidelines support nonpharmacologic care as first-line management of low back pain. However, persons in low-income and rural communities have significantly higher odds of receiving a prescription opioid for a new back pain diagnosis.
- Use of nonpharmacologic pain treatments is lower in rural settings and for persons of Hispanic/Latino ethnicity. Many of these communities are served by federally qualified health centers that often lack options to provide accessible nonpharmacologic alternatives.
- Clinical research can exacerbate disparities, because clinical trials typically are based in urban, academic medical centers, underrepresent diverse populations, and overlook community engagement strategies in trial planning and design.
- BeatPain Utah, an NIH Pragmatic Trials Collaboratory Trial, is an embedded pragmatic clinical trial comparing the effectiveness of nonpharmacologic intervention strategies for patients with back pain seeking care in federally qualified health centers in Utah. The interventions include a telehealth strategy that provides a brief pain teleconsult along with phone-based physical therapy, and an adaptive strategy that provides the brief pain teleconsult first, followed by phone-based physical therapy among patients who are nonresponsive to treatment.
- BeatPain Utah is using the Community-Engaged Dissemination and Implementation (CEDI) framework, which considers both social and technical factors in the implementation of health IT strategies, decentralizes the research methods and procedures, and grounds the implementation in a systematic, iterative mapping of how both clinic staff and patients interact with health IT.
- Although there is evidence of a significant divide in the implementation of advanced health IT functions, low-resource settings can adopt advanced health IT with some assistance. Moreover, there is considerable opportunity to reduce inequities through increased adoption of telehealth strategies, given that 96% of people in low-resource communities have at least a text and voice phone.
Discussion Themes
- Motivating patients to engage in self-management of health conditions is a challenge, irrespective of whether the intervention is delivered in person or remotely.
- Designing interventions that can meet everyone’s needs can be a challenge in a study that involves rural/urban and racial/ethnic diversity. Implementation mapping at the beginning of the design process is key. This includes direct assessment of patients’ needs, such as by interviewing patients who seek care in the partnering clinics to understand their expectations and how they would think about a mode of care delivery, like telehealth, that is unfamiliar to them.
- Another crucial element of the health equity–focused model is ensuring that the question at the heart of the research is of value to the clinics and their leadership. For every trial, one of the first important tasks is to reach out to the community health center leadership and see if they are interested. The clinic’s priorities should drive the design of the trial. “We have to be very accommodating to the needs of each [community health center] and respect their needs.”
- How quickly can these types of studies proceed from trial completion to release of results? Especially in studies involving chronic conditions, having long-term follow-up data to answer the core effectiveness question in a hybrid trial means there could be a long wait for results. Researchers must also be prepared to consider the question of sustaining a service that many clinics in the study have come to rely on, even before the results are available.
Tags
#pctGR, @Collaboratory1