Do you wonder how to encourage your patients to make changes in areas such as diet, exercise, tobacco use and alcohol use? Perhaps an automated telephone system could help do the trick. The Academy's National Research Network will test that theory, thanks to a $300,000 grant for a "telephony" project to assess improvements in patients' health behaviors through telephone-linked care.
Wilson Pace, M.D., director of the National Research Network, is directing the project. The funding is part of a second round of grants awarded through the program Prescription for Health: Promoting Healthy Behaviors in Primary Care Research Networks. Both the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality are supporters of Prescription for Health.
A report on the telephony project's first phase is part of the supplement to the July/August Annals of Family Medicine. The report explains that practices were asked to enroll patients interested in improving their physical activity levels and diet. Patients would develop goals and would phone an automated system to report their self-assessed scores on a four-point scale ranging from 0 (did not work on the goal) to 4 (exceeded the goal).
The second phase of the project, says Pace, will focus on working with patients who want to improve their diet, increase their exercise, stop smoking or stop risky drinking.
"There are easy ways to add exercise to your life and cut a couple hundred calories out of your day without trying to make wholesale changes like going to the gym or getting on a special diet," says Pace. "Small changes can lead to big outcomes."
An RWJ press release lists all recipients of the second-round funding through Prescription for Health. Many participants in other research projects funded through this second round of grants also are family physicians.
