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Innovation for Healthier Lives
Connection to Health, or CTH, is a suite of web-based tools that focuses on helping patients and their healthcare providers to efficiently and effectively develop actionable self-management goals to improve chronic conditions, such as diabetes and heart disease.
The CTH suite of tools includes a streamlined patient survey, action plan, and ability to track patients’ progress and follow up. Patients complete the patient survey through either a link in their patient portal prior to their office visit, or on a tablet while in the office. The patient and provider or healthcare team member develop a collaborative action plan that prioritizes the patient’s desires for improving their chronic condition.
CTH was developed and tested by researchers at the University of Colorado Department of Family Medicine and the University of California San Francisco Department of Family and Community Medicine through two NIH grants that spanned 10 years of research.
Connection to Health Improves Diabetes Outcomes: Our Research Overview
The research teams at the University of Colorado Department of Family Medicine and the University of California San Francisco Department of Family and Community Medicine received two NIH research grants over 10 years to develop and test CTH.
During our first round of NIH funding, CTH was implemented in 36 primary care practices in Colorado and northern California, enrolling over 1500 patients with diabetes in the study. Results from this study found that patients with diabetes who completed a CTH patient survey and action plan had a statistically significant decrease in their hemoglobin A1c trajectory compared with patients with diabetes who did not enroll in CTH.
The second CTH study was conducted in 12 primary care practices in northern California and the results are pending. Please see the CTH Research Results tab for more details about our studies and results. The results from these two studies have demonstrated that CTH can be successfully implemented into busy primary care practices and can improve patient outcomes.
How Can to Connection to Health Help my Heath System or Practice?
CTH has been successfully integrated into 47 primary care practices in Colorado and northern California, demonstrating its acceptability for practices and patients. And, as has been described, patients who complete a CTH patients survey and action plan had significant improvements in their diabetes outcomes.
Other benefits of CTH include:
- Easy to use for patients – results from both studies show acceptability and ease-of-use. The patients survey, action plan, and patient tips are all available in Spanish. The patient survey is narrated in English and Spanish for those patients with low health literacy.
- Helps facilitate goal setting and action planning – the patient survey results allow the patient to prioritize health goals to talk with their healthcare team, which leads to efficient and effective goal setting and action planning.
- Can structure and facilitate telehealth diabetes visits – since CTH is web-based, it can be used to structure and facilitate telehealth visits with your patients with diabetes and other chronic conditions.
- Can help with value-based payments – most value-based payments programs pay practices more for improvements in diabetes outcomes and use of CTH has been shown to improve hemoglobin A1c.