In this era of population health and care coordination anchored in a medical home, one of the additions to that home have been patient or parent navigators-- non-medical personnel often stationed in offices who help families better understand how to access services they may not have known about to improve the quality of the care they receive. So does having a patient navigator result in parents learning more about quality care and ways to insure it is occurring? Goff et al. (REF) this week report on their randomized controlled trial testing the impact of patient navigators to teach families how to use online accessible quality data about pediatrician performance.
The study involved mothers-to-be in a Massachusetts urban prenatal clinic in which some of these pregnant women were randomized to receive education by navigators on how to select a pediatrician based on quality performance scores available on a state website. The women who got the navigator intervention required two visits and 97% of the 746 women did that, and then were asked to select a pediatric practice for when their baby was born. The good news is that the women in the intervention were more apt to choose a practice with a higher quality rating than those who did not work with the navigators. The bad news is that when asked what helped these women choose their pediatrician, the quality data they had been taught to use did not have a large impact on the decision.
Does this mean adding lay navigators in a prenatal or postnatal office setting is for naught? Behavioral and developmental specialist Dr. Barry Zuckerman along with Dr. Elizabeth Peacock Chambers encourage us to continue to value navigators and put the results of this study in context in an engaging commentary (10.1542/peds.2016-2447) that accompanies this article. Are you using navigators in your office? Are you finding them helpful? Share your thoughts on this study or your experience by responding to this blog, uploading a comment on our website, or posting a comment on our Facebook or Twitter pages.
