Project 170021

The Canadian healthcare system is moving towards a reduction of operating cost by an increased emphasis on caring for the elderly and patients with chronic diseases of all ages at home instead of institutional care. This requires an increase in the care provided to patients through homecare nursing, personal support workers, and informal care providers (e.g. relatives). Such care might be provided more effectively if care providers and patients were given online access to the patient's medical records and to educational support in the home environment. This would mean linking providers with online systems that provide access to relevant records maintained by the patient's doctor, hospital records, pharmacy records, etc. Records provided to the patient in this way are called electronic personal health records (ePHRs). Such an approach would parallel the announced philosophy of the Canadian healthcare system to provide electronic health records for all Canadian patients, but with a further extension to patients themselves and their care providers. Given the complex nature of the computer systems involved, this is not a simple task. The objective of this proposal is to: 1) carry out a review of ePHRs that summarizes existing implementations and relevant research, and report on benefits and barriers to their use, 2) develop techniques (questionnaires, etc.) that can be used to gather information from a sample of Canadian healthcare practitioners, providers, and patients on their views of ePHRs; gather information, using these techniques, that can help to understand what form ePHRs should take and what education is needed to make use of them by caregivers and their patients, and 3) develop a priority list of the research gaps and capacity needs that have been identified, using information gathered in this study.

genetic and biochemical approaches to study arginine methylation