The effect evaluation of continuous care pathway on hypertension control:Evidence from a ru-ral community-based quasi-experiment / 中国卫生政策研究

ABSTRACT

Objectives:To test the effect of continuous care on rural hypertension control , we developed a com-prehensive intervention strategy and implemented a community-based quasi-experiment in Southwestern rural China.Methods:The intervention took place in Qianjiang District , Chongqing Municipality from July 2012 to June 2014.4 towns were randomly selected and categorized into 2 groups based on a comprehensive consideration of population and social development level.All the rural hypertension patients in treatment group were intervened with the Multi-institu-tional Continuous Pathway which was consisted of three partsthe Continuous Primary-Care Pathway , the Continuous Clinical Pathway and the Continuous Management Pathway.The patients in the control group served as a blank com-parison using the usual care.Difference-in-differences Model was used to test the effect of blood pressure control in treatment group.Results:853 patients were sampled and investigated using the stratified randomly sampling strategy and 712 of them had been followed up by the end of this program.The potential bias of pilot and patient selection were eliminated through control before and after the intervention.The previous blood pressure trends showed no statis-tically significant difference between groups.The systolic blood pressure in treatment group declined by 10.156 mm-Hg ( P<0.001 ) compared to control group after intervention , and the blood pressure control rate had increased by 27.6% ( P<0.001 ).Other contributing factors besides intervention were family structure , education level and med-ical service availability.Conclusion:The continuous care pathway have a significant marginal positive effect on hyper -tension control besides the national compulsory primary care , and the control rate change of blood pressure is more sen-sitive compared to blood pressure change.The potential contributing factors show that other intervention strategies could be developed to improve the rural hypertension control by adding to the social capital of rural patient , reinforcing the health education and facilitating the village transportation.