Grant: Catalyst Grant: SPOR Innovative Clinical Trials (iCT)

Providers are not always able to keep up with fast-changing medical science and guidelines, so patients don't always receive guideline-based care. If this gap could be bridged, patients with chronic conditions could have much better outcomes. To tackle this, we built the Evidence At the Point-of-Care (EAPOC) system - a computerized system which uses technology to give primary care providers evidence-based advice. The system requires patients to complete a questionnaire on a device or computer before their provider visit, then analyzes those answers to produce advice for the provider, and presents those recommendations to the provider within the electronic chart. This system has been proven to be effective and is now used in 15 clinics in Ontario. So far the system includes modules for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) - respiratory conditions affecting 10% and 12% of Canadians, respectively. We now plan to use the system to develop similar modules for other chronic diseases. However, each disease module must be tested in a research trial. Because such trials are hard to organize and recruit to, with this grant, we plan to build a network of primary care sites and patient partners which can be used to rapidly and efficiently deploy and test each new module in a pragmatic (real-world) trial. To do this, we will build upon an existing primary care network - the Canadian Primary Care Sentinel Surveillance Network (CPCSSN) - which brings together 1500 primary care providers across 8 provinces. This grant will allow us to build the relationships, processes, and infrastructure required to shape the trials platform, and to test it in a feasibility trial of the EAPOC COPD tool. Ultimately, this platform will help to test and prove similar electronic health systems across multiple chronic diseases for patients and providers across Canada, improving the quality of care received and thus the health of millions of Canadians living with chronic diseases.