Chronic Heart Failure (CHF) is a growing public health issue in Canada. Hospital re-admission within 1-year after diagnosis is 25-40%, and the 5-year rate of CHF death is 50%. Counseling by multidisciplinary health care teams helps CHF patients to improve self-care behaviors (for medications, diet, exercise, smoking cessation and symptom monitoring), and this reduces the rate of death and CHF hospitalization. In the absence of intervention, patient adherence to these behaviors is below recommended standards and quality of life among CHF patients becomes progressively compromised. A major challenge is to make self-care counseling available without overtaxing health care resources.
This year multicenter clinical trial will establish and evaluate a Canadian e-platform that provides multidisciplinary e-counseling to help patients with CHF to initiate and maintain recommended self-care behaviors. The investigators will recruit 298 CHF patients in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The investigators hypothesize that a 12-month program of e-Counseling + Usual Care versus general eInfo + Usual Care will improve quality of life, self-care behaviors, program engagement, and heart health. This proposal is based upon previous clinical trials in CHF, e-health and preventive lifestyle counseling by our team. The novel contribution of this research is that it will establish an infrastructure for a pan-Canadian e-platform in preventive e-counseling for CHF. A key feature of this proposal is that our multidisciplinary team will work with professional heart health organizations to share our findings and e-health resources with the public and other health care professionals in Canada, which will help to galvanize research and clinical work in eCounseling. Our clinical trial will strengthen eCounseling services in order to improve the quality of life of patients with CHF.
