Message from the Principal Investigator

Anne Holbrook
MSc, MD, PharmD, FRCP(C), FISPE

Principal Investigator

Tel: 905-522-1155 Ext. 35269
E-mail: holbrook@mcmaster.ca

It is our pleasure to bring you this progress report on the award-winning COMPETE research program. Our pathway towards a national electronic decision support delivery and research network continues with COMPETE III.

We have been fortunate to win peer-reviewed grant support for each phase of COMPETE, in large part due to the vision, hard work and persistence of our team, our partners and most of all our participating physicians and patients.

Although electronic health care is the “holy grail” for many health systems, COMPETE and others have shown repeatedly that the computerization of healthcare:

1. Is more difficult than in most other sectors of society,
2. Is extremely expensive,
3. Cannot succeed without extensive clinical leadership or frontline involvement,
4. May improve the quality of care but requires considerable training and support,
5. Is worthwhile for high risk conditions or treatments where clinical algorithms can automatically detect important care gaps and suggest concrete intelligent changes for individual patients.

While electronic medical records (EMRs) integrated with decision support will doubtless be routine some years from now, randomized trials of integrated electronic interventions such as COMPETE, are essential to ensure that they do more good than harm, to refine the interventions and to test affordability on a larger scale.