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Culturally-Tailored Approach to Improve Medication Use in Patients With Heart Attacks

NCT00426231 · Status: COMPLETED · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 140

Last updated 2014-02-24

Study results available
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Summary

Our research aims to improve the use of medicines known to prevent recurrent heart attacks. In particular, we know that statin treatment is useful after heart attacks, but many patients do not use it. There are a few possible reasons for this. Patients cannot find affordable medicine. Their doctor may not prescribe the medicine after they leave the hospital. Some people may culturally mistrust using the medicine. So they may decide not to take it even if it is prescribed. We are developing a hospital based culturally attuned program to target this problem. In this program, a community health worker counsels and helps patients in accessing pharmacy assistance programs. We will test whether this program can improve appropriate statin use.

We will enroll patients who have heart attacks. We will compare patients who are counseled by the community health worker with those who get the usual care at baseline and at 6 and 12 months (participants enrolled during the early phase of the recruitment will have an additional study visit at 24 months). We will test if their "bad" cholesterol levels are controlled. We will find out how regularly they have filled their questionnaire and taken the medicine. Finally, we will test if they are getting benefit from the statin treatment. We will do this using blood tests and imaging the patients' arteries with ultrasound. We will also measure how cost-effective it is for a hospital to run the program.

It is our goal to develop a community health worker model that is culturally sensitive for people with cultural, educational or educational barriers. Statin use is known to benefit patients in theory; such a culturally competent program will improve health outcomes in practice. After we test it, a cost-effective program such as this can be implemented in other hospitals.

Conditions

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Navigation by a health worker

Help provided by health worker to navigate medication access programs

BEHAVIORAL

Information control

Information about medication access programs provided to the participant and their healthcare provider

Sponsors & Collaborators

Principal Investigators

  • Dhananjay Vaidya, MBBS PhD MPH · Johns Hopkins University

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
PREVENTION
Masking
NONE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
21 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2006-03-31
Primary Completion
2009-12-31
Completion
2009-12-31

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

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Entities

Diseases
Companies

Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT00426231 on ClinicalTrials.gov