Impact of a Real-time Mentoring Tool on Antibiotic Prescription (medAL-mentor)

ePOCT+ is a paediatric digital clinical decision support algorithm for health workers in primary care facilities in Tanzania. The objective is to improve the integrated management of acutely ill children aged 1 day to 14 years and reduce inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions.

Preliminary findings from the first phase of the DYNAMIC project, an open-label cluster randomized controlled study performed in 40 health facilities, showed a reduction in antibiotic prescription by health providers from about 70% in the control arm to 23% in health facilities using ePOCT+, with similar clinical outcomes in children at day 7. Nevertheless, uptake of ePOCT+ and antibiotic prescription in the intervention arm were very heterogeneous across health facilities.

Benchmarking in healthcare is defined as "a process of comparative evaluation and identification of the underlying causes leading to high levels of performance". The findings and experiences of different institutions are shared, and elements of best practices are adopted to improve performance. Benchmarking has been promoted for years by infectious diseases societies as a component of hospital antimicrobial stewardship programs, to reduce antibiotic prescription. Benchmarking has also been shown to be an effective incentive to improve the quality of care in various settings, including primary care practice. Unfortunately, published initiatives have largely come from high-income countries.

In the context of the DYNAMIC project, we developed a near real-time mentoring tool, medAL-mentor, based on a monitoring and benchmarking dashboard using data collected through ePOCT+. The tool provides direct feedback to health workers on their performance, based on several clinical indicators (including antibiotic prescription), in comparison with data from other health facilities. The monitoring team will target calls and monitoring visits to health facilities based on these indicators and use the dashboard to facilitate discussions with healthcare workers.

This ancillary study, MedAL-mentor, aims to assess whether this real-time mentoring tool based on data generated by a clinical decision support algorithm, as well as feedback from the mentoring team, improves healthcare workers' compliance with guidelines - and therefore the quality of care for sick children at primary care level.

More specifically, the study objectives are :

Primary objective :

To determine whether the provision of medAL-mentor, a digital mentoring tool, decreases antibiotic prescription by primary care clinicians using a clinical decision support algorithm (ePOCT+) for the management of sick children

Secondary objectives are :

• To assess the impact of medAL-mentor on clinicians' uptake of ePOCT+
• To assess the impact of medal-mentor on clinicians in terms of :

• Performance of key measurements and assessment of signs by clinicians
• Compliance with the recommendations related to point-of-care tests (for malaria and haemoglobin)

This open-label, parallel cluster randomized controlled study is embedded in the second phase of the DYNAMIC project in Tanzania. The intervention consists of providing direct access to medAL-mentor to the healthcare workers. The mentoring team will target calls and monitoring visits to health facilities based on medAL-mentor indicators and use the dashboard to facilitate discussions with healthcare workers during the monitoring visits. Since the intervention takes place at the healthcare worker level and their practices are influenced by the context of the health facility they are working in, randomization at the health facility level rather than at the health worker level was chosen.

40 health facilities using ePOCT+ for the first time during the second phase of the DYNAMIC project will be randomly selected and assigned to two groups (randomization 1:1, intervention: control). Health workers in health facilities randomized to the intervention group will receive feedback on their performance through direct access to medAL-mentor and regular mobile messages, as well as targeted phone calls and visits by the monitoring team based on the medAL-mentor dashboard. Health facilities from the control group will receive standard monitoring (regular messages to check for any issues and regular site visits), without access to medAL-mentor (neither for the health workers nor for the monitoring team).

Inclusion criteria

• Presenting for an acute medical or surgical condition

Exclusion criteria

• Presenting for scheduled consultation for a chronic disease (e.g. HIV, tuberculosis, non-communicable diseases, malnutrition)
• Presenting for routine preventive care (e.g. growth monitoring, vitamin supplementation, deworming, vaccination)