Lake Superior Rural Cancer Care Project part II: Provider knowledge

PURPOSE: The purpose of this article is to report the main learning outcome s of the Lake Superior Rural Cancer Care Project. DESCRIPTION OF STUDY: The authors designed and tested a multimodal interven tion directed at rural providers and their healthcare systems in a large ru ral area in the north central United States. An experimental design was use d to randomize rural providers at the group level. The intervention consist ed of providing increased education for rural providers with a number of ap proaches, including the use of clinical opinion leaders. The main outcome o f the intervention was knowledge scoring on discipline-specific cancer mana gement tests. RESULTS: Knowledge scores for providers in the experimental group significa ntly increased from pretest to post-test: 66 to 79 for physicians (and phys ician assistants) (P = .02); 58 to 71 for nurses (P = .01); and 54 to 64 fo r pharmacists (P = .01). At post-test, participating providers in the exper imental group performed significantly better on the knowledge tests (P < .0 1) than those in the control groups. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: This study may be the first to test educational inte rventions to improve rural providers' knowledge about cancer practice using an experimental design. The intervention may possible change provider prac tice behaviors and, thus, patient outcomes, data that will be reported in a future issue. Finally, this educational intervention may prove useful for providers in other rural areas.