Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) Tear
Conditions
Brief summary
Background: Telemedicine is increasingly used to overcome distance between patients and physicians. Preliminary studies suggest that mobile app follow-up care for ACL reconstruction patients is feasible, can avert in-person follow-up care, and is cost-effective. Objective: To avert in-person follow-up through the use of a mobile app in the first six weeks after surgery. Methods: This will be a single-center, prospective randomized controlled trial Results: Data to be analyzed from 72 patients.
Interventions
DEVICEmobile app
The mobile app follow-up group will have no planned in-person follow-up, however these visits will be replaced with surgical site examination via submitted photos, Visual Analogue Scale (VAS), and Quality of Recovery - 9 questionnaire (QoR-9) and limb specific recovery monitoring. All information is submitted with the mobile app (QoC Health Inc, Toronto).
OTHERconventional in-person
Patients in the conventional follow-up group will have a planned clinic follow-up at 2 and 6 weeks post-operatively, which is the schedule currently used by our surgeons. At these scheduled follow-up visits, patients will be asked to complete the VAS to assess pain and the QoR-9 in addition to recovery questions about their operated extremity.
Sponsors
University of Toronto Orthopaedic Sports Medicine
Study design
Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Intervention model
PARALLEL
Primary purpose
SUPPORTIVE_CARE
Masking
NONE
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
18 Years to 70 Years
Healthy volunteers
No
Inclusion criteria
* Patients undergoing ACL reconstruction at Women's College Hospital (WCH), between the ages of 18-70. * Patients must be able to use a mobile device and communicate in English.
Exclusion criteria
* Patients who are smokers, as they carry increased rates of complications. * Patients must not: * Suffer from chronic pain * Be taking narcotic (morphine-like) medication for pain on a regular basis, and * Have an allergy to local anesthetics or morphine-like medications * Pain scores captured in the VAS and QoR-9 are important for judging post-operative recovery. Pre-existing pain or inability to take narcotics post-operatively would compromise the reliability of these measures.
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Required physician visits | 6 weeks post surgery | Total number of physician visits (including specialist, family physician, and ER) related to surgery |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Health care phone calls | 6 weeks post surgery | Total number of health care telephone calls and emails (including specialist, family physician and ER) |
Other
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of treatment | through study completion (approximately one year) | cost of treatment related to surgery (i.e. rehabilitation, assistive devices) |
| Patient satisfaction with post-operative care | 6 weeks post surgery | patient satisfaction as recorded in the questionnaires (VAS) at 6 weeks post surgery |
Countries
Canada
Outcome results
None listed