Grant: Project Grant

Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is a heart condition describing heart attack or impairment of blood flow to the heart muscle itself. It is one of the most common reasons for hospitalizations in Canada, with more than 80,000 patients admitted with ACS each year. Readmission occurs when a patient is rehospitalized after being discharged from the initial hospitalization. They are frequent, extremely costly to the health care system, and are associated with poor long term outcomes. Readmission is generally believed to represent suboptimal quality of care and is an actionable target for improvement. However, many aspects of readmission after ACS are poorly understood. The main goal of this comprehensive proposal is to identify important modifiable factors associated with both short and longer-term readmissions for ACS patients. The second goal is to develop a prediction model for clinical use in ACS patients prior to hospital discharge. To achieve these goals, we will use multiple population-based health administrative, clinical databases, and laboratory data in Ontario to create a novel "big data" research dataset. This proposal will be one of the most comprehensive evaluations to tackle the problem of readmission in Canada. Given the timeliness and importance of our study, we anticipate the results of this grant proposal will have an important impact on the future care.