Disclosures: Cecilia Cordova Vallejos, MD: No financial relationships or conflicts of interest

Objective: To follow-up and provide resources (i.e health information, support-groups, empowerment tools, and physical activity opportunities) to the amputee population seen in our Rehabilitation Department. To evaluate the feasibility of a “communication and follow-up” protocol, to reduce the number of amputee-patients lost to follow-up.

Design: “Plan-Do-Study-Act” model, small-test-of-change and scaling-up method. Monthly-meetings (among residents and resident-leader with Attending-mentor).Setting : Acute Inpatient Rehabilitation Unit, Outpatient Rehabilitation Clinics, and Rehabilitation Consult Services.Participants : Amputee-patients of any age, amputation and K-level, referred within the Rehabilitation Department.

Interventions: Amputee-patients identified by Rehabilitation Medicine house-staff are placed in an new EPIC-shared-folder. Monthly rotation of resident-volunteers to follow-up patients added to the shared-folder via phone call and e-mail (new official group e-mail account). Excel sheet with demographics, contact information, and others (amputation data -level/cause/date-, interest in participation and in access to resources), to addressed intervention and actions taken.

Main Outcome Measures: Principal outcomes are the number of patients that: are being added to the EPIC-shared-folder, have successful communication, are willing to participate and access to resources. Secondary outcomes include: number of patients followed in P&O clinic, are using the resources, have complications (re-admission, new amputations, infection, other). Simple statistics methods including mean, variance, and mode were used.

Results: 56 amputee-patients (35 men) were added to our EPIC-shared-folder (September 2020-February 2021). 67% had BKA, 25% had more than one amputation, 44% had peripheral artery disease as main cause of amputation. 43% of patients showed interest in follow-up after first contact, 16% were not interested. 41% had either communication-failure or data-collection-problems, insufficient for analysis.Conclusions: Communication-determinants and clear-data-collection shown to be a barrier for follow-up of our amputee-patients. Of the successfully contacted patients, most showed interest in being followed-up and to use the resources available. We believe that a follow-up protocol for this patient group is feasible and needed, and it may improve health outcomes.

Level of Evidence: Level V

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PM&R Meeting Abstracts - https://pmrjabstracts.org/abstract/support-and-follow-up-of-an-underserved-amputee-population-a-quality-improvement-project/