Bolstering the Business Case for Adoption of Shared Decision-Making Systems in Primary Care: Randomized Controlled Trial

Abstract

Background: Limited budgets may often constrain the ability of health care delivery systems to adopt shared decision-making (SDM) systems designed to improve clinical encounters with patients and quality of care. Objective: This study aimed to assess the impact of an SDM system shown to improve diabetes and cardiovascular patient outcomes on factors affecting revenue generation in primary care clinics. Methods: As part of a large multisite clinic randomized controlled trial (RCT), we explored the differences in 1 care system between clinics randomized to use an SDM intervention (n=8) versus control clinics (n=9) regarding the (1) likelihood of diagnostic coding for cardiometabolic conditions using the 10th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) and (2) current procedural terminology (CPT) billing codes. Results: At all 24,138 encounters with care gaps targeted by the SDM system, the proportion assigned high-complexity CPT codes for level of service 5 was significantly higher at the intervention clinics (6.1%) compared to that in the control clinics (2.9%), with P 8% (n=8463), 7.2% vs 3.4%, P 30 kg/m2 (n=19,838), 6.2% vs 2.9%, P