Goals of the project
The overall goal of the project ACQUIRE-ICD is to develop and evaluate the clinical and economic impact of an interactive, web-based care innovation that:
1) allows patients to routinely track their own health status and symptoms of anxiety and depression, flag deteriorations early on, initiate interactions with the ICD outpatient clinic, and give them access to appropriate self-management advice and tools via a web-based interactive platform, and
2) serves as a tool to inform clinicians in a timely manner about changes to patients' symptoms to allow early medical intervention, support shared-decision making, and provide more tailored treatment.
The project will make use of mixed-methods, including focus groups and multi-disciplinary expert panels that will also include the end users, to develop and implement the platform. The effectiveness of the platform will ultimately be tested in a randomized controlled trial design. Recruitment of patients will commence in the fall of 2016.
Background
Heart failure is a complex, chronic condition and the end stage of most heart diseases. Many patients with heart failure are implanted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) in order to prevent sudden cardiac death. The disorder causes disability, depression, and reduced quality of life due to fatigue, shortness of breath and fluid retention, and the risk of hospitalization and mortality is high. The incidence and prevalence of these patients are rising and thus the burden to the health-care system and society at a time when the health-care system is already challenged on its resources.
We know from clinical practice that it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when things start to go wrong for these patients, also since practice has changed and almost all ICD patients are placed on remote monitoring, reducing the number of visits to the outpatient clinic. ACQUIRE-ICD represents a highly innovative and sustainable paradigm shift, as it relies on patient-centered and personalized tools to empower patients, with these tools coupled to a novel web-based and interactive platform that is also available via an app. This approach has not been tried so far.
Expected results
We want to give patients a more active role as advocates of their own health in a medical decision-making process, while enabling treatment recommendations to be tailored to individual patients’ needs and preferences. We expect that this will improve patient empowerment, compliance, treatment satisfaction, and quality of life, and may help prevent hospitalizations and overall enable patients to live a better life with their disease.
Update from 2021
All patients (n = 478) are now included in the randomized study and the last 12 month follow-up is expected around September 2021. I.e. the first analyze related to the primary endpoints are likely to take place by the end of 2021.
The project is funded by TrygFonden, Patient@home and Lundbeck Foundation.
The project is carried out under INSIDE research group in collaboration with our Partners.
