The EAPOC (Evidence at the Point-of-Care) System is a computerized disease management and clinical decision support system (CDSS) tool. It aims to empower healthcare providers, including physicians and pharmacists, to improve chronic disease symptom control, quality of life, and health outcomes. The platform is comprised of three parts:
Our research shows that the EAPOC system significantly improves quality of care, bridging important gaps between real-word care and guideline-recommended best care. As well, it increases patient autonomy in disease control while avoiding unnecessary physician and hospital visits.
The asthma component of EAPOC (called the Electronic Asthma Management System - eAMS) is also endorsed as an implementation tool for the Canadian Thoracic Society Asthma guidelines and the Health Quality Ontario (HQO) Asthma Quality Standards.
EAPOC started in 2008 with a desire to improve the lives of the nearly 4 million people across Canada living with asthma. Recognizing the challenges and gaps in the quality of asthma care, as specialists in improving quality of care through digital solutions, the first disease that our team built on the EAPOC platform was the Electronic Asthma Management System (eAMS).
Our team lead is Dr. Samir Gupta, a respirologist, clinician-scientist, and Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto. Dr. Gupta was awarded Asthma Canada's 2019 Lead Investigator Award in Health Research and the 2023 University of Toronto Department of Medicine Award in Quality and Innovation for his ground-breaking knowledge translation work in developing and testing the eAMS to help close gaps in asthma care.
Dr. Gupta and his team identified four major care gaps that care providers face at the point-of-care: determining if the patient has good control of their disease, making sure that the patient is on the best medicines recommended by guidelines, providing each patient with a self-management action plan, and identifying patients with severe disease who require specialist care, as guidelines recommend.
Having studied the barriers to these practices in real-world care and working closely with primary care physicians and pharmacists to find solutions, the team developed the eAMS computerized clinical decision support system. Over the years, the technology was built with the help of patients, pharmacists, primary care and specialty physicians, respiratory educators, and researchers, with an overarching goal of making it easier for providers to deliver guideline-based care. Building on the success of the eAMS, Dr. Gupta and his team then leveraged the EAPOC platform to build a parallel computerized clinical decision support system for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), called the EAPOC-COPD.
With over 20 peer-reviewed scientific publications produced, extensive research has gone into the development and testing of the EAPOC platform in order to bring it to practice. Studies have demonstrated that the system can be successfully used in real-world settings to improve quality of care with minimal impact on pre-existing workflows.
The EAPOC platform has had many partners and funders along the way, including: the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Thoracic Society, Asthma Canada, the Lung Health Foundation, the Family Physician Airways Group of Canada, the Temerty Faculty of Medicine, the Canadian Respiratory Research Network, the St. Michael’s Hospital Foundation, the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, The Physicians’ Services Incorporated Foundation, the Canadian Foundation for Pharmacy, and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care.
