Patient Health
Patient Health Management
Merck Frosst is a partner in a number of projects across Canada aimed at improving health care management and delivery in a wide variety of therapeutic areas, including asthma, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and osteoporosis.
PHM is a disease management approach to healthcare that seeks to improve practice patterns and patient health outcomes. PHM projects seek to facilitate broad stakeholder partnerships with government, healthcare providers, patient advocacy groups, academia and the pharmaceutical industry. Repeated measurement and feedback of practice patterns foster continuous quality improvement and the closing of care gaps in an evidence-based manner.
The PHM group is dedicated to closing the care gap, that is, the difference between best possible care as studied from clinical trials and usual care practiced in the population at large, in many different therapeutic areas.
Common causes of the care gap include:
- poor diagnosis
- poor prescription patterns
- poor patient compliance and/or
- sub-optimal access to treatment.
Effectively, patients are not receiving the benefits of proven efficacious treatments.
PHM assesses the way healthcare is delivered through baseline measurement and analysis of current patterns of practice allowing care gaps to be identified by rigorous analysis. Then, using a continuous quality improvement loop, a partnership of key stakeholders, including the PHM group, develops and implements interventions aimed at improving the identified care gap(s). Further measurements are made and compared to baseline measurements to assess whether the interventions were successful.
Take the Improving Cardiovascular Outcomes in Nova Scotia project (ICONS) for example. ICONS began in 1997 as a five year project that was undertaken to measure and improve the quality of care provided to Nova Scotians with cardiovascular disease and was conducted in a partnership between Merck Frosst's PHM group, the Government of Nova Scotia and the Division of Cardiology of the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre in Halifax. As one of the largest Canadian population-based studies ever, ICONS was undertaken to measure and improve existing healthcare for heart disease. The study looked at patients hospitalized with heart disease at acute care institutions in Nova Scotia as well as high-risk patients from physician practices across the province. The program has been operated and funded by the Nova Scotia Department of Health since April of 2002. (For more information on ICONS, go to www.icons.ns.ca.)
