Interventions to De-implement Unnecessary Antibiotic Prescribing for Children With Ear Infections

Study Summary

This study aims to improve care and reduce unnecessary antibiotic prescribing for children with ear infections. The study will compare the effectiveness of a "gold standard" to a hybrid intervention combined with this gold standard, in order to identify steps to increase parent satisfaction for child ear infection care. The "gold standard" approach is a Health System Level Intervention. On its own, it involves clinician education, tools in electronic medical records, and audit and feedback reports for clinician prescribing habits. The hybrid intervention includes the elements of the health systems level intervention in addition to a Shared Decision-Making component, which allows for both an increase in the role parents play in their child's care, as well as clinician education for how to use this method. The goals of this work are to increase parent satisfaction, reduce antibiotics taken for childhood ear infections, align medical care with the current national guidelines, and evaluate differences in the two intervention groups. Both groups will be evaluated for implementation outcomes to improve dissemination and scalability for future use of these models in antibiotic prescribing for children with ear infections. This study will recruit a diverse group of patients and clinicians to complete surveys, parents to participate in focus groups, and clinicians and administrators to be interviewed in order to meet study aims and receive sufficient feedback on the interventions performed. There are two hypotheses for this research: 1. The Hybrid Intervention will have higher parent satisfaction and reduced antibiotic use compared to the Health-System Level Intervention and 2. The Hybrid Intervention will be more challenging to implement than the Health-System Level Intervention, but will be preferred by parents, clinicians, and administrators.

Primary Outcome

Survey responses will be measured by the percentage of "Very Satisfied" or "Extremely Satisfied" responses from parents on a 7-point Likert Scale. The survey tool will be created from adaptations to the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL) and the Acute Otitis Media Severity of Symptom Scale (AOM-SOS). In this survey, the higher scores on the Likert Scale will indicate more overall parent satisfaction.

Conditions Studied

Interventions

• OTHER Changes to the electronic health record (EHR)
• OTHER Individualized audit and feedback reporting for clinicians
• OTHER Clinician education sessions
• OTHER Use of a shared decision-making (SDM) aide
• OTHER Shared decision-making (SDM) education

Study Locations (3)