Case Study: Activating and Empowering At-Risk Patients for Aortic Stenosis
Background
The Challenge
- Aortic stenosis is a type of heart valve disease that progresses quickly. Once symptoms start, if untreated the average survival is 50% at two years and 20% at five years
- Facilitating prompt treatment is therefore critical to survival
- Unfortunately, awareness of the main symptoms of aortic stenosis is low among both patients and healthcare professionals and symptoms are often dismissed as simply age-related.
Our Behaviour Change Approach
Atlantis Health implemented a behaviour activation campaign to identify and empower at-risk patients to approach their healthcare professional for heart checks:
- Increase symptom awareness and identification among at-risk patients using a co-designed self-screening tool (adapted from Everett et al., 2018)
- Encourage self-screened patients to discuss their symptoms with their GP
- Facilitate cardiac-related referrals and treatment where required.
The Solution
- Key stakeholders co-designed and validated the self-screening tool
- Clinics consented to a patient management system (PMS) query to identify potential at-risk patients
- Identified patients were sent a letter and text message with the screening tool and encouraged to identify any possible aortic stenosis symptoms
- Patients were then advised based on results of their self-screening to make an appointment with their healthcare professional to discuss the symptoms and a treatment plan
- Follow-up query via the PMS determined if patients were activated by the campaign to seek an appointment with their healthcare professional and receive a heart check.
The Impact
- Of the at-risk patients identified and sent the self-screening tool, 82% visited their GP during the following 7-week campaign period
- Of those patients who sought an appointment for a heart check, 26% were either likely or highly likely to have been activated directly by the campaign
- Post-campaign analysis based on their next predicted visit date calculated from 18-month actual visit data
- ‘Likely’ = those who visited GP before their predicted date
- ‘Highly likely’ = those who visited GP more than 1 week before their predicted date
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