Time Limited Trials to Reduce Non-Beneficial Intensive Care Unit Treatments
Public ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT04181294. Field values are reproduced from the official study page; the official ClinicalTrials.gov record remains the source of truth for eligibility, enrollment, and contact information.
Data is sourced from official ClinicalTrials.gov public API records. Always review the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for the latest information.
Official title
Time Limited Trials to Reduce Non-Beneficial Intensive Care Unit Treatments Among Critically-ill Patients With Advanced Medical Illnesses
Brief summary
Reproduced verbatim from the official ClinicalTrials.gov record. Not medical advice.
Overutilization of intensive care unit (ICU) treatments among patients with advanced medical illnesses and poor prognosis places them at risk for prolonged suffering with minimal anticipated benefit. Improving communication and shared decision-making between providers and patients/family members represents an opportunity to reduce potentially non-beneficial treatments. Time limited trials (TLTs) are agreements between clinicians and patients/surrogate decision-makers to use medical therapies over a defined period of time to observe if patients improve or deteriorate according to agreed-upon clinical outcomes. The objective of this project is to examine whether a quality improvement intervention that uses protocoled time limited trials as the default ICU communication/care planning strategy for patients with advanced medical illnesses will decrease the duration and intensity of non-beneficial ICU treatments without changing hospital mortality.
Study identification
- NCT ID
- NCT04181294
- Recruitment status
- Completed
- Study type
- Interventional
- Phase
- Not applicable
- Enrollment
- 209 participants
Conditions and interventions
Conditions
Interventions
- Family meetings using time limited trials as default ICU communication and care planning approach Behavioral
- Usual practice Behavioral
Behavioral
Eligibility (public fields only)
- Age range
- 18 Years and older
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Healthy volunteers not accepted
This page does not interpret eligibility. Detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria are on the official ClinicalTrials.gov record.
Study timeline
- Start date
- Jul 31, 2017
- Primary completion
- Dec 22, 2019
- Completion
- Dec 30, 2019
- Last update posted
- Nov 20, 2025
2017 – 2019
United States locations
- U.S. sites
- 3
- U.S. states
- 1
- U.S. cities
- 3
| Facility | City | State | ZIP | Site status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center | Los Angeles | California | 90033 | — |
| Olive View Medical Center | Sylmar | California | 91342 | — |
| Harbor UCLA Medical Center | Torrance | California | 90509 | — |
Site contact phone numbers, emails, and investigator names are intentionally not displayed here. Open the official ClinicalTrials.gov record for site contact information.
About this trial record page
- What this page shows
- Public field values for ClinicalTrials.gov record NCT04181294, including study identification, conditions, interventions, eligibility (age, sex, healthy volunteer), timeline, and U.S. site list.
- What this page does not do
- No medical advice, eligibility judgments, treatment recommendations, study quality scoring, or AI-generated medical summaries. No site contact phone numbers, emails, or investigator names.
- Where the data comes from
- Sourced from the official ClinicalTrials.gov public API. The official record is the source of truth.
- Last refresh
- Last update posted Nov 20, 2025 · Synced Sep 6, 2026
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Open the official record
The complete protocol, eligibility criteria, and contact information for NCT04181294 live on ClinicalTrials.gov.