de Toledo 2006.
| Methods | Randomised controlled trial | |
| Participants | 157 COPD patients recruited during a tertiary hospital admission for an acute episode, randomised to an intervention group: N = 67; age = 71 ± 8 years, 2.3 % women and control group: N = 90; age = 72 ± 9, 3.2% women | |
| Interventions | The care team shared a web‐based patient record which also featured mobile home visits units and fixed home units. There was also integrated support for education (of both professionals and patients) and videoconferencing with the patients. The intervention group patients also had 24 hour access to the multidisciplinary care team via a call centre. The call centre was not intended for dealing with emergency calls and stored out‐of‐hours calls until the next day. Control patients did not have access to the call centre but received education and home visits as well. Follow‐up for these patients was made without the mobile home visit unit and web‐based patient management module. |
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| Outcomes | 1. Number of readmissions. 2. Number of visits to emergency department. 3. Mortality. 4. Acceptability to professionals. 5. Patterns of use and equipment and communication costs. |
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| Notes | ||
| Risk of bias | ||
| Bias | Authors' judgement | Support for judgement |
| Random sequence generation (selection bias) | Unclear risk | "randomly distributed in an intervention and a control group" |
| Allocation concealment (selection bias) | Unclear risk | Insufficient information |
| Blinding (performance bias and detection bias) All outcomes | High risk | Impossible to blind patients to intervention, no evidence of outcome assessor or data analyser blinding. |
| Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes | Unclear risk | Insufficient information, no details of patients withdrawing or lost to follow up. |
| Selective reporting (reporting bias) | Low risk | No evidence of selective reporting, all outcomes in methods are reported. |
| Other bias | High risk | Patients in the intervention group may have experienced a feeling of being better cared for that may have improved their outcomes. Extreme sex ratio in study groups may limit generalisability |