Inflammatory Bowel Disease Telemedicine Clinical Trial: Impact of Educational Text Messages on Disease-Specific Knowledge Over 1 Year.

Background Effective treatments are available for patients with inflammatory bowel disease IBD however suboptimal outcomes occur and are often linked to patients limited disease knowledge The aim of this analysis was to determine if delivery of educational messages through a telemedicine system improves IBD knowledge Methods TELEmedicine for Patients with IBD TELE IBD was a randomized controlled trial with visits at baseline 6 months and 12 months patient knowledge was a secondary aim of the study Patients were randomized to receive TELE IBD every other week EOW weekly TELE IBD W or standard of care Knowledge was assessed at each visit with the Crohn s and Colitis Knowledge CCKNOW survey The primary outcome was change in CCKNOW score over 1 year compared between the TELE IBD and control groups Results This analysis included 219 participants Participants in the TELE IBD arms had a greater improvement in CCKNOW score compared with standard care TELE IBD EOW 2 4 vs standard care 1 8 P 0 03 TELE IBD W 2 0 vs standard care 1 8 P 0 35 Participants with lower baseline CCKNOW scores had a greater change in their score over time P Under 0 01 However after adjusting for race site and baseline knowledge there was no difference in CCKNOW score change between the control and telemedicine arms Conclusions Telemedicine improves IBD specific knowledge through text messaging although the improvement is not additive with greater frequency of text messages However after adjustment for confounding variables telemedicine is not superior to education given through standard visits at referral centers Further research is needed to determine if revised systems with different modes of delivery and or frequency of messages improve disease knowledge