Hospitals that aim to offer women long-acting reversible contraception immediately after giving birth require up-front coordination across departments, including early recruitment of nonclinical staff, researchers have found.
One of the advantages to offering LARC postpartum in the hospital, instead of an outpatient clinic, is that patients are not required to present for repeat visits. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has called the immediate postpartum period an optimal time for LARC placement.
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In an effort to fill in this knowledge gap, a team of investigators led by Lisa G. Hofler, MD, MPH, of Emory University in Atlanta, sought to identify barriers to implementation and characteristics of successful efforts among hospitals developing postpartum LARC programs.
Dr. Hofler’s team interviewed clinicians and staff members, including pharmacists and billing employees, at 10 Georgia hospitals starting in March 2015, about a year after the state approved a separate Medicaid-reimbursement protocol for immediate postpartum LARC. Of the hospitals in the study, nine were attempting to launch programs during the study period, and four had active programs by the study endpoint (Obstet Gynecol 2017;129:3–9).
Dr. Hofler and her colleagues found – through interviews conducted separately with 32 employees in clinical or administrative roles – that the hospitals that had succeeded had engaged multidisciplinary teams early in the process.
“We found that implementing an immediate postpartum LARC program in the hospital is initially more complicated than people think, and involves the participation of departments that people might overlook,” Dr. Hofler said in an interview. “It’s about engaging a pharmacy person, a billing person, or a health records expert in addition to the usual nursing and physician staff that one engages when you have some sort of clinical practice change.”
Barriers to successful programs included staff lack of knowledge about LARC, financial concerns, and competing priorities within hospitals, the team found.
“Several participants had little previous exposure to LARC, and clinicians did not always easily appreciate the differences between providing LARC in the inpatient and outpatient settings,” Dr. Hofler and her colleagues reported in their study.
“Early involvement of the necessary members of the implementation team leads to better communication and understanding of the project,” the researchers concluded, noting that implementation cannot move forward without “financial reassurance early in the process.”
Teams should include representation from direct clinical care personnel, pharmacy, or finance and billing, they reported, though the specific team members may vary by hospital.
“Consistent communication and team planning with clear roles and responsibilities are key to navigating the complex and interconnected steps” in launching a program, they wrote.
Though Dr. Hofler stressed that the report was not meant to substitute for formal guidance, it maps the steps needed, and the departments involved, at each stage of the implementation process, from exploration of a program to its eventual launch and maintenance.
The study was supported by a grant from the Society of Family Planning Research Fund. Two of the coauthors disclosed research funding or other relationships with LARC manufacturers.