Patient Outcome Plans for the ACUAWARE Study

Your ACU-Track account includes a series of Plans to help you monitor your patient’s specific health complaints. You will see these Plans displayed under the ‘Patient Outcome Plans’ button in each patient’s Clinical Record underneath the Pathway name:

For the ACUAWARE Study you will be using only two of these plans to monitor patient outcomes:

• The ‘Wellbeing and Pain Plan’

• The ‘Interoceptive Awareness Plan’

The ‘Wellbeing and Pain Plan’ uses the PROMIS© 10 Global Health questionnaire. This is a simple 10 question questionnaire which tracks overall physical and mental health, including wellbeing, energy levels and also includes a 0-10 pain scale.

The Interoceptive Awareness Plan uses a measure called the MAIA 2. This is a slightly longer questionnaire which asks a range of questions relating to how a patient feels in their own body.

Initiating a Plan

• First, find the patient, select the ACU-Track Main Health Complaint Pathway and go to their Clinical Record.

• To initiate a patient onto the Plans, simply click the Patient Outcome Plans button, then first select the ‘Wellbeing and Pain Plan’.

• The date will automatically be today’s date so do not change this.

• Click the green ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the page to confirm.

You will see two new red forms displayed at the top of the patients Clinical Record. A ‘Main Health Complaint Form’ (this is to categorise the patient’s main health complaint) and the PROMIS 10 baseline questionnaire form.

• Then, repeat the same process, click the Patient Outcome Plans button and select the ‘Interoceptive Awareness Plan’.

You will now see another new red form displayed at the top of the patients Clinical Record which is the MAIA 2 baseline questionnaire form.

Completing the Baseline Questionnaires

For the ACUAWARE Study, we are asking practitioners to complete the baseline at the time of the first appointment. This can either be done with the patient after the initial consultation process.

Alternatively, you may get a trained member of your clinical staff to administer the questionnaire for the patient on your behalf in the waiting room before their first appointment. Either way, the process of initiating the plan is the same as described above.

• To open the baseline questionnaires, click the blue ‘patient portal’ link below the left-side menu to open the Patient Portal in a new window.

*Please Note:

It is important that you PASS CONTROL OF THE DEVICE to the patient when they are completing any questionnaires in clinic.

Ask the patient to click ‘Complete Now’

The first question on each Plan asks the patient to type and select the term that best describes their main health complaint. If you are completing the questionnaire in clinic, you will have already discussed their problem in detail during the initial consultation. You should help guide the patient to select the option which is most appropriate and accurate.

They may have a clear medical diagnosis for their chronic pain problem in which case this will be straight forward, or they may just have pain or a problem in a particular area of the body with no formal diagnosis.

 If you or the patient are not sure which term to choose, or if their complaint is not listed, just select ‘OTHER HEALTH PROBLEM’, either by clicking on the magnifying glass icon or typing this term directly in the search box.

This will then load a new text box and the patient can write their health complaint in their own words.

Don’t worry if you don’t get it right!

You can always update this categorisation in the future by Changing Health Complaint Categorisation.

The second question simply asks them to score how long they have had this problem.

Next the patient will be guided through the specific questionnaires on their chosen Plan.

*Quick Tip

You can help clarify the patients responses if they are not sure about a certain question or what to put, but please be careful not influence the patients responses when they are answering the questionnaires.

When they have finished the questionnaire, the patient can just click ‘Return to Your Portal Home Page’ or ‘Quit’, and pass the device back to you.

You will now see the completed forms are marked Black, and displayed under ‘Health Complaint’ and ‘Outcomes’ in the patient’s Clinical Record.

You can now finish your consultation and proceed to deliver any treatments or prescriptions!

Collecting Follow-up Questionnaires

Once a patient has been initiated onto a Plan and has completed their initial questionnaires, your ACU-Track account will automatically send all follow-up questionnaires to the patient via email at pre-defined time-points of:

• 4 weeks

• 8 weeks

• 12 weeks

• 6 months

• 9 months

• 1 year.

In a patient’s Clinical Record:

• Grey forms under ‘Future Tasks’ show all questionnaires that will be sent in the future.

• Black forms mean the questionnaire has been completed, and you can click on the forms to view their scores.

• Red forms mean that the questionnaire has NOT been completed

*Quick Tip

Please try and get patients to complete all follow-up questionnaires remotely via email wherever possible.

However, if a patient forgets and has an overdue questionnaire due at the time of their appointment, you can simply click the same blue ‘Patient Portal’ link which will open their questionnaires in a new window and the patient can complete their follow-up questionnaires in the same way they completed the baseline questionnaire.

If a patient does not complete a questionnaire, the system will send an automatic email reminder to each patient twice.

• You can also Send a Manual Email Reminder to the patient.

As well as the MAIA 2 and PROMIS 10 follow-up questionnaires. The ACU-Track system will also send additional follow-up questionnaires to help monitor patient progress and improvement with their main health problem.

• The Patient Global Impression of Change (PGIC) scale

At 8 weeks the patient is sent some additional one-off follow-up questionnaires asking about their overall satisfaction with care, perceived effectiveness of treatment, adverse events and for any further comments or information.

View Clinical Scores

Your ACU-Track account lets easily view and monitor individual patient progress.

• In patient’s Clinical Record, click on the Clinical Scores button in the left-hand side menu.

• Select the name of the questionnaire to display a record of all the recorded scores at each date.

• Click on the graph icon to view the visual progression of mean scores over time.

• The green or red arrows will indicate whether the score progression is positive or negative.

• For the MAIA 2, you can view a patients overall score progression, or view a breakdown of the questionnaire sub-domains directly.

*Quick Tip!

As well as collecting patient scores for the ACUAWARE study; we encourage practitioners to routinely monitor a patients’ questionnaire scores as a helpful clinical tool to assess patient progress as they undergo a course of treatments and care.

The patient may show an overall improvement or may show an improvement in some scores but not others. This information can be very useful for you as a practitioner and can help guide you in adapting the treatment strategy for a particular patient.