PACE in multimorbidity. Patient-Centred Innovations for Persons with Multimorbidity

A Canadian research group led by Drs. Moira Stewart and Martin Fortin recently received funding in the amount of 2.5 million dollars over five years to improve the delivery of primary health care for people with multimorbidity. Awarded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), this important grant is part of a government initiative to support research oncommunity-based primary health care (CBPHC) across Canada.

The Team proposes innovations in CDPM that will: reorient care from a single disease focus to a multimorbidity focus; centre on not only disease but also the patient in context; and realign the health care system from separate silos to coordinated collaborations in care. The proposed multifaceted innovations will be grounded in the current realities of CDPM (i.e. chronic care models including self-management programs) that are linked to primary care reform efforts. The Team will build on this firm foundation, will design and test promising innovations and will achieve transformation by creating structures to sustain relationships among researchers, health professionals, patients and decision-makers. The Team will conduct cross-jurisdictional comparisons and is mainly a Quebec – Ontario collaboration with participation from three other provinces: British Columbia, Manitoba and Nova Scotia.

The program will identify factors responsible for the success or failure of current CDPM initiatives linked to the primary care reform, by conducting a realist synthesis of their quantitative and qualitative evaluations and transform consenting CDPM initiatives by aligning them to promising innovations on patient-centred care for multimorbidity patients. The Team will test these new innovations in at least two jurisdictions and compare among jurisdictions. In addition, the program aims to foster the scaling up of innovations and to conduct research on different approaches to scaling up.