Grant: Operating Grant: KTA - PA: Primary and Community-Based Healthcare

Asthma is a chronic disease that affects 8.3% of Canadians aged 12 years and over, leads to serious respiratory symptoms, and costs our system over $1.5 billion per year. An asthma action plan (AAP) is a written form filled out by a health care professional for each patient with asthma, providing instructions on what to do when asthma symptoms become active. Studies have shown that AAPs decrease symptoms and emergency room visits, and improve quality of life. However, in Canada, only 11% of patients with asthma have received one. The reason for this is that doctors do not feel that they have the skills and time required to prepare AAPs. We developed the electronic Asthma Action Plan System (eAAPS) to enable doctors to quickly and easily prepare and deliver AAPs. The goals of this study are to see if this system can increase the frequency of AAP delivery by doctors to their patients, to measure what effect this has on patients' asthma control, and to seek feedback on the system itself. We will conduct our study at a Family Health Team where they use an electronic medical record system which patients can access from their home computers. Patients will answer a series of simple questions about their asthma from home or on a portable computer in the doctor's waiting room, and this information will be transmitted to the doctor's computer, where it will be used to automatically generate and store an AAP that is tailored to that patient. When the patient is then seen in clinic, the doctor will be able to easily print and provide this AAP. If the eAAPS is successful, we will seek to implement it across Canada through our partners: government health officials, provincial and national level allied-health-centered, physician-centered, and patient-centered asthma and respiratory groups, and Family Health Team members. We hope to improve not only the way that heath care is delivered, but also the everyday health of the 3 million asthma sufferers in Canada.