Grant: Team Grant: Personalized Health

When approaching end-of-life, most Canadians want to spend their last days at home with their loved ones. Unfortunately, that often does not happen-most Canadians die in hospital. A key challenge is knowing how much time people have left to live so that doctors, patients and their families have time to make decisions that are right for them and for helpful services to be offered early enough. Personalized end-of-life prediction tools have the potential to transform end-of-life care by providing person-specific life expectancy estimates. Canada and New Zealand lead the world in health data to make individual life expectancy estimates for end-of-life. Our team has created two preliminary tools that use a patient's own data to estimate their remaining life expectancy: RESPECT, an algorithm that predicts life expectancy for people in the community and long-term care facilities, and HOMR Now!, to predict life expectancy for those in hospital. Both have the potential to help make sure that the right decisions and supports are in place to improve the quality of end-of-life of all Canadians. With this grant, our team of patients, researchers and health professionals will combine, validate and enhance these algorithms to form RESPECT Now!. We will test and validate it with New Zealand collaborators. We will make sure that health professionals, patients and families are supported when discussing personalized life expectancy by integrating RESPECT Now! into patient decision aids to identify decision-making needs, plan next steps of care, and share preferences. We will also evaluate whether RESPECT Now! improves care at end-of-life and integrates into the health system. We will foster an international network of patients and researchers collaborating to develop, evaluate and disseminate personal health algorithms and decision tools for end-of-life.