Grant: Operating Grant - PA: ICRH - New investigators (Bridge Funding)

Asthma is a chronic disease affecting 8-12% of Canadians. While there are effective and inexpensive treatments for asthma, adherence to such treatments is disappointingly low. As a result asthma remains uncontrolled in a significant proportion of patients, causing avoidable medical costs, productivity loss, and reduced quality of life. Community pharmacists are at a strategic position in the chain of health care delivery. They have the knowledge and skills acquired through years of training and are often the last health professional patients encounter in their interaction with the health care system. It is, unfortunately, a recognized fact that pharmacists' expertise and training is under-utilized in Canada, in a role hitherto focused on dispensing. One reason for this can be the traditional focus on unilateral delivery of care from the physician to patient. According to Health Canada, a quality health care system in the 21st century will be based on "continuous healing relationships", characterized by continuous communication and information flow, facilitated by information technology, among all the links in the chain of health care delivery. Community pharmacists in such a system can be seen as active members of a multidisciplinary health care team. In this research we propose and evaluate an intervention for monitoring and improving individual's adherence to asthma medications through mobile text messaging. Community pharmacists in this framework will play a central role providing care and linking patients and physicians. Our study is the first intervention that uses accessible information technologies to promote the role of community pharmacists in the management of asthma. Pharmacists in Canada are increasingly advocating for, and obtaining the rights to, expand their scope of practice, and our proposed intervention can benefit from this impetus to improve the quality of asthma care in our communities