Page 131 - Exploring the Potential of Self-Monitoring Kidney Function After Transplantation - Céline van Lint

Self-monitoring: the reliability of patient-reported data 129
variation over a short period of time. It was therefore deemed unnecessary to replace these other laboratory measurements with a home-based alternative.
To remind nephrologists of scheduling a telephone consult instead of a face-to-face visit, a short note asking for the next appointment to be a telephonic one was shown repetitively in a patients’ electronic hospital file. It was, however, up to the treating nephrologist to judge whether a patients’ condition allowed for a telephonic consult to take place or whether a face-to-face visit was requested.
At the end of the intervention period of one year, all patients were invited to bring their creatinine device to download logged data. This data included test results, date and time of all performed measurements and, if applicable, an indication of whether a specific value was termed a test measurement. Further, data that was automatically logged in the SMSS was downloaded including the registered value(s), date of performed measurement (according to the patient), date of registration and the feedback that was supplied online after each registered creatinine value.
Measures
Patients completed a questionnaire at baseline to collect demographic characteristics. The read out data from the creatinine device and the data that was logged in the SMSS were combined using date of measurement. For the creatinine device, measurement date was the date of measurement performance that was registered automatically in the device memory. For the SMSS, measurement date was the date of measurement performance according to the patient.
Statistical analyses
Adherence to measurement frequency
To assess whether patients adhered to the measurement protocol, we separated adherence according to device logged data (did patients perform the requested number of measurements?) and adherence to SMSS logged data (did patients register the requested number of measurements online?). If applicable, paired t-tests were conducted to compare means using SPSS 22.0. In these cases p<.05 was considered statistically significant.
For adherence according to device logged data, we calculated the number of days with measurements per patient per phase and compared this to the number of requested measurement days. Number of requested measurement days was 28 during phase one (four weeks), 15 during phase two (five weeks), 12 during phase three (six weeks) and 37 during phase four (37 weeks). To make it easier to interpret the results, level of adherence was divided in 4 subcategories for this study:
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