Evaluation of a Health Information Technology–Enabled Panel Management Platform to Improve Anticoagulation Control in a Low-Income Patient Population: Protocol for a Quasi-Experimental Design

Background Warfarin is one of the most commonly prescribed medications in the United States, and it causes a significant proportion of adverse drug events. Patients taking warfarin fall outside of the recommended therapeutic range 30% of the time, largely because of inadequate laboratory monitoring and dose adjustment. This leads to an increased risk of blood clots or bleeding events. We propose a comparative effectiveness study to examine whether a technology-enabled anticoagulation management program can improve long-term clinical outcomes compared with usual care. Objective Our proposed intervention is the implementation of an electronic dashboard (integrated into a preexisting electronic health record) and standardized workflow to track patients’ laboratory results, identify patients requiring follow-up, and facilitate the use of a validated nomogram for dose adjustment. The primary outcome of this study is the time in therapeutic range (TTR) at 6 months post intervention (a validated metric of anticoagulation quality among patients receiving warfarin). Methods We will employ a pre-post quasi-experimental design with a nonequivalent usual-care comparison site and a difference-in-differences approach to compare the effectiveness of a technology-enabled anticoagulation management program compared with usual care at a large university-affiliated safety-net clinic. Results We used a commercially available health information technology (HIT) platform to host a registry of patients on warfarin therapy and create the electronic dashboard for panel management. We developed the intervention with, and for, frontline clinician users, using principles of human-centered design. This study is funded until September 2020 and is approved by the University of California, San Francisco Institutional Review Board until June 22, 2020. We completed data collection in September 2019 and expect to complete our proposed analyses by February 2020. Conclusions We anticipate that the intervention will increase TTR among patients taking warfarin and that the use of this HIT platform will facilitate tracking and monitoring of patients on warfarin, which could enable outreach to those overdue for visits or laboratory monitoring. We will use these findings to iteratively improve the platform in preparation for a larger, multiple-site, pragmatic clinical trial. If successful, our study will demonstrate the integration of HIT platforms into existing electronic health records to improve patient care in real-world clinical settings. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/13835