Data access has been approved for a project which uses registry data to evaluate Patient-reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) in the management of atrial fibrillation.
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most frequent cardiac arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice, affecting 2% of the general adult population in North America, and up to 18% of people over 80 years of age, according to the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada (2016). It is a major public health concern as it is associated with significant morbidity and substantial healthcare costs.
The management of AF has become increasingly complex, due to advances in diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, multifaceted clinical conditions due to the aging population, polypharmacy, and variable side-effects of treatment. For these reasons, registries containing PROMs are increasingly used to evaluate factors that are important to patients in "real world" settings, and to narrow the gap between clinical research and practice.
University of British Columbia School of Nursing PhD candidate, Jae-Yung Kwon, hopes that novel insights can be gained about practices, processes, and outcomes by examining registry-based, PROMs data.
“The study findings may help to identify targets of interventions in patients' health trajectories to support them in their daily lives as they adapt to atrial fibrillation and its management,” says Mr Kwon.
In addition, the study has the potential to provide clinical impact for cardiac health services by identifying characteristics of patients who may be at higher risk of poor outcomes, and may help clinicians understand the extent to which PROMs offer unique information to augment program evaluation and support clinical practice from a provincial perspective.
The project is funded by the UBC School of Nursing’s Lyle Creelman Endowment Fund and supervised by Dr. Jennifer Baumbusch, Associate Professor at the School.
PopData will link four data sets from the BC Ministry of Health, the BC Vital Statistics Deaths data set and data from the Cardiac Services Registry for the study.
