Racial and ethnic differences in clinical outcome trajectories for care managed patients.

Background: Care management has demonstrated improvements in quality of care for patients with complex care needs. The extent to which these interventions benefit race/ethnic minority populations is unclear.

Objectives: To characterize race/ethnic differences in the longitudinal control of clinical outcomes for patients with complex care needs enrolled in Care Management Plus, a health information technology-enabled care coordination intervention.

Research Design: Multilevel models of repeated observations from clinical encounters before and after program enrollment for 6 Oregon and California primary care clinics.

Subjects: A total of 18,675 clinic patients were examined. We estimated multilevel models for 1481 and 5320 care-managed individuals with repeated hemoglobin A1c and blood pressure measurements, respectively.

Measures: Primary outcomes were changes over time for 2 clinical markers of health status for complex care patients: (1) hemoglobin A1c for patients with diabetes; and (2) mid-blood pressure (BP) (average systolic and diastolic blood pressure).

Results: We found significant reductions in A1c for patients with previously uncontrolled A1c (preperiod slope, b=1.03 [0.83, 1.24]; postperiod slope, b=-0.63 [-0.91, -0.35]). For mid-BP we found increasing unconditional preperiod trajectories (b=3.52 [2.39, 4.64]) and decreasing postperiod trajectories (b=-5.21 [-5.70, -4.72]). We also found the trajectories of A1c and mid-BP were not statistically different for black, Latino, and white patients.

Conclusions: These analyses demonstrate some promising results for intermediate clinical outcomes for underrepresented patients with complex chronic care needs. It remains to be seen whether these health care system delivery redesigns yield long-term benefits for patients, such as improvements in function and quality of life.