Knee Osteoarthritis Care: A Quality Improvement Intervention in Physiotherapists

Physiotherapists' knee OA care is suboptimal. Exercise therapy including a combination of aerobic, muscle strengthening and functional exercises is not always performed and a lot of treatments are used for which there is no evidence. By a continuing education session and a pop-up in the electronic patient file, this study wants to improve knee OA care by focusing on combined exercise therapy. The study will be performed in collaboration with Pro-Q-Kine, an independent organization implementing quality improvement in Belgian physiotherapists' care. Besides Pro-Q-Kine the study will be performed in collaboration with two or three software producers of physiotherapists' electronic patient files that reached a national homologation for their respective software packages and covering a large part of the Flemish physiotherapists. Pro-Q-Kine will organize sessions of continuing education with a focus on optimal knee OA care. These sessions will be performed in LOK-groups (local peer-groups of physiotherapists who meet each other for continuing education). At these sessions the physiotherapists will be asked to take part to the study. A pop-up will be installed in the electronic patient file of the participating physiotherapists, lightening up when physiotherapists register a patient with knee OA. The pop-up includes a short message about optimal knee OA care. The physiotherapists will also receive a script for a query in their electronic patient files in order to extract those patients that initiated a treatment for knee OA between 1 year and 3 months before the therapists received education. These patients will receive a letter of their respective physiotherapists in which they are addressed to take part to the study. An informed consent, patient questionnaire and retour-envelope will be included. There will also be the opportunity to complete the questionnaire electronically with an electronic informed consent. The patient questionnaire will include some background det