NSERC Grant for Wojtek Michalowski to Develop Decision Support Tool for Management of Comorbid Diseases

Wojtek Michalowski will use a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to develop a computable clinical practice guideline (CPC) model for the management of comorbid diseases. Professor Michalowski, a leading expert in the field of health informatics and the director of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI)-funded Mobile Emergency Triage (MET) research group, will receive a $120,000 grant from NSERC over 5 years.

An increasing number of patients with chronic diseases have comorbid — or coexisting — conditions that need to be managed in a systemic manner. However, concurrent application of disease-specific guidelines in this population might have undesired health effects. Therefore, a key objective of the research is to provide physicians with a decision support tool that allows for the automatic execution of multiple CPC — and automatic mitigation efforts when there are adverse interactions. Promoting the use of evidence-based medicine at the point of care in this way promises to improve the quality of a care provided to this large population of patients.

Concurrent use of CPGs for comorbid patients poses a problem due to the possible adverse drug-drug or drug-disease interactions. To date, however, there is little research on the automatic mitigation of these interactions – a situation that puts increased pressure on the attending physician to mitigate such interactions in order to arrive at proper therapy.

Visit the Telfer School’s website to read Professor Michalowski’s profile or to learn about the MET Research Group.