Grant: Operating Grant: Knowledge to Action

Asthma affects 8.1% of Canadians, leads to serious respiratory symptoms, and costs our system $1.8 billion per year. An asthma action plan (AAP) is a written form filled out by practitioners for patients with asthma, providing instructions on what to do when symptoms worsen. At each visit, practitioners should assess the level of a patient's asthma control, adjust medications accordingly, and provide an AAP. These simple actions can decrease symptoms and emergency room visits, and improve quality of life. However, in Canada, most practitioners do not complete these tasks in even 50% of their patients. Reasons include not knowing how to correctly check control and adjust medications, lacking skills to prepare AAPs, and time limitations in clinic. We developed the Electronic Asthma Action Plan Mobile System to enable doctors to easily check their patients' control, adjust medications, and prepare an AAP. A Smartphone app also enables patients to access their AAP and other asthma tools. The study aims to see if this system can increase AAP creation by doctors, to measure the effect on patients' asthma symptoms, and to seek feedback on the system itself. Patients will answer a series of simple questions about their asthma control on their smartphone when in the doctor's waiting room, and this information will be instantaneously processed and transmitted to the doctor's computer, along with recommendations and an AAP. When the patient is then called in, the doctor can see the patient's control, follow medication change recommendations, and easily print and provide the AAP, tailored to the patient. If the system is successful, we will seek to implement it across Canada through our partners: government health officials, provincial and national allied-health-centered, physician-centered, and patient-centered asthma groups, and clinicians. We hope to improve not only the way heath care is delivered, but also the everyday health of Canada's 2.4 million asthma sufferers.