Mapping variation in intervention design: a systematic review to develop a program theory for patient navigator programs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There is a great deal of variation in the design and delivery of patient navigator (PN) programs, making it difficult to design or adopt these interventions in new contexts. We (1) systematically reviewed the literature to generate a preliminary program theory to describe how patient navigator interventions are designed and delivered; and (2) describe how the resulting program theory was applied in context to inform a prototype for a patient navigator program. METHODS: The current study includes a secondary review of a larger systematic review. We reviewed studies included in the primary review to identify those that designed and evaluated programs to assist patients in accessing and/or adhering to care. We conducted a content analysis of included publications to describe the barriers targeted by PN interventions and the navigator activities addressing those barriers. A program theory was constructed by mapping patient navigator activities to corresponding constructs within the capability-opportunity-motivation model of behavior change (COM-B) model of behavior change. The program theory was then presented to individuals with chronic disease, healthcare providers, and system stakeholders, and refined iteratively based on feedback. RESULTS: Twenty one publications describing 19 patient navigator interventions were included. A total of 17 unique patient navigator activities were reported. The most common included providing education, facilitating referrals, providing social and emotional support, and supporting self-management. The majority of navigator activities targeted barriers to physical opportunity, including facilitating insurance claims, assistance with scheduling, and providing transportation. Across all interventions, navigator activities were designed to target a total of 20 patient barriers. Among interventions reporting positive effects, over two thirds targeted knowledge barriers, problems with scheduling, proactive re-scheduling following a missed appointment, and insurance. The final program design included a total of 13 navigator activities-10 informed by the original program theory and 3 unique activities informed by stakeholders. CONCLUSIONS: There is considerable heterogeneity in intervention content across patient navigator interventions. Our results provide a schema from which to develop PN interventions and illustrate how an evidence-based model was used to develop a real-world PN intervention. Our findings also highlight a critical need to improve the reporting of intervention components to facilitate translation. SYSTEMATIC REVIEW REGISTRATION: PROSPERO CRD42013005857.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".